In his opening salvo, the esteemed Scott Yenor righteously scrutinizes the travesty of single-sex education at the Virginia Military Institute. 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 United States 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 key part of Yenor’s essay is his call to create new institutions like VMI — schools that would force a legal and cultural reckoning over sex in education and the military. It’s a persuasive argument because red-state governors already hold the power to act. They can challenge entrenched institutions and build new ones that reflect their citizens’ values.
The modern obsession with sex equality may be the clearest example of how civilian ideology corrupts military formation.
A governor such as West Virginia’s could establish a military academy with full higher-education credentials and an attached ROTC program to train future officers. Its character must be ironclad — steeped in discipline, animated by a warrior ethos, and set apart from the civilian world its graduates would swear 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.
The cost of integration
The modern obsession with sex equality may be the clearest example of how civilian ideology corrupts military formation. As Yenor argues, new military academies must be all-male to restore the ideal of masculine virtue and preserve the integrity of a space insulated from the social fashions and ideologies of civilian life.
Male-only environments aren’t just valuable for education — they’re indispensable for building effective military units. The case for single-sex academies rests on a simple truth: Men must train as they fight, and the continuity between those two worlds determines whether they win.
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 4 in 5 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.
Passing the Ginsburg test
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.
Sec. 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, Hegseth would have authority to act at the direction of the president.
Without decisive national direction, any new academy would stand vulnerable to the same scrutiny that undid VMI’s traditions.
Congress could intervene to block or codify such a policy, but absent legislative action, executive authority would control. Even a layman’s reading of U.S. 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 “exceedingly persuasive justification” standard, Virginia had to convince the Supreme Court that excluding women from VMI was both essential and well-founded. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg disagreed. She pointed to the military’s decades-long inclusion of women in federal service academies as proof that VMI’s male-only model lacked a factual basis. In her view, Virginia’s justifications were speculative and failed the constitutional test she applied.
RELATED: Female veteran says Pete Hegseth is RIGHT about women in the military
Photo by Jupiterimages via Getty Images
The real lesson of U.S. v. Virginia isn’t that single-sex military education is unconstitutional. It’s that such institutions can survive only when their structure aligns with national policy. Ginsburg’s reasoning hinged on the fact that by 1996, women already served in the academies and the armed forces, making VMI’s stance seem outdated. For new male-only academies to endure, they must rise alongside a broader policy shift that treats sex-segregated combat preparation not as exclusion, but as essential to military effectiveness.
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 United States produce the kind of warrior men upon whom its survival ultimately depends.
Editor’s note: A version of this article was published originally at the American Mind.
Opinion & analysis, Opinion, West point, Virginia military institute, Vmi, Usma, Naval academy, Dei, Diversity equity inclusion, Diversity equity and inclusion, Dei in military, Feminism, Military readiness, Single-sex education, Coed