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The defense secretary raised the issue suggesting women were getting into combat not because they met high standards, but because they were given a pass.
Oct. 2, 2025, 7:27 p.m. ET
Bobbie Scholley, a retired Navy captain and advocate for women in military special operations, decided to watch Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s address on Tuesday to hundreds of military leaders to see whether he had anything new to say.
But after about 30 minutes into a livestream of the event, she snapped her laptop closed.
“I listened to it with my gut just clenching, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse until finally I turned it off,” Captain Scholley said in an interview.
In the hodgepodge of messages, Mr. Hegseth told the crowd at a base in Virginia that physical fitness standards had slipped in recent years to make it possible for women to serve in combat roles. It is an idea he has often repeated, without evidence.
Women, he said, should be held to the “highest male standard.”
“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” Mr. Hegseth told the crowd.
Mr. Hegseth often talks about fitness standards for women, though it is unclear which ones he is referring to. Three categories of military physical tests have been given to men and women for decades.
The secretary raised the issue suggesting that women were getting into combat not because they met high standards, but because they were given a pass. Men and women must meet different basic fitness standards for admission to the military, but for the most high-risk, high-demand positions, standards are gender-neutral.
As a junior officer in 1983, Captain Scholley graduated from the Navy’s deep-sea diving and underwater salvage courses, which are among the most physically demanding in the military. Only about two dozen women had completed the classes since the Navy allowed women to attend eight years earlier.
“I tried to stay open-minded to what he was trying to say,” Captain Scholley said of Mr. Hegseth’s remarks. “Because every time a new commander takes over in the military, they set the tone.”
During 24 years of active-duty service, Captain Scholley said, opportunities for women in the armed services had improved, but only because they fought hard to overcome the misogyny in the military.
“Things I thought had gotten better are now being eroded,” she said. “I had to work really, really hard to get to where I was, and even work harder than some of my male counterparts in order to be taken seriously and get the jobs I wanted.”
“Hegseth just made it sound like we were just handed things just because we were women and there were quotas, which is so far from the truth,” she added.
When Kate Wilder was an Army captain in 1980, she overcame intense resistance from some senior male officers to become the first woman to graduate from Army Special Forces training, meeting all of the standards expected of male soldiers. She retired as a lieutenant colonel.
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“Nobody changed the standards for me,” Colonel Wilder said in an interview. “I didn’t ask for any changes to be made, and nobody did me any favors, either. So, I went along and took the test just like everybody else did.”
“You just have to get out there and prove the people wrong,” she added. “And just do your best.”
Soon after Colonel Wilder graduated from the Special Forces school, the Army barred women from applying for that course.
That changed only in 2016 when the Defense Department formally dropped the last remaining restrictions on women in combat. Four years later, a female National Guard soldier became the first woman to graduate from Special Forces training after Colonel Wilder.
When Captain Scholley showed up at the Navy’s Dive and Salvage Training Center in Panama City Beach, Fla., in 1983, there was only one other woman in her class.
Their senior instructor, a chief petty officer, told them to let him know “if anyone gives you any problems because you’re women.”
“And then he turned right around and said, ‘Don’t expect any slack, because you’re going to get the same treatment as all the other men,’” she recalled. “And we’re like, ‘Well, no, of course, chief, we don’t expect any special treatment.’”
The deep-sea diving equipment they wore weighed about 120 pounds, Captain Scholley recalled, and was not built to fit women’s bodies.
She went on to command both a salvage ship and a mobile diving and salvage unit, and was one of the senior diving officers for the recovery of TWA Flight 800, which exploded over Long Island Sound in 1996.
In 2000, she supervised dive operations inside the U.S.S. Cole, the Navy destroyer that was badly damaged in a terrorist attack off the coast of Aden, Yemen, and helped to stabilize the stricken vessel and recover the bodies of sailors trapped underwater inside the ship.
Captain Scholley also led Navy expeditions in 2001 and 2002 that recovered sections of the U.S.S. Monitor, a Union ironclad that sank in a gale off Cape Hatteras, N.C, during the Civil War.
During those expeditions, divers battled bad weather and strong underwater currents, had to breathe specialized gas mixtures at depths of 240 feet, and underwent treatments in hyperbaric chambers once they reached the surface.
That mission involved 24-hour diving operations seven days a week for 45 days, all while the divers lived on a rented oil exploration barge anchored over the Monitor’s wreck.
Even with those accomplishments, Captain Scholley and Colonel Wilder both served at a time when the decades-long journey to equality for women in the military was still ongoing.
Women were first allowed to serve on warships and fly combat aircraft in 1993, but were still prohibited from joining certain direct-combat occupations like the infantry, artillery, submarines and many special operations career fields.
The ban on women serving aboard submarines ended in 2010, and the last prohibitions against women in other combat roles were dropped by the Defense Department in 2015.
At the time Captain Scholley served, being a deep-sea diver was not considered a combat job, but this week Mr. Hegseth expanded the list of what are considered “combat arms occupations” in the Navy to include divers and explosive ordnance disposal technicians.
Mr. Hegseth further directed men and women in combat jobs across the Defense Department to “execute their service fitness tests at a gender-neutral, age-normed male standard scored above 70 percent.”
But it was unclear which tests would be used and what those scores would be, and the Pentagon did not respond to a request for clarification on Wednesday.
The physical fitness test that Captain Scholley took to enter dive school more than 40 years ago was the same required of men and has not changed: a 500-yard swim, a 10-minute rest, two minutes of push-ups, two minutes of sit-ups, pull-ups with no time limit, and another 10-minute rest followed by a mile-and-a-half run.
“If I can make it, then just don’t put a ‘do not enter sign’ in front of my path and make me have to not enter because I may have committed the mortal sin of being born female,” Colonel Wilder said. “I mean, that’s not right. That doesn’t cut it.”
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
