By WIIS Senior Fellow Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese
On April 29, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced via Instagram that the Defense Department (DOD) would “proudly” end the Women, Peace & Security (WPS) program, despite its legal authority. This was a reversal of President Trump’s administration’s demonstrated global leadership in 2017 with the passage of the WPS Act. But others in the Trump administration must now stand up and protect the baby it birthed, because the stated justifications for dismantling WPS are based on little more than myths. More to the point, accumulated evidence and statements of military leaders substantiating the operational utility of WPS for complex contingencies and military operations can only mean that eliminating the DOD WPS program is emphatically not in U.S. national interest.
President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan WPS Act on October 6, 2017. Congressional sponsors of the Act included then Congresswoman Kristi Noem and Senator Marco Rubio. In June 2019, the US Strategy on WPS was delivered to Congress by first-daughter and WPS champion Ivanka Trump. At that time, then Congressman and former National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, co-chaired the bipartisan Congressional WPS Caucus. This Act and Strategy made the United States the first country in the world to have legislatively mandated implementation of principles related to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), which recognized the need for and role of women in security affairs and to have a plan for doing so. Rubio praised the program as recently as April 1, 2025, at the International Women of Courage Awards Ceremony.
The Strategy included four Lines of Effort (LOE):
- Seek and support the preparation and meaningful participation of women around the world in decision-making processes related to conflict and crises;
- Promote the protection of women and girls’ human rights, access to humanitarian assistance, and safety from violence, abuse, and exploitation around the world;
- Adjust U.S. international programs to improve outcomes in equality for, and the empowerment of, women; and
- Encourage partner governments to adopt policies, plans, and capacity to improve the meaningful participation of women in processes connected to peace and security and decision-making institutions.
The return on investment with partner nations alone has been significant: the DOD has spent around $3 million annually since 2021 on engaging partner nations on WPS to improve operational effectiveness, out of the overall FY 2024 departmental budget of $824.3 billion. As Mike Waltz once said: “where women thrive the extremists don’t.”
Administration efforts could be reasonably rationalized as pulling government WPS programs back to these LOEs, which some critics claim have strayed beyond intent. But, according to many individuals working on WPS programs within the military, these efforts will snuff out all activity by spuriously lumping WPS in with eradication of Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) programs and by categorizing it as “all about women,” diminishing U.S. lethality and warfighting capabilities.
DEI, WPS…TOMATO/TOMAHTO
DEI and WPS have different origins and different goals. In the case of WPS, women’s involvement is sought in security-related fields for the added value they bring to both understanding operational environments and in terms of workforce requirements. Often, however, DEI and WPS are conflated, with WPS dismissed as merely “more DEI.”
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs grew out of social justice efforts to bring and retain minorities – including women – into jobs, professions, and institutions where they traditionally had been largely excluded. DEI programs initially were run through human resources departments, often focused on numbers and quotas and sometimes ham-fisted and poorly executed. Though well intentioned, they undeniably created considerable bad blood within workforces.
Unlike DEI, which operates as a human resource tool, WPS operates as a strategic tool. WPS grew out of decades of civil society experience and empirical research, showing that women play critical roles in security matters, broadly defined, and that policies and programs affect men, women, boys, and girls differently. That research includes evidence that if a nation scores high on gender inequality, it is more than twice as likely to be a fragile state and has more than three times the chance of having a less effective and more autocratic and corrupt government. States with high gender inequality also have more than one and a half times the chance of being violent and unstable. In addition, violence within the “first political order” (the home) correlates to violence becoming the de facto method of problem solving nationally. Finally, when women are involved in negotiating peace agreements, the probability of the agreement lasting at least two years increases by 20%, and peace agreements are 35% more likely to last at least 15 years when women participate. WPS principles are intended to be part of security operations – from analysis, planning, and through to execution.
The four U.S. government organizations charged with implementation of the 2017 WPS Act are Defense, State, Homeland Security, and (the almost defunct) United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Clearly, WPS has been recognized as a Whole of Government (WOG) security framework. And yet, it is being shunned in favor of “lethality and warfighting.” The irony there is that while WPS works to abate conflict, it also offers considerable additive value to lethality and warfighting capabilities.
Not Just About Women
WPS has a branding problem, self-inflicted by its title. The emphasis on women is in recognition that women have traditionally been excluded from security affairs. In reality, WPS is a whole of society approach to security and conflict.
Understanding an operational environment is key to developing a successful strategy for addressing whatever goal is sought, from avoiding conflict to stabilization to winning a battle – as the US quickly learned in Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of understanding an operational environment is understanding the expectations culture places on people in that environment. Those expectations are traditionally based on an individual’s biological sex but called gendered expectations because they are sociologically determined by culture. Women in Bangladesh, for example, are culturally expected to remain at home and wait for help even when a natural disaster is approaching. Further, women in Bangladesh are not usually taught to swim and wear bulky garments for coverage related to religion. Hence, it is not surprising that more women die in floods there than men. But the same gendered expectation of women would not hold true for women, based on their sex, in other cultures and parts of the world.
