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Civil Rights Groups File Lawsuit Against DOD for Withholding Records on Study of Women in Ground Combat Roles

NEW YORK – Today, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project (WRP), the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), and the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking information about the Pentagon’s decision to launch a study of the “effectiveness” of women in ground combat roles. The request seeks records concerning why the study was ordered, its scope, and what its findings could mean for women’s continued ability to serve in ground combat jobs, which they integrated ten years ago.
“Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has repeatedly, without evidence, questioned women’s ability to serve in ground combat, even though senior military leaders from every branch have attested to women’s success,” said Gillian Thomas, senior counsel, ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. “Now, without explanation, he has commissioned a study of women’s performance and assigned it to a researcher with a record of criticizing women’s combat readiness. The public has a right to know why, and what he plans to do with the results.”
“If Hegseth wants to push women out of the military, he cannot hide from the public,” said Lauren Khouri, senior director of workplace justice at NWLC. “We’re suing today to hold Hegseth accountable for his baseless, sexist, and offensive attacks on women servicemembers. These attacks undermine the law and our national security and must end.”
“Servicewomen in combat roles have consistently proven their capability by meeting the exact same unchanged, rigorous standards as their male peers. Re-examining these settled integration standards in secret distracts from military readiness and undermines the thousands of women serving with distinction,” said Elisa Cardnell, chief executive officer, SWAN. “The Department of Defense owes servicewomen and the public full transparency about why this study was ordered and how its findings will be used.”
In August, the groups submitted a FOIA request seeking records related to DOD’s review, which was launched in December 2025, a decade after DOD lifted all restrictions on women serving in ground combat roles. Since then, roughly 5,000 women have served in those jobs. DOD did not announce the review, which became public only after it was reported by a news outlet.
In April, DOD reassigned the study from the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) to the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) and extended its duration from six months to one year. The lead researcher at JHU/APL authored a 2015 study, commissioned by the Marines, that was critical of women’s combat performance. The study was widely criticized for its methodology and other flaws, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has cited it favorably. Despite the current review’s apparent wide-ranging scope and potential negative consequences for thousands of women serving in combat jobs, DOD and Secretary Pete Hegseth have provided no meaningful explanation for why it was initiated, its methodology, or how its findings may be used.
Women have always been on the frontlines of our nation’s defense and have served in every major U.S. conflict, beginning with the Revolutionary War. For decades, however, restrictions barred women from thousands of combat positions. Those restrictions were largely rolled back for women in the Navy and Air Force in the early 1990s, but the ground combat ban remained in place — barring women from serving in more than 200,000 jobs in infantry, armor, artillery, and related fields. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the lines between “combat zone” and “combat support” routinely were erased, and where women were killed, wounded, and decorated for valor, the formal exclusion of women from ground combat jobs became impossible for the Pentagon to defend. In 2016, following a lawsuit by WRP on behalf of SWAN and four servicewomen challenging the Pentagon’s combat exclusion policy, all remaining ground combat roles were opened to women.
The formal review of women’s combat “effectiveness,” a decade after they began serving in those jobs, comes amid a series of actions by Secretary Hegseth reflecting hostility to all servicewomen. In addition to questioning women’s ability to perform in ground combat positions, Secretary Hegseth has repeatedly denigrated women servicemembers and veterans and taken unprecedented action to fire senior women leaders — along with senior Black officers — and remove them from promotion lists.
Secretary Hegseth has also put forth rhetoric and policies emphasizing a hyper-masculine conception of physical strength as the leading predictor of job combat performance. These include his recently announcing mandatory testosterone testing and changing physical eligibility criteria for combat jobs across the military branches based on an asserted notion that existing standards held women to lower fitness requirements. These actions have raised concerns that the formal review currently underway could serve as a pretext for reinstating the ground combat ban, in whole or in part. Given that Secretary Hegseth and other senior leaders have refused to provide substantive answers to questions about the review — even from members of Congress — the need for transparency is urgent.
The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring DOD to promptly process the FOIA request and release all responsive records. The request seeks records related to the formal review describing the scope, purpose, methodology, and anticipated use. It also seeks records related to an earlier DOD review of occupational standards for combat jobs.
A copy of the complaint is available here.
A copy of the FOIA request is available here.