The Real Women Behind Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Lioness’ Series

Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness returned to Paramount+ for a third season Aug. 2 with Zoe Saldaña’s CIA officer Joe McNamara leading another covert mission. The Paramount series is based on a real U.S. military program, although its fictional operatives bear little resemblance to the women who carried the Lioness name in Iraq.

Those Lionesses included Army mechanics, clerks, engineers and other support soldiers, as well as female Marines pulled from specialties across the Corps. They were given a job commanders had not originally planned for.

The Real Lionesses Went Outside the Wire in Iraq

In the early years of the Iraq War, female soldiers began being attached to combat units because male troops could not search Iraqi women without violating local cultural norms.

The Marine Corps subsequently developed Lioness teams of its own, drawing volunteers from jobs ranging from maintenance and communications to aviation support. Their mission included searching Iraqi women at checkpoints and during operations while working alongside ground combat units.

Their official assignments still said support.

At the time, Pentagon policy barred women from being assigned to many direct ground combat units. Commanders instead temporarily “attached” female troops to those formations. In practice, that could put Lionesses on patrols, house searches and raids with units they had never trained alongside.

By 2004, some of the Army Lionesses were accompanying Marines on combat operations in places including Ramadi and Fallujah. Several found themselves in firefights despite arriving in Iraq with support specialties and little expectation that they would be used that way.

Their experience became the subject of the 2008 PBS documentary Lioness, directed by Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers. The film followed five women from the Army’s 1st Engineer Battalion: Shannon Morgan, Rebecca Nava, Kate Guttormsen, Anastasia Breslow and Ranie Ruthig.

Morgan, an Army mechanic from Arkansas, went on patrols and raids with infantrymen and Marines and fired on insurgents during combat. The documentary later followed her at home, where she spoke about living with memories of the war.

Breslow, then an Army signal officer, remembered being attached to Marines without enough familiarity with their tactics and weapons.

“If everyone [in the platoon] had been hurt, I would have had no idea how to get back to the forward operating base,” Breslow said in the documentary. “I felt we needed to know more.”

Ruthig was a mechanic who served alongside Morgan in Ramadi. Guttormsen and Breslow, both captains during the 2003-04 deployment, were among the senior women in the original group.

Nava later became an advocate on combat-related hearing loss after her own experience demonstrated another problem facing Lionesses: work performed outside their official specialties could be difficult to document when seeking veterans benefits.

The Lionesses Helped Change Women’s Role in Combat

The disconnect between what those women were officially allowed to do and what the war required eventually became part of a much larger debate.

The Pentagon rescinded its direct-ground-combat exclusion policy in 2013. Two years later, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that all remaining military occupations would open to women who met the standards, including infantry, armor and special operations positions.

The Lioness idea also continued in other forms. The Marine Corps developed Female Engagement Teams for Afghanistan, placing small groups of women alongside infantry units to search women, meet civilians and reach portions of the population largely inaccessible to male troops. Cultural Support Teams later performed similar work alongside special operations forces.

How Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Lioness’ Differs From the Real Program

Sheridan’s series takes the name much farther into fiction. Paramount’s Lioness is a CIA special operations program that recruits women to infiltrate organizations around high-value targets. Paramount acknowledges that the show’s characters and missions are fictional.

Some veterans of the original program have objected to how loosely the series uses their history. Sommers wrote that several Lionesses were upset when the show debuted because a name tied closely to their wartime service had been attached to a story with little connection to their experiences.

Sommers and Morgan responded by helping create The Lioness Origin Story podcast through the Veterans Breakfast Club. The oral-history series brought back original Lionesses and commanders, including Ruthig, Guttormsen, Breslow and retired Col. David Brinkley, the 1st Engineer Battalion commander credited with creating the original Army program in Ramadi.

More than two decades later, Sheridan’s series has made “Lioness” a familiar name again. The women who first used it were already writing a considerably different story outside the wire in Iraq.

For readers interested in seeing how Hollywood reimagined the Lioness name, all three seasons of Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness are streaming exclusively on Paramount+. Season 3 premiered Aug. 2, and new episodes are released Sundays through the Sept. 20 finale.