China girl, pt. 5: American amnesia - how we mobilized women in defense to win wars on land, race to the moon, and find the worst people on Earth but then forgot it while China didn't
Or when winning in America required everyone, we used everyone, and Agnes Meyer Driscoll, Katherine Johnson, and 10,000 female codebreakers proved what works
When Mao declared “women hold up half the sky” in 1968, his own mother, born in 1867, had bound feet, meaning she was literally immobilized by tradition. Less than a century separates the birth of Mao’s mother, a woman whose feet were broken to limit her movement, from the birth of Zhu Xuejun in 1962, dubbed China’s ‘Missile Goddess’, whose hypersonic missiles travel at roughly ten times the speed of sound, faster than anything America can currently intercept.
Xuejun’s feet were not bound and neither were her capabilities, as China learned to unbind both women and their potential to serve the country’s defense needs. Meanwhile, America, lagging severely behind its adversaries in the defense industry, has a superpower we refuse to use desperate innovation. When we absolutely must win, whether World War II, the Space Race, or finding bin Laden, we suddenly remember that talent comes in all packages. Then the crisis passes and we forget. Our distinctly American amnesia indicates we know how to get ahead by bringing in women into defense roles, but we only seemingly mobilize this capacity at the very last minute possible, when we’re already in a situation where our adversaries are advancing.
Part 1,Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of the China Girl series established America’s systematic exclusion of women from defense technology while examining China’s 10x drone advantage stemming from 46% female workforce participation, their 13-month AI capability gap closure enabled by 2 million female data annotators, our $100 billion annual economic loss compounding to $4.5 trillion since 1976, and the structural mechanisms perpetuating this exclusion ranging from military pipelines importing 82% male demographics to security clearances averaging 249 days while penalizing student debt women disproportionately carry.
Part 5 examines the historical precedent that makes this gendered exclusion particularly irrational. America has repeatedly mobilized women in defense technology during existential crises with decisive results, from WWII codebreaking to Apollo calculations to finding bin Laden through laundry patterns, then deliberately dismantled these successful initatives once each crisis passed. Tellingly, China has studied these American successes, recognized the pattern, and made crisis-mode inclusion their permanent operating system whereas we’re suffering from a distinct operation of American amnesia.
Part 5’s subsections:
The precedents in America’s repeated mobilization and demobilization cycles
World War II: When women broke codes that won the war
The Space Race: How female computer scientists and their hand-written calculations put men on the moon
Modern intelligence: We found Osama bin Laden because women in the CIA noticed weird laundry patterns that the others overlooked
From bounded to unbounded: China’s transformation
Conclusion and next steps
The precedent: America’s repeated mobilization and demobilization cycles
There’s an identity crisis cycle to American defense, and it goes something like this.
America faces an existential threat. America discovers women can do technical work at scale.
America wins using women’s contributions.
War or crisis ends, women are sent home, their contributions are classified, minimized, or erased from institutional memory, and we forget.
Years later, America faces a new threat and has to re-learn the same lesson, practically from scratch.
Rinse, repeat, spin, hang to dry, this cycle is much like laundry, which by the way, was the clue that led to Osama bin Laden’s capture due to a woman in the CIA noticing it (more on that later in this article).
America’s defense workforce policy follows a recurring pattern where crisis drives gendered inclusion of women in defense, success validates it, and peace erases it. This is what I dub American amnesia, This matters because it demonstrates we already know what works, we just repeatedly choose to forget.
How many Americans know Agnes Meyer Driscoll, Elizebeth Smith Friedman, Katherine Johnson, or Mary Jackson by name? How many know Alan Turing’s?
The cycle has repeated through World War II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror (and plenty of other situations) where each time, women’s participation in America’s defense proved decisive. Yet each time, their contributions were classified, minimized, or erased from institutional memory.
In the time between 1945 through 1976 and later, America discovered American women could break codes that saved millions of lives, American women could calculate trajectories to put men on the Moon, and American women found the most wanted man in the world who had masterminded the most devastating terror attack on American soil. But afterwards, we forgot the women, their contributions, and their roles in America’s defense, while China didn’t. China observed this pattern and asked the obvious question: what if we just kept the crisis-mode inclusion permanent?
World War II: When women broke the codes that won the war
Here I demonstrate the scale of women’s participation in the most decisive technical achievement of WWII in breaking Axis codes, which is one example of gender integration at massive scale producing world-changing results that was then deliberately erased.
During World War II, with most men fighting overseas, the United States recruited over 10,000 women into cryptanalysis and signals intelligence, nicknaming them ‘code girls’. Women were more than 50% of American codebreakers, and they were busy at work not filing administrative tasks or fetching coffee, but instead intercepting intel, decoding enemy communications, and changing the course of history while doing so. For example, women were responsible for breaking Purple, the encryption system used by Japan to send secret communications all over the world. Genevieve Grotjan, a mathematician and former railway statistician, made the critical breakthrough on Purple in September 1940, a feat the NSA later called ‘..one of the greatest achievements in the history of U.S. codebreaking.’
