A new Army study has found that women are physiologically more resilient than men to the extremes of Ranger School, one of the most punishing courses the military offers -- their bodies weathering its sleeplessness and starvation with fewer disruptions than the men who endured it alongside them. The study's timing was striking: this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a program to screen troops for testosterone so they can, in his words, "operate at your absolute best" -- part of what he branded a "High-T Department of War." Ironically, the Army's own researchers had just found that women -- whose bodies produce far less testosterone than men -- held up best under intense strain.
To measure what the notoriously challenging course does to a body, researchers at the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine tracked soldiers through all three of its phases -- field, mountains, swamp -- drawing blood and measuring hormones, iron, inflammation, and the balance between the calories the students burned and the far smaller number they were allowed to eat. The men came out the more depleted of the two.
Men's markers deteriorated across the board and across the entire course, while the women's changes were fewer and clustered in a single phase, a pattern the researchers summarized in the cautious language of their field: multi-stressor environments, they wrote, "may disproportionately affect male physiological markers."
Holly McClung, who led the study, was willing to say it without the hedging. Women had proved "more resilient," she said, "more efficient in utilizing the fuel that they have," and seemingly "meant to withstand longer periods" of exactly the kind of deprivation Ranger School is built to inflict.
Few courses in the military ask more of a body. Nearly half of all candidates are gone by the end of the first week, and those who last push through swamp and mountain and open field for weeks at a stretch on two meals and a few hours of sleep a day, heavy rucks on their backs the whole way -- the sustained, grinding, underfed exhaustion that the study found women's bodies absorbed at less cost than men's.
Women have been earning the Ranger tab since the course opened to them in 2015, and more than 150 have done it, but the finding surfaces at an awkward moment for the institution that produced it: the Pentagon has opened a formal review of the "effectiveness" of women in frontline roles, an exercise critics say amounts to making women prove all over again what they have already demonstrated in the field. One arm of the department has measured how well women endure; another is investigating whether they should be there at all.
The department's current leader, Pete Hegseth, has made his own views abundantly clear. "We should not have women in combat roles," he said before his confirmation, arguing that their presence "hasn't made us more lethal." Under his watch, the first woman to lead the Navy has been fired, as has the first woman to lead a military branch. He has repeatedly struck women from the promotion lists drawn up by senior officers -- removing every woman from the Navy's most recent slate of one-star admirals, and blocking female officers chosen to become Army generals. The Navy will promote no women to admiral this year, in a service where women make up roughly a fifth of the ranks. And for the first time in nearly two decades, not a single woman serves as a four-star general or admiral anywhere in the United States military.
It is this Defense Secretary who announced this week that every service member thirty and older, women included, will be screened annually for low testosterone -- a condition that is genuinely rare, and that most of the people now being tested for it have no reason to suspect they have. Dr. Peter Snyder, who led the major national trials on the hormone, has said that low testosterone is uncommon even in men in their seventies, and that a low reading on its own is "never a reason for treatment."
There is also no FDA-approved testosterone therapy for women in any case -- who carry the hormone at a fraction of what men do, and whose bodies, the Army's own study found, were the ones that held up the best. Whatever it was that carried those soldiers through the swamp, it was not the hormone now lending its name to the Department of War.
Hegseth's High-T obsession did not come from nowhere. Testosterone has become a preoccupation of the manosphere, the online world of masculinity influencers who discuss their own use of it and treat "High-T" as shorthand for a particular idea of manhood. Prescriptions have climbed from under a million a year in 2000 to nearly twelve million now, the sharpest rise among younger men with nothing clinically wrong with them. Hegseth's own name for the program -- "the High-T Department of War" -- placed it squarely in that world.
For all the talk of testosterone and lethality, the Army's own study measured something real -- what a body actually does under weeks of hunger and exhaustion -- not just a fad borrowed from the internet. And it was women's bodies that endured. When asked what her findings meant for who is fit to serve, McClung, the study's author, put it simply: "An elite warfighter is an elite warfighter. It doesn't matter what your sex is."
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