Some Air Force webpages on pioneering female pilots — from World War II to the modern era — have been taken offline, as the Trump administration continues its drive to eliminate diversity-related materials from government sites.
Air Force Times identified at least a dozen pages on the WWII-era Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, and retired Maj. Gen. Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot, including biographies, photos, museum exhibits, a video and a commentary, were no longer online as of Tuesday.
The URLs for three of those pages were modified with the acronym “dei” — short for diversity, equity and inclusion — a term the Trump administration has used as a pejorative.
The removals come as the Trump administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have assailed diversity-related initiatives of previous administrations, calling them divisive and a distraction from efforts to make the military more “lethal.” President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office ending those initiatives and later directed the military and other government agencies to swiftly pull such materials from public view.
In an emailed statement, an Air Force spokesperson did not specifically address the removed pages, but said that some removed historical content could be put back online after a review.
“Our intent is to restore purely historical content after we review to make sure it complies with the guidelines,” the spokesperson said.
A message sent to Leavitt’s website requesting comment was not answered by Tuesday afternoon.
Trailblazer content removed
The WASPs were a group of more than 1,000 women who conducted pilot training and ferried aircraft domestically during WWII. The program was formed to ease the stateside pilot shortage suffered by the Army Air Corps, as the majority of the nation’s male pilots were overseas.
In 1993, Leavitt became the first woman to serve as a fighter pilot in the U.S. military when she graduated from flight training and began flying the F-15E Strike Eagle. During her 31 years in uniform, Leavitt flew more than 3,000 hours, including 300 hours in combat above Iraq and Afghanistan, advanced to two-star general and held several leadership positions, including Air Force’s chief of safety, commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service and two stints as a wing commander. She was also the first woman to ever command an Air Force fighter wing.
The removals appear to be conducted inconsistently, with some material being down at one location but remaining online at another. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that preserves archived copies of websites, retained copies of most of these pages, and showed one now-pulled site was online as recently as Feb. 6.
In the Trump administration’s first week, the push to remove diversity-related materials prompted the Air Force to briefly pull a course from basic military training that included videos on the WASPs, as well as the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black pilots in the U.S. military who escorted bombers on raids over Nazi Germany. That course was reinstated days later after a public outcry.
Meanwhile, other historic subjects involving minority service members that have recently been removed from the military’s webpages include materials on the Navajo Codetalkers of World War II, and Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Marine and member of the Pima tribe who helped raise the U.S. flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Tuskegee Airmen material appears to be unaffected by the recent changes.
The deleted Air Force materials related to the WASPs include a page on the National Museum of the United States Air Force’s website. That page included a gallery of photos of a museum exhibit on the pilots, including images of the Congressional Gold Medal that then-President Barack Obama presented to the WASPs in 2009. That page was online last month.
The Air Force also pulled offline a 2022 release from Dyess Air Force Base in Texas about a Dyess Women’s Summit celebration saluting the service’s all-women aircrews and marked the 80th anniversary of the WASPs. Local elementary school students and ROTC cadets also attended that event, according to an archived version of the release.
That release included a quote from the third-grade daughter of a deputy commander, who called the event “very fun” and said, “I liked looking at the planes and I learned that the WASPs were women in the military just like my mom.”
A female airman who attended the summit wrote a commentary about the event a few weeks later, describing how hearing about WASPs overcoming discrimination and seeing women’s progress in the military gave her hope for the future of the Air Force. That commentary is also now offline and tagged with “dei.”
Multiple pages related to Leavitt and her status as the service’s first woman to fly fighter jets have been taken down. A YouTube video labeled “Brig. Gen. Jeannie Leavitt: ‘Diversity is a competitive advantage,’” which was posted as part of a 2019 Airman Magazine feature, has been made private.
Two photos of Leavitt from her tenure commanding the 4th Fighter Wing, the captions of which refer to her as “the first female fighter pilot,” have also been pulled. An archived version of the pages shows one is of her in her F-15E cockpit; the other photo shows Leavitt in her flight suit, taking notes at a briefing.
Multiple versions of an Air Force article about Leavitt’s 2023 retirement, which called her a “trailblazer,” are unavailable, though a remaining version could be found in a little-known corner of the service’s website.
“From her early aspirations in aerospace engineering to confronting policies that once barred women from combat-coded fighter aircraft roles, Leavitt’s resolve knew no bounds,” the Air Force said in that article.
A 2013 Air Force News Service release about Leavitt, titled “AF first female fighter pilot continues to break stereotypes,” also now shows a 404 error message. Its URL also has been tagged “dei.”
Another Air Force release, which was pulled from one base’s website but remains available elsewhere, described Leavitt’s 2022 visit to Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, where she met with other female aviators and gave them advice on matters such as perseverance, how to find mentors in a male-dominated fighter pilot culture and how to stay competitive in their careers when they become pregnant.
“If I inspire some young boy or girl to dream big, work hard, and achieve more than they thought possible, it’s a win for national security,” Leavitt said in the release. “It doesn’t matter if they join the military or not because we will be a stronger society.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