American women were also intercepting U-boat positions that saved convoy after convoy and decoding enemy communications that determined where to send troops, when to attack, and how to win. The same pattern held in Britain, where women were 75% of Bletchley Park’s personnel and operated the machines that broke Germany’s Enigma cipher. Without women running the bombes, the electromechanical devices that tested thousands of cipher settings, Alan Turing’s theoretical breakthrough would have stayed a hand-written algorithm on paper. Turing designed the method, but women ran it and the machines around the clock which turned it into actionable intelligence.
Consider just a few other individual examples. Agnes Meyer Driscoll broke multiple Japanese naval codes, and her breakthrough on the JN-25 cipher in 1939-40 laid the cryptanalytic foundation that would later provide advance warning of Japan’s attack on Midway. Though Driscoll was transferred off JN-25 work in October 1940, her foundational cipher work enabled the intelligence that allowed Admiral Nimitz to position carriers for the ambush that turned the Pacific War. Without that intelligence, Midway could have been a Japanese victory that opened Hawaii to invasion. Yet her contributions remained classified until 2015, seventy years after the war ended and decades after Driscoll’s death in 1971. By then she had been dead for forty-four years, her name unknown outside specialist circles while the men who managed her department became household names.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman led a team that hunted Nazi spies across South America by breaking their codes. Prior to the war, she cracked smuggling rings for the Coast Guard throughout Prohibition. During WWII, Friedman broke three separate Enigma machines used by Nazi spy networks in South America, which prevent German infiltration of the Western Hemisphere. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover later claimed public credit for these successes, while Friedman, bound by a lifelong secrecy oath, could not speak about her wartime work. As so much of it remained classified, even Friedman’s own children and family did not learn the full story of what she had done until decades after her death too (which is a recurring pattern we saw with Driscoll earlier).
More than 80,000 women were a part of the U.S. Navy’s WWII women’s reserve technical corps, known as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). These women operated the Navy’s first computers, ran its sophisticated radar systems, and trained pilots in instrument flying using early simulators.
WAVES mathematicians and technicians programmed and ran the Navy’s first large-scale computers (such as the Harvard Mark I, where Lieutenant Grace Hopper was a leading figure). WAVES also maintained the machines that tracked every ship in the Pacific, calculated the firing trajectories for naval guns, coordinated the logistics of island-hopping campaigns and countless other tasks too numerous to list. The women of WAVES handled some of the most complex technical feats of the war and helped turn the tides to win it. Imagine if they had not been there.
Historians estimate that Allied codebreaking (to which women contributed the bulk of personnel) shortened WWII by as much as two years.
Millions of lives were saved by codebreaking and an additional two years of all-out industrial war in the 1940s would have cost untold resources (on the order of trillions of today’s dollars) and yet we forget.
American amnesia has done away with the scale of value that female codebreakers provided while people argue over the meaning of “trad wife” aesthetics on social media in the U.S.
In the post-war era, the WAVES program was discontinued, the women thanked and sent home with the knowledge they had accumulated ranging from how to program early computers, how to operate complex tracking systems, how to coordinate massive logistical operations, and more, all walking out the door with them. We had to relearn it all when the Korean War started.
The lesson was clear in 1945 that women could do the most sophisticated intelligence and technical work at the highest levels, but when the war ended, we treated their involvement as a one-off emergency measure, not a new normal. We effectively put Jenga pieces back in the box and lost a huge strategic advantage we had momentarily discovered in bringing women into defense.
Katherine Johnson and the moon shot we almost missed
Here I examine how women’s mathematical work enabled America’s most celebrated technological achievement, despite their contributions being hidden until a Hollywood movie 70 years later. This matters because it shows the pattern continuing into the modern era of American women doing pivotal defense work, men getting the credit, and everyone forgetting.
In the fifteen years after the last great war, NASA in the 1960s was facing another existential crisis - we needed to beat the Soviets to the moon. Where did we find the computational talent? We found it in black women mathematicians working in segregated facilities. Once again, the nation tapped a pool of talent it had long marginalized: women - and specifically women of color - in mathematics and engineering. Women like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and dozens of others were instrumental in getting Apollo to the Moon. They did the orbital mechanics by hand, provided the verification for new electronic computers, and literally calculated the path to the Moon and back. Their contributions were critical to America’s most celebrated technological achievement, and yet their names were largely unknown until a book and Hollywood movie (Hidden Figures in 2016) finally gave them wider recognition
In 1961, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for Mercury and Apollo missions by hand, including the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. In 1962, when NASA got electronic computers and was preparing to send John Glenn to orbit Earth, Glenn famously refused to fly unless Johnson personally verified the orbital calculations being done by IBM computers. ‘Get the girl to check the numbers,’ he said. ‘If she says they’re good, I’m ready to go.’
Glenn, a white male test pilot and American hero, trusted a Black woman’s math more than a state of the art computer because he knew her track record. Johnson spent a day and a half re-checking the machine’s math, confirmed it, and Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission went off successfully. Without Johnson’s verification, Glenn might not have had the confidence to make that historic flight.
American amnesia means women like Johnson operated in segregated facilities in the 1960s American South, using separate bathrooms and often excluded from meetings, yet they did the complex math that sent humans to space and back.
