While addressing military leaders on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reopened the debate nationally on women in combat.

Among other announcements, Hegseth said that anyone in a military combat role must meet the “highest male standard.”

“When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender-neutral. If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is,” Hegseth said.  

For female veterans in Colorado Springs and across the nation, the process of fully integrating the military has been long. For two local women, from different eras, proving to their male colleagues they could fill their roles meant working just as hard or harder.

“Each generation has laid the steppingstone for the rest to move forward,” said Cindy Anderson, one the first female drill sergeants in the Army.

The military opened up the last ground-combat roles to women in 2016 and the physical standards for those jobs have always been gender-neutral. Women represented 17.7% of the active duty force in 2023, according to the DOD.

For Anderson, Hegseth’s comments didn’t line up with what she saw back in the 1970s when she led some of the first integrated basic training courses. 

“There were some women who could out train those men,” Anderson recalled. 

She also led 5-mile runs carrying 30 pounds of gear because she wouldn’t ask anyone to do something she wasn’t willing to do herself. 

“That is where I earned my respect,” said Anderson, who grew up on a farm as an outdoorsy and athletic child. She graduated college before entering the Women’s Army Corps. 

As the first women in an all-male unit, other troops looked at her “like she had two heads.” But she “ended up with more big brothers that I knew what to do with.”

She also found that when coaching new recruits she just needed to explain matter-of-factly what needed to happen to build her team. 

“You don’t degrade the people you are supposed to lead,” Anderson said, noting that she found Hegseth’s lack of respect in his speech frustrating. 

While military standards, such as weight have changed since the 1970s, so has technology and the nature of war, Anderson said. Back then, the nation wasn’t preparing to fight a war with drones. 

“Nothing is like it used to be, you have to adapt,” Anderson said, who now leads the local chapter of the Women’s Army Corps Veterans Association. 

Medically retired Army Staff Sgt. Mindy King, a former Black Hawk helicopter crew chief and door gunner, who served from 2004 to 2011 including two tours in Iraq, agrees with Hegseth’s premise that job qualifications should be neutral.  

“When you get on the battlefield, gender does not matter,” she said. 

As a woman in a male-dominated field, King also found she always had to work harder than everyone else to prove her worth, a truth she also heard from more senior crew chiefs.

In one instance, when King was headed out on an air assault and they had paused and were waiting for new orders, she took off her helmet and some troops she didn’t know were shocked to see she was a woman. Before she took her helmet off, they couldn’t tell, she said. 

Their reaction was: “We didn’t know girls could do that stuff,” she recalled. 

King said in some cases there is a lack of exposure and education around working with women. 

“They don’t see the benefits or any of the positives of having females among their ranks,” said King, who is now the commander of the VFW 101 in Colorado Springs.