The Naval Academy scored a historic first, but nobody’s talking much about it.

In May, a female midshipman will join 31 other graduates heading for the rigorous training to become a Navy SEAL. She will be the first woman to make the trip from Annapolis to the training waters of San Diego.

It’s being treated quietly for a few reasons. The six-month Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school washes out up to 80% of candidates, although academy grads succeed at higher rates than others. SEALS also work in classified operations, and the Pentagon wants to keep their names secret.

And maybe this, too — women warriors might be about to go out of vogue in Washington. Once again, Naval Academy women represent a changing America.

“Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat means casualties are worse,” FOX News host Pete Hegseth said during an interview last month on “The Shawn Ryan Show.” “I’m straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles — it hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”

Hegseth, 44, is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to become secretary of defense. If confirmed, he could try to reverse the nearly decade-old policy of opening all military jobs to women, particularly the infantry, armor, artillery, and special operations like the SEALs.

Retired Lt. Col. Amy McGrath, a member of the academy’s Board of Visitors and the first woman to fly a Marine Corps jet in combat, has been a vocal critic of Hegseth.

In a Newsweek essay last month, she attacked Hegseth for convincing Trump to pardon and even promote service members convicted of war crimes. She criticized his tattoos signaling Christian nationalism and white supremacy. And she questioned his opposition to women serving in combat.

“How can we trust this man to be honest?” wrote McGrath, a 1997 academy graduate. “To serve for a higher cause than just mere loyalty to Trump? To have the backs of the millions of Americans entrusted with defending our nation? Based on his background, I have little faith that we can.”

Monday’s Board of Visitors meeting in Hopper Hall, named for Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, offered plenty of signs that change is coming.

In his new book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” Hegseth called on Trump to “clean house” of “woke” generals and service academy leaders.

It could be McGrath’s final meeting. One of six presidential appointees, her three-year term isn’t up until December 2026. Staying on is possible, but less so when you’re a vocal critic and the incoming administration has eyes on your organization.

“I’m very concerned about the Naval Academy,” said McGrath, who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in Kentucky.

Retired Marine Corps Gen. Gen John R. Allen, who led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, could be out, too. His term is up this month, and he called Trump’s June 1, 2020, Rose Garden speech on the use of military against civilian protests a dark warning.

“Remember the date,” he wrote four years ago in Foreign Policy magazine. “It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”

Given Trump’s stated thirst for revenge, and his break-the-mold appointments to top-level posts since winning a second term, there’s good reason to assume he’ll add six new names to the Board of Visitors. Expect some level of shock value.

“Clearly, some are disruptors and I think you can expect to see more of that,” said U.S. Rep. Jake Ellzey, a Texas Republican and 1992 academy graduate on the board.

Conservatives already targeted the academy as part of their culture war. A ruling is imminent on a federal lawsuit challenging how the academy considers race in admissions.

Heritage Foundation commentators blew up the choice of historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat for the Bancroft Lecture on history in October. She’s a scholar of fascist regimes and was set to talk about how they’ve used their militaries.

She’s also a high-profile Trump critic and announced her invitation on her blog, where she launched a broadside the same day. The academy postponed Ben-Ghiat’s invitation indefinitely.

On Monday, Provost Samara Firebaugh said Ben-Ghiat’s blog post was enough to give any reasonable person pause. But she said inviting controversial speakers fits with the academy’s definition of scholarly integrity and its history of listening to all sides to build critical thinking skills in graduates.

“These are the guidelines we went to war with,” Firebaugh said.

U.S. Sen. Dan S. Sullivan, an Alaska Republican on the board, pressed her to define academic freedom differently than civilian universities because the academy trains men and women to fight wars and kill the enemy.

“The public has a sense that the academy is different than other universities,” he said. “These kinds of things erode that sense.”

Monday’s meeting represented other changes as well. It was the final one for U.S. Sen Ben Cardin and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger. The Maryland Democrats served on the board for 17 years and neither sought reelection.

But nobody talked about the woman headed to San Diego. It’s been almost 50 years since women were admitted to Annapolis, and three since the first completed the special warfare program.

The only reference was on a slide showing where the Class of 2025 will go. She was represented by a (1) after the number 32 for the men heading to SEALS training.

That will send her from the command of Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, the first female academy superintendent, to one held until August by her husband, recently retired Rear Adm. Keith Davids.

Davids narrated slides showing happy mids celebrating their service of choice, or maybe second or third choice. There were buzz cuts for some of the 135 men and 44 women going to the Marines.

Davids pointed out the difference from her service selection day before graduating in 1989, the start of a career that offered no chance of combat at first. That changed gradually, with an end to the ban in 2015.

Maybe Hegseth’s talk is just what it appears, bluster aimed at selling books. Maybe he’ll look at recruiting numbers and realize the Navy can’t do without women in combat roles. Perhaps he’ll look at what’s actually happening and decide he was wrong.

But Davids, who served as the captain of a ship in a war zone, focused for the moment on the celebration and simpler changes: “It’s a lot different than when I stood in a line from one to 1,000.”