The Militarization Gap in U.S. Women, Peace, and Security Policy

By: Dhanvi Mehta

Ten years after Congress passed the Women, Peace and Security Act, the United States can point to strategies, implementation plans, and training modules across the interagency. The 2019 U.S. Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security lays out four lines of effort and commits the government to supporting women’s participation, protection, and relief in times of conflict. Yet the distance between writing policy and implementing it is stark.

Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) is still treated primarily as a humanitarian issue. It is far less visible in operational approach, contingency planning, or how military campaigns are designed. The structure of the 2019 strategy reveals the problem. Three of its four lines of effort focus on protection - meaning the prevention of gender-based violence, improved access to humanitarian access, and programs intended to safeguard women and girls in conflict settings. While these priorities are essential, they place the emphasis on responding to harm rather than ensuring women participate in the decisions that shape security outcomes. The strategy also explicitly connects the agenda to the National Security Presidential Memorandum on Women’s Global Development and Prosperity, which uses women’s economic empowerment as a development and security tool.

Training U.S. personnel and improving gender analysis are important steps, but they are not the same as making WPS a binding requirement. There is no requirement for them to influence major military planning, deployments, or alliance commitments. If WPS were integrated into core defense planning, it would shape how operations are designed. For example, by requiring gender analysis in contingency planning, incorporating women’s civil society organizations into stabilization strategies, or making women’s representation a condition in peace negotiations supported by U.S. security assistance.

In practice, however, WPS becomes something to support the mission, not something that defines it.

This framing matters because where a policy sits in the bureaucracy affects how it is implemented. When WPS is mainly tied to aid programs, it stays separate from major security decisions.

The WPS Act requires the executive branch to produce a government-wide strategy, after which individual agencies—including the State Department, USAID, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security—develop their own implementation plans. In theory, this spreads responsibility across the government. In practice, it makes ownership unclear, allowing agencies to treat WPS as a secondary requirement rather than a central mission.

Evidence from Congressional Research Service reports and civil society evaluations show that implementation has largely focused on diplomatic outreach, foreign assistance programs, and training activities. Much of the day-to-day work fell to USAID gender offices and specialized units within the State Department, which carry the bulk of staffing and program responsibilities. Within the Department of Defense, WPS initiatives have often been managed by gender advisers or small dedicated offices instead of being incorporated into standard planning, budgeting, and operational processes. As a result, WPS efforts frequently operate alongside mainstream defense activities.

The Department of Defense’s 2020 WPS Strategic Framework itself acknowledges that WPS has not yet been fully integrated into military plans, operations, or security cooperation programs. Commentary in military journals similarly describes WPS as underused and disconnected from major strategic concepts such as integrated deterrence. Together, this suggests that the interagency structure, while designed to promote coordination, has instead reinforced institutional silos that limit WPS influence.

Afghanistan

The experience of Afghanistan illustrates the consequences of this divide. For two decades, the United States and its partners supported Afghan women through education initiatives, political participation efforts, and legal reforms aimed at expanding access to employment, public life, and basic rights.

At the same time, however, the negotiations that ultimately shaped Afghanistan’s political future were conducted largely without women’s meaningful participation. The Doha peace process focused primarily on counterterrorism assurances, power-sharing agreements, and timelines for U.S. military withdrawal. However, Afghan women’s organizations repeatedly warned that excluding women from negotiations would jeopardize long-term stability and human rights protections. Despite this, their engagement was largely confined to consultation forums and advocacy channels rather than integrated into the formal negotiation process. As a result, Afghan women’s rights weren’t central to the structure of the final agreement. 

When the Taliban returned to power, many of the gains supported through years of international programing were quickly reversed. This rapid erosion revealed that the problem was not simply insufficient funding or weak implementation. Instead, it reflected a deeper structural divide. Since women’s inclusion was not embedded as a core condition of the security settlement, the protections created through aid and governance programs proved fragile. 

Ukraine

In Ukraine, the pattern is more subtle but similar. Understandably, international support has focused on the urgent demands of wartime defense such as heavy weapons transfer and macro-level financial stabilization to sustain Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Parallel to this effort, women-led organizations have organized evacuations, delivered medical aid, supported displaced families, and maintained local governance in areas they can. 