At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the ‘Rocket Girls’ hand-computed launch windows for America’s first satellites. In 1958, when Explorer 1 had to launch in response to Sputnik, these women worked 24-hour shifts recalculating trajectories as weather conditions changed. Barbara Paulson calculated the trajectory that put America’s first satellite in orbit, yet her name appears virtually nowhere in the celebration coverage.
During Apollo 8, Frances “Poppy” Northcutt became the first woman in Mission Control, where she calculated return trajectories to get the astronauts home. She was also the first woman to receive an award from NASA’s Apollo program. Today, most people could not name her while everyone knows Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Much like after WWII, after Apollo, we let progress lapse. After we won, we celebrated the male astronauts, forgot the females involved, and let their contributions fade into footnotes.
In wartime and with the space race, we had proven that brilliance comes from everywhere and that given the chance, women could do 'men’s work’ in math and engineering as well as anyone. Yet once we had the luxury of complacency, we largely reverted to old habits, and those women’s stories nearly vanished.
Modern intelligence: Laundry lines, burning trash, and what male analysts miss
Here I analyze how women’s different cognitive approaches identified the world’s most wanted terrorist through patterns male analysts overlooked, which demonstrates the value of diverse thinking in contemporary defense challenges, not just historical ones.
Osama bin Laden was caught because of laundry. Re-read that. Yes.
Let me explain in yet another striking example of diverse thinking in defense success, which comes from the more recent past in the hunt for bin Laden. The world’s most wanted terrorist was found not through flashy high-tech surveillance or brute-force intelligence, but through patterns of domestic life that a female analyst noticed when others did not. It shows that having different perspectives in the room, in this case, a woman’s perspective, can illuminate clues that others dismiss.
In the mid-2000s, a small team at the CIA dubbed ‘The Sisterhood’ had been obsessively tracking Bin Laden’s network for years often with little support, as their prior warnings before 9/11 fell on deaf ears. By late 2010, strong leads indicated a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan merited further analysis.
A female CIA analyst whose name remains classified noticed something interesting - there was something off with the laundry.
Through careful aerial surveillance analysis of the Abbottabad compound, she counted how many items were hung to dry, which suggested more adults and children than the supposed residents per intel.
She identified the compound’s unusually high walls and the lack of phone or internet lines despite the wealth of the area.
She sensed something was off and these subtle observations coalescing together were key in concluding a high-value target was likely hiding there.
Male analysts had access to the same imagery, but they were looking for weapons shipments, communication intercepts, financial transfers, all of the traditional intelligence indicators. The domestic irregularities that revealed the world’s most wanted terrorist were invisible to them because they were not looking at laundry or trash or considering the absence of things rather than the presence of things. Bin Laden was known to have multiple wives and many children living in hiding. Someone put the pieces together, and it was a woman.
The female analyst’s understanding proved mission-critical and her analysis convinced CIA leadership (then Director Leon Panetta, for one) that the intelligence case was solid. The rest is history - U.S. Special Forces raided the compound, found, and killed bin Laden in May 2011.
I don’t know if we’ll ever know her name, but somewhere in the world there is a woman responsible for finding the terrorist who masterminded the most devastating attack on American soil. She did this by noticing what her male counterparts missed.
This is not an isolated case - I mentioned earlier that female CIA analysts at the Alec Station were tracking bin Laden since 1996 and arguing for attention to their efforts and resources which were repeatedly denied until 9/11 made their warnings retroactively prescient.
According to accounts from former analysts, female CIA officers also predicted the timing of the USS Cole predecessor attack in January 2000. That attack failed only because the bombers’ boat sank before reaching the destroyer.
Imagine how much has been lost to the lack of and ignoring women - it boggles a brain to even comprehend these innumerable losses, leads, and life-changing possibilities for individuals and American national security.
Before 9/11, the same female CIA team wrote detailed warnings that al-Qaeda was planning large attacks possibly using planes, but their unit chief was dismissed by colleagues as only having ‘girls’ working for him. After 9/11, it became clear the girls had been right all along.
We keep finding out women are right, and we keep forgetting how we found out.
Every single time, when survival is on the line, we mobilize women, they deliver, then peace comes and we pretend it was a fluke.
Concluding remarks: The competitive implications of memory
Historical precedent proves that including American women in defense technology produces decisive advantages for the country. America proved it with Agnes Meyer Driscoll breaking codes, Katherine Johnson calculating trajectories, and female CIA analysts finding bin Laden through laundry patterns amongst other examples.
While America cycles through crisis-driven inclusion and comfort-driven exclusion, China studied our pattern and chose permanent mobilization. They made our wartime desperation their peacetime doctrine. You cannot win using half your talent, and women have shown themselves to be key players who can shift the tides towards winning over an adversary.
The results are measurable given how towards the end of 2025, China fields 10x our drones, closes AI gaps in months not years, and acquires weapons 5-6x faster than America.
The final part of this series, Part 6, will examine implications for AI governance and emerging technology competition, where these patterns of exclusion will determine who controls next-generation strategic capabilities.