What We Don’t Know About Women Warriors

With the Department of Defense facing a “recruitment crisis” in recent years and a dwindling pool of qualified young Americans available to recruit from, maximizing the recruitment and retention of female warfighters (currently 17.3% of the active duty force of the US Military) presents a great opportunity for growth.

Optimizing the health and performance of female warfighters is hampered by long-standing gaps and bias in applied research across the domains of training and testing standards, injury prevention and rehabilitation, nutrition and supplementation, personal equipment, and human performance technology. These gaps lead to female warfighters who are at a disadvantage when it comes to reaching an ideal level of effectiveness in their military occupational skill due to suffering through equipment and programming that is ill-suited for their needs which often leads to a higher risk of injury than their male colleagues

The Department of Defense cannot continue to ignore these gaps. The  Department of Defense must look for opportunities to lead new research that will broaden society’s understanding of female performance, such as how hormones and the menstrual cycle can impact training, recovery, rehabilitation, and nutrition. Other efforts, such as further research into the impact of energy deficit on warfighter health, the development of more flexible sizing options for equipment, as well as exploration into the viability and development of an individualized approach to performance optimization will offer benefits to all warfighters and increase overall readiness levels across the military.