Although international donors frequently recognize their effectiveness at delivering humanitarian assistance, these organizations receive only a small share of direct funding and are often positioned as implementers of recovery programs rather than as contributors to security policy. Gender strategies and Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) commitments appear in dedicated policy frameworks and donor guidance documents, however military planning, reconstruction financing, and security coordination are outlined through separate channels. As a result, Ukrainian women participate as soldiers, volunteers, and negotiators at local levels, yet aren’t given a voice in long-term priorities. 

Gaza

The situation in Gaza and the broader occupied Palestinian territories continues to underscore how WPS is marginalized. United Nations and humanitarian documents emphasize gender-based violence risk, maternal health, and access to aid. Women’s organizations are recognized as essential providers of psychosocial support and service delivery. This includes households headed by women, which now account for nearly one in seven in Gaza. 

Women are framed primarily as beneficiaries of protection rather than as actors in ceasefire negotiations, deconfliction arrangements, or decisions about access corridors. The October 2025 ceasefire agreement involved no women at the negotiating table in any high-profile capacity. This is consistent with a broader pattern: globally, only one in ten peace talks in 2024 included women negotiators. 

Security and military planning continue to dominate those arenas, with limited transparency about how gendered risk assessments are incorporated, if at all. The pattern remains consistent: WPS is visible in humanitarian corridors and accountability reports. It is less visible in the rooms where key decisions are made. 

Moving Beyond

None of this suggests that development and humanitarian programming are misplaced. They are indispensable to the U.S framework. But if WPS remains largely confined to assistance frameworks, it will continue to be vulnerable to political shifts and changing foreign policy priorities across administrations.

The durability problem is, at its core, a structural one. The 2019 strategy and the WPS Act itself represent meaningful legislative anchors, but statutory requirements lose force when implementation stays discretionary. Making WPS resilient across political cycles requires embedding it in the parts of the national security apparatus that are hardest to quietly deprioritize. 

There are two options here. The first is strengthening Congressional mandates. The WPS Act already requires government-wide strategies and reporting, but Congress could go further by conditioning security assistance authorizations on demonstrable WPS integration. This would mean not just the existence of a plan, but evidence that gender analysis shaped how funds were allocated and how operations were designed. Oversight hearings focused specifically on DoD WPS implementation, rather than threatening it as a footnote to broader foreign policy reviews, would create accountability that persists regardless of which party holds the White House. 

The second option is bureaucratic embedding within the Department of Defense. As long as WPS is managed primarily through gender advisor offices rather than integrated into planning doctrine, budget cycles, and operational guidance, it remains removable. Codifying WPS requirements into standing planning directives - the kinds of instructions that govern how combatant commands build contingency plans - would make its inclusion routine rather than optional. This is less visible as a new strategy, but more durable. 

The question, then, is not whether the United States supports Women, Peace and Security. The question is whether it is prepared to treat WPS as integral to how it plans and wages war, not simply how it funds recovery afterward.

References

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“Israel & Palestine - Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.” Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, 28 Jan. 2026, giwps.georgetown.edu/conflict-tracker/country/israel-palestine/.

“Seven in Ten Women Human Rights Defenders, Activists and Journalists Report Online Violence | UN Women – Headquarters.” UN Women – Headquarters, 9 Dec. 2025, www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2025/12/seven-in-ten-women-human-rights-defenders-activists-and-journalists-report-online-violence.

Trump Administration. Women, Peace, and Security Strategy: Milestones & Metrics.

“What Is the Women, Peace and Security Agenda? | UN Women – Headquarters.” UN Women – Headquarters, 20 Oct. 2025, www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/what-is-the-women-peace-and-security-agenda.

“Women, Peace and Security Conflict Tracker: October Updates - Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security.” Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, 24 Oct. 2025, giwps.georgetown.edu/2025/10/24/women-peace-and-security-conflict-tracker-october-updates/. Accessed 2 Mar. 2026.

“Women, Peace, and Security: Global Context and U.S. Policy.” Congress.gov, 2025, www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12346.

Women, UN. “Seven in Ten Women Human Rights Defenders, Activists and Journalists Report Online Violence.” ReliefWeb, 9 Dec. 2025, reliefweb.int/report/world/seven-ten-women-human-rights-defenders-activists-and-journalists-report-online-violence. Accessed 2 Mar. 2026.