Is the Lioness Program real? Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Special Ops’ story explained

Undercover military action has never looked so slick, but is the Lioness Program actually real? Here’s how Taylor Sheridan got his Special Ops story.

Lioness Season 2 has exploded onto our TV screens, with the Episode 1 and Episode 2 premiere setting up major drama ahead for Joe’s team.

The Taylor Sheridan series is getting its debut just before Landman and Yellowstone Season 5 Part 2, yet it’s somehow managing to hold its own.

While the on-screen tension is ramping up, how much of the true story behind the Lioness Program is accurate?

The Lioness Program is inspired by a real-life operation

While it doesn’t exist anymore, Sheridan’s take on Lioness is inspired by the real-life Team Lioness, who were female United States Marines attached to combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Paramount

The strategy became a crucial way of establishing a sense of trust between civilians and military personnel in both wars. Because there was no official battlefield, attacks could happen anywhere at any given time… to absolutely anyone.

Because of this, it was vital for US Marines to form bonds with the locals, and try to gain intelligence through the community. However, male soldiers weren’t culturally allowed to approach female locals, which is where Team Lioness came in.

This also posed a problem at US checkpoints, where local women could pass through without being searched because of the same cultural reasoning. Team Lioness was officially set up to help deter women from being used as instruments of war – and according to the Marines themselves, the operation was mostly a success.

Team Lioness was the gateway to using Female Engagement Teams (FETs) on a wider basis, originally being used between 2003-2004.

Interestingly enough, women in combat were restricted at the time the Team was initially put together, thanks to the Combat Exclusion Policy. This explains why Lionesses were “attached” rather than assigned to official units.

In the new TV show, Joe and her crew operate more like the modern-day FETs than the original Team Lioness.

Who was the real Team Lioness made up of?

In a real-life Lioness team, there were two members – a searcher and a “guardian angel” who was responsible for protecting them.

Paramount

In these teams of two, the Lionesses would search an average of 100 women a day, frequently finding weapons, large sums of money, and “Anti-American propaganda.” It was discoveries like these that meant many thought Team Lioness was a success.

Women undertook a 5-10 day SERE training regime before being temporarily attached, covering off things like:

• Techniques for searching women
• Culture and language training and protocols for working with interpreters
• Training for dealing with explosive devices
• Instruction on UN-regulated rules of engagement covering legal and ethical behavior in war
• Training in detention
• Intelligence gathering training
• Briefs on current threats in the area of operation

After this, women were on the ground for 30 days working in the pairings explained above.

As we’ve mentioned, the Lioness program as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore – but that’s because it was only ever destined to be temporary.

When they moved out, local women were then trained to carry out the same procedures, making the entire process more accessible to communities in Iraq. The most notable group to work alongside Marines in this was the Sisters of Fallujah.

How to watch the Lioness documentary

In 2008, a documentary titled Lioness was released looking at the first members deployed to Ramadi, Iraq in 2003. You can now watch it via Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+.

In the documentary movie, we follow five female support soldiers who made up some of the first US women to ever be sent into direct combat.

Alongside highlighting their work, the documentary helped make some essential changes to women’s military service. Among them was The Women Veterans Healthcare Improvement Act, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010.

The first two episodes of Lioness Season 2 are available to stream now and will air on a weekly basis. You can also check out everything on the Costner-Sheridan feud, the best Yellowstone episodes of all time, the timeline of Yellowstone spinoffs, and more TV shows streaming this month.