The U.S. military’s Women, Peace and Security framework, recently declared dead by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, centre, was based on an inalienable truth: when women are at the table, peace lasts longer and communities recover faster.LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images

Mellissa Fung is a journalist and the author of Between Good and Evil: The Stolen Girls of Boko Haram.

In late April, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “proudly” announced on X that he had ended the U.S. military’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) framework, which aims to leverage women’s meaningful participation in all aspects of conflict, whether that’s in the theatre of war or at the negotiating table for peacemaking and reconstruction. “WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops – distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING,” he declared.

But he got it all wrong. Not just about the president who signed it into law – that was his current boss Donald Trump in 2017, who further expanded it in 2019 – but because dismissing WPS as mere “wokeness” overlooks the program’s profound significance both on and off the battlefield.

“[Hegseth’s view] is a narrow interpretation of military effectiveness, which is lethality,” says Stéfanie von Hlatky, the Canada Research Chair in Gender, Security and the Armed Forces at Queen’s University. “It’s surprising for [someone] who’s had experience in Iraq, to not understand … that this was a whole-of-society fight, and that you need to leverage........

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