MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
President-elect Trump continued the fast pace of nominations to key roles for his second term, yesterday selecting Army veteran and Yale Law School classmate of Vice President JD Vance as secretary of the Army. It is a civilian position and a political appointment, and thus, it is expected to change with the administrations. But we thought this would be a good time to check in with the current secretary, Christine Wormuth, who also happens to be the first woman to become secretary of the Army, and she is with us now. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us.
CHRISTINE WORMUTH: It's a pleasure to be here, Michel. Thank you.
MARTIN: So for people who don't have any connection to the armed forces now - and, you know, that is a lot of people - the main role of the service secretaries is to recruit, train and equip the force. When you came into the role in May of 2021, what would you say was your biggest priority?
WORMUTH: Probably my biggest priority when I started was to make sure the Army continued to modernize. We really needed to change from being focused on counterterrorism to being focused on being ready to go to war against a nation-state.
MARTIN: Well, say more about that.
WORMUTH: Well, we had spent 20 years, you know, in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places like Syria, parts of Africa, really fighting against violent extremist organizations who didn't have particularly high-tech weapons. But looking to the future, we knew we might potentially go to war against Russia, for example, or, you know, we've been very focused on China as a rising military. And so the types of weapon systems that the army would need for that were very different. And so being able to develop those weapons, being able to field those weapons on a pretty flat budget, that was a tall order when I started.
MARTIN: We know that more women are coming into the services. I mean, women are, as I understand it, about 17% of the Army now.
WORMUTH: Sixteen percent of the Army overall, but this year, 19% of our recruits were women.
MARTIN: I mean, it was actually static for a long time. It has been slowly increasing over the last years. Why is that?
WORMUTH: I think a lot of it is when you can see it, you can be it. And I think women are more visible now in the Army than they were 15 years ago. And I think the Army presents tremendous opportunities for young people, man or woman. And I think a lot of women are seeing that more and more.
MARTIN: We don't know who the new secretary of defense is going to be, but we do know that one big issue that seems to be swirling around is the issue of women in ground combat. The person who's currently been nominated to be defense secretary, Pete Hegseth - we don't know what's going to happen here, but he says women should not be in ground combat roles. What do you make of that?
WORMUTH: I don't agree with that. Right now, we have over 5,000 women currently serving in combat roles. They're adding value, and it's helping us recruit, and we're in a period right now where recruiting is hard, so I don't think we should turn away anyone who can meet our standards.
MARTIN: What would happen to these thousands of women who have been serving in these roles if that policy were to change?
WORMUTH: Well, I think, given that the nominee hasn't even had a hearing yet, it's premature to start speculating about what would happen if they decided to reverse that policy. But like I said, women are adding value. I mean, a couple of great examples - when we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cultures in those countries are very gender separated. So there were whole areas where male soldiers couldn't go to collect intelligence that we really needed. It was because we had women in infantry units that we were able to go and collect intelligence that led us to be able to hunt down high-value targets.
MARTIN: Do you believe that women have largely been accepted in all these roles?
WORMUTH: For the most part, I absolutely do. If you go into our special operations community, there are some old-timers, I would say, who maybe say, oh, I don't know if it was a good idea to have these roles. But in general, this is not a topic of conversation. People are used to having women in the formations. We have women in every single battalion-sized unit across the United States Army, and it's well accepted.
MARTIN: So you mentioned that recruiting has been a challenge. Why is that?
WORMUTH: A lot of reasons. Part of it is only 25% of young Americans even meet our standards in terms of weight, in terms of sort of conduct. Only 9% of young Americans right now want to serve in uniform, so, you know, we have to convince people of the value proposition. So those two reasons are a big part of it. Unemployment's been very, very low so people can get other good jobs. So we're facing more competition from the private sector, I would say. And then kids understandably have the concerns you would imagine, which is, if I join the Army, am I going to get killed?
MARTIN: Well, there are some conservatives who say that part of the reason that the military is having trouble attracting young people will say that the military is too woke. Do you think that's true?
WORMUTH: I think that's wrong, and the data doesn't support that. You know, we spend one hour in basic training on equal opportunity training, and we spend something like 95 hours on rifle marksmanship. We are focused on being lethal, being ready to win wars, and I think anyone who comes to our units, that's what they'll see our soldiers focused on.
MARTIN: Christine Wormuth is the 25th secretary of the Army. Madam Secretary, thank you so much for joining us.
WORMUTH: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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