In print, the Pentagon’s policy on women in combat looks like this: Women shall be excluded from assignment to most units “whose primary mission” is “direct combat on the ground.”
On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s policy on women in combat looks like this: Women risk their lives as truck drivers, mechanics and medics attached to combat units. At checkpoints, they do a job that men can’t: search Iraqi women. They fire rifles and lob grenades. And when they are struck by the IED blasts and suicide bombers that characterize this war, they are wounded or killed just as surely as their fellow soldiers.
In other words, the written policy is divorced from reality.
In part because a few jobs — in the infantry, field artillery and special forces — remain off limits, there is a lingering myth that women are not in direct combat.
In truth, about 7% of the 191,000 troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are women, and they are doing just about everything they are physically capable of doing. That’s as it should be.
The existing Pentagon policy dates to 1994, when then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin loosened what had been far tighter restrictions. By 2006, according to a study by international think tank Rand Corp., more than 92% of Army occupations were open to women. That’s progress as far as it goes, but today the combat exclusions make little sense.
The policy, for instance, talks about combat taking place “well forward on the battlefield.” In Iraq and Afghanistan, there are no front lines. Danger is everywhere.
Smart commanders use women “in all the positions for which they are qualified,” as the 1994 policy also envisions. But when it comes to the exclusions, the Army has to tie itself in knots to show that it’s complying.
Thus, in talking about Spc. Monica Brown, a medic who won the Silver Star in March after running through gunfire to save injured comrades, the Army is at pains to underscore that Brown wasn’t “assigned” to the combat unit where she showed such courage, but was only “attached” to it. That’s just silly.
Most of the opponents of women in combat seem to have gotten over their objections. In a USA TODAY/Gallup poll in September, 74% of Americans agreed that women should be allowed to hold combat jobs, up from 36% in an NBC News poll that asked the same question in 1981.
In 2005, when a band of House Republicans tried to limit women’s roles in the war, the top brass objected so strenuously the critics were forced to retreat. (When we sought a lawmaker to debate this issue today, several one-time critics of women in combat declined to write an opposing view.)
Even if you accept one of the objections raised by past opponents — that female POWs could face rape and other abuse — keeping women from the so-called front lines won’t help. Female soldiers are subject to capture at a checkpoint or in a convoy almost anywhere in Iraq.
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