Women, gays, transgender and queer Americans serve in the military because men won't

When I worked on the 1st Marine Division’s staff back from 2004-2007, I was part of a team that had to “find” officers and senior enlisted Marines to send to Iraq. Later, I was part of a team that had to determine if a battalion truly was at full readiness to deploy.

The problem was people. Iraq was not going well. Marines were getting out of the service and refusing to reenlist. At the same time, recruiters were struggling to convince American men to join the War on Terror.

My team had the unenviable task of deciding who to send back to war. Transfer orders were cancelled, stop-loss and recalls became a thing, and the Marines were offering cash incentives to reenlist or extend contracts.

At the same time, this was happening one section over from mine, something peculiar was happening. The administration separations section was still processing discharges from the military for people they deemed to be unfit — mamely gay and transgender Marines. It was baffling to me.

We needed people to fight and were begging people who didn’t want to serve while kicking out those that did. What dawned on me then is something that Peter Hegseth will learn if he becomes secretary of Defense; that a lot of red-blooded, alpha-male, patriotic American men are actually too scared to join the military. And a lot of women and gay and transgender and queer Americans aren’t.

A common misconception over the Vietnam War was that everyone was drafted. This wasn’t true. Most men were actually volunteers who joined the military out of patriotism, financial needs, adventure or to get away from home. The rest were drafted to fill the enormous gap created to fight a war so complex and unpopular. When the military did their postmortem of Vietnam, they determined that an all-volunteer fighting force would be better when fighting conflicts that might not be so popular at home.

Thus was the modern all-volunteer military born. And, right off the bat, the military learned two things. The first was that a lot of patriotic men do not want to join the military. Why would they? It is dangerous, you have few rights, you might get sent to war and end up dead. So, the military sweetened the deal. College, home loans, job training, government jobs and health care all got amplified. And yet still, the military fell short and started looking for different people to join.

One of the groups they looked to was women.

As we can see, in the post-Vietnam years, women flooded into the service and took up roles that were traditionally filled by men. They did a pretty good job of it — so much that the military realized non-combat jobs could and should be performed by women.

You probably caught the non-combat adjective. Good, it comes into play later.

The military still refused to allow gay and transgender Americans to serve, and would discharge any that were caught in the ranks. Things got political, and the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule was enacted in the Clinton era. Of course, anyone who served during that time would tell you the work-around was to get someone else to ask and coerce the suspected gay service member to tell them as a friend. Thousands of service members were discharged this way.

Then 9/11 happened and we went into Afghanistan. For some reason, we decided to go into Iraq. And this is where it all changes. When Iraqis formed into insurgent groups, the American military found itself doing two jobs at once: nation building and fighting a counter insurgency. It was close to impossible, and casualties mounted. And the Marines (as well as Army) started assigning women to do tasks like patrols, convoys and checkpoints.

Even a Marine like me was taken from my desk job and assigned to an ad-hoc combat unit because there weren’t enough Marines to deploy. We had infantry squad leaders who were highly decorated and tough as nails, and we learned everything there was to know about going to war. And when we got back, they said they were going to send the unit back out again, but because there were too few people, women would be joining us this time.

There were two lessons we learned from Iraq. The first was that when you put women in combat roles, they rose to the task. The second was, why beg straight white men to serve when gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans are so willing to?

Peter Hegseth has been to war. I believe that many of his views are formed by his deep and powerful experiences from serving. Many men I served with feel the same way. There is a belief that things would run smoother and more efficiently, that the risks outweigh the good, and that women and gay, bisexual, and transgender service members are still weaker.

But those feelings run face-first into an uncomfortable reality that Hegseth, military brass, recruiters and combat units continue to face. Military recruiting is down and the problem is that men simply do not want to serve.

Hegseth will learn that a lot of men who claim to be patriots are only as patriotic as putting a flag on a truck, chanting "USA" at a sporting event, or trolling anyone who criticizes the U.S. online, are just too scared to serve. And if he wants to keep the U.S. military in a state of combat readiness, he will have to go “woke” aka rely on the women and men who he thinks should not serve this country.

Jos Joseph is a master’s candidate at the Harvard Extension School at Harvard University and alumni of The Ohio State University. He is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and lives in Anaheim, Calif.

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