There are gendered expectations for men as well. More than 8,000 boys and men were killed in Bosnia in 1995 not because they were soldiers, but because they were male and therefore might become soldiers. In some countries, boys are not considered men until they marry and have children. Yet in some of those same countries, a man must pay a “bride price” to marry. If he cannot afford that price, he cannot become a man. That gendered cultural reality allows groups like Boko Haram to offer “brides” as recruiting bonuses.
Talking about gender is not inherently about gender ideology in the sense it is sometimes mischaracterized – as a transformational rejection of biologically grounded sexuality – but as a way to understand the rules a society or culture imposes on individuals based on sex. A cisgender male student in one of my WPS classes, an Army Major and career intelligence analyst, well-stated the importance of “seeing” gender. He said he had taken every course offered by the military to intelligence officers over the duration of his career, and nobody had ever talked about gender. After learning and discussing it at length in class over the course of a semester, he said he had done a disservice to those who relied on his reports. He believed this because so much potentially useful information had been left out of his assessments by not considering gender-related information, perspectives, and issues.
Lethality and Warfighting
Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth is committed to a warrior culture at the Pentagon that is “laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability and readiness.” WPS is not just compatible with this statement; it is a necessary requirement for achieving it. Women add to the talent pool of best qualified persons. Meritocracy and diversity are not mutually exclusive, and they are needed to fill numerous vacancies critical to lethality and warfighting.
The U.S. military has significant recruiting challenges. Only 23 percent of individuals aged 17 to 25 are eligible to enlist in the US military without a waiver due to educational deficiencies, mental health challenges, drug use, criminal records, obesity, and medical issues. There is currently an estimated shortage of 28,000 cyber specialists in DOD, creating risks to DOD and the nation. As of 2024, the USAF is short some 1850 pilots, including fighter pilots, affecting combat readiness. Despite women facing special challenges in the military – including continuingly high rates of sexual assault and a culture of underreporting due to fear of reprisals – women in 2024 signed up for military service at higher rates than men.
While the doors are still open to women in all fields of the military, at least for now, there is a difference between opening the door and accommodating individuals toward maximizing each individual’s potential success. “Accommodating” women is, however, often mischaracterized as “women seeking special treatment.” WPS recognizes that policies and programs treat men and women differently, not out of favoritism or preferential treatment but out of the systemic blindspots and absence of intentional query into their impact. It is not just a woman, for example, who might need the size of a gun grip changed to allow her to perform at her top level; the same could easily also be true for a man with small hands.
USAF Lt. Gen. (ret) Mary O’Brien was part of a 2019 team that made a business case for the professional development of women in the Air Force, but one that was applicable across the services and to men and women. Called the “5R” model, it provides a rubric for evaluating personnel actions based on quantifiable metrics for five criteria: Recruitment, Retention, Resources, Readiness and Risk. The intent is to make recruitment attractive to retain the best candidates – men and women – so that resources are not being constantly spent to train new people but, rather, to assure that forces are ready to fight, thereby reducing risk to the force and the mission.
Women also provide access to information and areas critical to mission success, as demonstrated by support units like the women in the Marine Corps Female Engagement Teams and the Army’s Cultural Support Teams who served alongside Special Operations units in Afghanistan to interact with local women and children who were off-limits to men. That interaction also included body searching women and children potentially carrying guns or explosives, including suicide bombs.
Lethality depends on a skilled workforce. Future wars will likely be “information technology” heavy, thereby requiring primarily brains, not brawn. Men and women with interests and capabilities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), intelligence, and linguistics, among others, will be needed to plan and execute strategies that will require less emphasis on combat jobs and more on high-tech. Recent studies show that the number of women entering STEM fields is increasing faster, by 31%, than the number of men entering STEM fields (up 15%). Not recognizing the value women add to security communities, including the military, creates disadvantages, not advantages.
Competitive Advantage and Winning
The Trump administration demonstrated global leadership in 2017 with the passage of the WPS Act. Subsequent strategies operationalizing the WPS framework were moving forward as understanding of intent and value expanded. Continuation, as recently stated by retired Marine Corps officer Jane Stokes, “would provide the essential competitive advantage that America needs to achieve its strategic competition goals in today’s complex global security environment. WPS offers a framework to place the most essential individuals in the right places, based on their abilities, and to solve America’s greatest challenges.” WPS maximizes America’s potential to “win” against its enemies, now and in the future. Dismantling serves no national security purpose. Indeed, it puts the nation at risk.
Published May 6, 2025. The opinions expressed here are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Women In International Security or its affiliates.
About the Author
WIIS Senior Fellow Dr. Joan Johnson-Freese served as a University Professor and Chair of the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College (NWC) between 2002-2022. She has also been part of the Government Department faculty of Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School since 2004, where she teaches courses on Women, Peace & Security, Leadership in War and Peace, and Grand Strategy and US National Security.
As a political scientist, she has published multiple articles on aspects of Women, Peace & Security, particularly focusing on raising awareness regarding the framework generally and within security communities specifically, believing that you can’t implement what you don’t know about. She is the author of “Women, Peace & Security: An Introduction” (2018) and “Women v Women: The Case for Cooperation” (2022). Over the arc of her academic career, her research also focused on space security, authoring seven books in that field and over 100 published articles, many with a particular focus on the Chinese space program. She has testified before Congress on multiple occasions about space issues and served on the National Academy of Sciences Space Studies Board.