In his opening salvo, the esteemed Scott Yenor righteously scrutinizes the travesty of single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Yenor lays bare the deleterious effects that forced sex integration has had on honor, cohesion, and the society into which graduates of the school march. What he emphasizes less, however, is how the Supreme Court’s decision in US v. Virginia fundamentally changed the nature of VMI’s military character, and the essential path to reclaiming same-sex spaces for military officer formation.
The most important part of Yenor’s essay is his proposal to create more VMIs that can force a legal and cultural reconsideration of issues involving sex in education and the military. This is a compelling recommendation, because responsibility lies with committed red state governors who have the authority to make bold moves to challenge existing institutions and create alternative ones.
The governor of West Virginia could establish a military academy with higher education credentials and, like VMI does today, endow a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program at the school to serve as a pipeline into the military’s officer ranks. The character of this new service academy must be ironclad, inculcate a warrior ethos, and be set apart from the civil society that its graduates will pledge their lives to defend.
While offering a four-year degree is necessary to attract those with talent who are willing and able to lead and thrive, this status must not infringe on the mission of the next VMI. This new academy must seek to minimize the distinction between the academic and military spaces to the greatest extent possible. This does not mean that cadets should take exams in body armor, but rather that their college experience should produce elite warrior leaders.
Every class, extracurricular, and academy event should directly relate to the military profession. This would almost certainly mean smaller course offerings, fewer Division I athletics, and fewer civilian professors without military experience. Above all, like VMI, West Point, and the Naval Academy, a student hierarchy (or chain of command) must be the definitive experience of academy life.
There is perhaps no greater manifestation of the corrupt effect civilian ideology can have on military formation than the supposed imperative of sex equality. As Yenor rightly states in his piece, new military academies must be all-male in order to reclaim the ideal of masculine virtue, and the inherent integrity of a space built apart from the surrounding social milieu and ideologies.
Yenor makes clear that male-only spaces are not only fundamental for a proper education environment, but are even more critical for military formation. The case for male-only military academies rests on the continuity between how units train and how they ultimately fight.
Scholarship from the 1990s first identified how gender integration erodes cohesion and readiness within combat formations. Subsequent physiological studies reinforced the point, finding that women experience higher injury rates and markedly greater attrition in strenuous training environments. Such outcomes in the formative stages of a soldier’s career have profound implications for the design of academies that are meant to cultivate endurance, resilience, and mutual reliance.
The operational record echoes these concerns. The U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s “Women in ARSOF” report revealed deep dissatisfaction among operators, with nearly four out of five saying that integration undermined effectiveness. More conclusively, a 2015 Marine Corps study demonstrated that all-male units outperformed mixed-gender counterparts in speed, lethality, and cohesion.
These findings matter for academies, for they are the crucibles where young men forge the habits of trust and shared hardship that define combat units. If integrated units struggle to match the performance of male-only formations, then academies designed on an integrated model risk instilling the very fissures that later compromise unit effectiveness on the battlefield.
Much of this effort can be accomplished outside of Washington, D.C., but that does not obviate the need for the federal government to adopt policies that will protect male-only military spaces from inevitable legal challenges.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth could direct the Department of War to issue a new regulation barring women from ground combat roles. Because their prior exclusion was rooted in departmental rulemaking rather than congressional statute, Secretary Hegseth would have authority to act at the direction of the president. Congress could intervene to block or codify such a policy, but absent legislative action, executive authority would control. Even a layman’s reading of US v. Virginia reveals that such bold policy action is a necessary precondition to building the kind of alternate institutions Yenor identifies as necessary to rebuild sex-segregated education in the military.
Under the heightened equal protection standard (“exceedingly persuasive justification”), Virginia had to show the Supreme Court that its exclusion of women was essential and well-grounded. Justice Ginsburg, however, saw the U.S. Military’s broad inclusion of women in the service academies in the decades prior to 1996 as an important reason VMI had no claim to keeping its single-sex model of education. In the Court’s logic, the pre-existing inclusion of women in the military showed that VMI’s justifications were speculative rather than proven, and thus failed the constitutional standard Justice Ginsburg applied.
The lesson of US v. Virginia is not that single-sex military education is constitutionally foreclosed, but that its survival depends on the alignment of institutional design and national policy. Justice Ginsburg’s reasoning turned on the fact that by 1996, women had already been admitted into federal service academies and the Armed Forces, making Virginia’s exclusion of women appear anomalous. This means that if future academies are to reclaim the tradition of male-only formation, they must be created in tandem with a renewed policy framework that treats sex-segregated combat preparation as essential to military effectiveness rather than a vestige of exclusion.
Yenor is right that cultural renewal will require state leaders who are willing to build institutions that resist prevailing orthodoxies. Yet even more important is the recognition that law follows policy. Without decisive national direction, any new academy would stand vulnerable to the same scrutiny that undid VMI’s traditions. The path forward, then, lies in building academies with an unambiguous martial ethos, supported by federal policies that make male-only formation not only culturally defensible but also constitutionally secure. Only then can the U.S. produce the kind of warrior men upon whom its survival ultimately depends.