Pentagon Pushes Women-in-Combat Review to 2027, Extending Uncertainty Across the Force

The Pentagon has pushed its women in combat review into 2027, extending a process launched in January with an expected six-month timeline. The shift comes with a change in who is doing the legwork for the review, and how it is being carried out.

The Department of Defense reassigned the review from the Institute for Defense Analyses to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in April. Pentagon officials told Military Times that the longer timeline allows for more field-based data tied to combat conditions rather than relying primarily on existing studies.

JHU/APL has been given a 12-month runway specifically to incorporate new combat-relevant field tests and analyze operational data for what the Pentagon is now calling the "Performance, Readiness, and Integrated Mission Effectiveness Assessment."

Women remain eligible to serve in all combat roles. There has been no directive issued changing standards or access. That is the current policy, for which it stands.

Ten Years After Integration, the Pentagon Reexamines Combat Roles

When the military opened all combat roles to women in 2015, DoD leadership at the time presented the decision as the culmination of years of internal debate. A decade later, the Pentagon is reviewing the same policy with years of deployment data, training outcomes, and injury tracking across combat units.

Officials have pointed to a need for data drawn from operational environments, including sustained load carriage, casualty evacuation, and extended field conditions where fatigue compounds and small performance gaps become harder to ignore. Those demands have always existed, and they are being measured differently now.

Leadership Is Part of the Equation

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has previously argued against women serving in combat roles and has since said support depends on meeting established standards. All aspects of the Secretary’s position remain part of the public record.

No policy change has been announced yet. Still, leadership posture carries weight long before formal decisions are made. Inside units, that shows up in quieter, subtle ways, usually when people start asking different questions, and not out loud.

Decision Delayed

A timeline shift like this does not stay contained to Washington.

Service members considering a move into a ground combat training pipeline are not waiting for a final report to weigh the risk. Infantry and armor tracks are multi-year commitments.

Once someone is in, stepping away is not an easy thing to do. Plus, once someone passes training, they’ve passed and are put into the job. Removing them seems unrealistic.

What This Means for Women in Combat

The extension of this review to 2027 carries heavy implications for the force right now, impacting daily life, career trajectories, and military readiness.

• Career Progression and Anxiety: Infantry and armor tracks are multi-year commitments and traditional stepping stones to the highest ranks of military leadership. Service members considering a move into a ground combat pipeline are now forced to weigh the risk of entering a career field they might be legislated or policy-directed out of.
• Unit Cohesion and Authority: When the permanent status of female combat leaders is publicly under review, it can undermine their authority in the field. If junior enlisted troops believe their female squad leader or platoon commander might be removed by a pending policy change, it creates friction that detracts from lethality and cohesion.
• Retention and Recruiting: Once someone passes training, they’ve earned their MOS and are put into the job. Removing them retroactively is a logistical nightmare. However, the looming uncertainty acts as a chilling effect on recruitment. Young women considering enlisting in combat arms may choose other career fields—or the civilian sector—rather than face a year of ambiguity.

What Is Being Measured, and What Isn’t Yet Defined

Pentagon officials continue to emphasize sex-neutral standards tied to performance. That language has held since integration. What remains less clear is how those standards are applied across units operating under different conditions, with different training cycles and deployment demands.

The expanded review leans on field data. How that data will be weighed against existing research, and what threshold would trigger any policy change, has not been established publicly.

The Policy Holds Strong, For Now

Nothing in the current guidance removes women from combat roles or makes any conclusive finding on anything related to the current review.

The only thing that changed is the timeline, as the Pentagon says they recognize there is more involved in what should be reviewed than they initially realized.

The review has slowed, broadened, and changed hands. That alone changes how this is being read across the military. The decision that opened combat roles to women was framed as final.

Congress Moves to Lock the Policy in Place

While the Pentagon review stretches into 2027, lawmakers are not waiting for its conclusions. On March 27, 2026, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan reintroduced the WARRIOR Act in Congress alongside Rep. Maggie Goodlander (NH-01), the only other female Veteran in the U.S. House. The legislation is designed to codify the current policy allowing women to serve in all combat roles. If passed, the bill would effectively take the question out of the Pentagon’s hands by writing the existing standard, sex-neutral, with eligibility based on performance alone, into law.

The bill does not change the standards. It locks them in. The Pentagon review is examining outcomes, performance data, and long-term readiness impacts. The WARRIOR Act addresses access. It ensures that, regardless of how the data is interpreted, the baseline policy remains intact: any service member who meets the standard is eligible, without restriction tied to gender. The legislation acts as a hedge against the uncertainty created by the review. Even if internal findings were to recommend narrowing access, Congress would have already drawn a line around what cannot be rolled back without legislative action.

Where the review introduces questions, the bill attempts to close them. As of now, the WARRIOR Act has been introduced and referred to committee, with no final vote scheduled. Its path forward remains uncertain, as with most defense-related legislation outside of the annual National Defense Authorization Act process. But its presence alone signals that this is no longer just a Pentagon decision. It is now a policy debate spanning both branches of government. For service members watching the timeline stretch into next year, that may matter as much as the review itself.