WOMEN IN COMBAT

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."

by: Brandon Friedman
VET VOICE
Tue May 13, 2008 at 01:06:38 AM EDT

http://www.vetvoice.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=1237

From USA Today:

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.

Here's my take: Every job in the military should be opened up to women so long as they can meet the same physical standards as the men. As USA Today says, they're "in direct combat" anyway.

I'll give a personal example: When I was in Iraq--back before Titan and L3 had started contracting locals--I had a female intel soldier (an Arabic linguist) assigned to my infantry company to act as our translator. When we went out on missions, she was another infantryman woman just like everybody else.

In that case, she literally saved our asses, as there were no other translators available in April 2003. And there's really nothing much else to say. It's not complicated at all: Women serving in Iraq are on the front lines and it's about time the rules, the law, and our society caught up to that fact.

End of story.

I don't think you'd find many people who've served in Iraq or Afghanistan who would contradict this.

For more information on the current stupid rules barring women from combat roles, I highly recommend this Washington Post piece on PFC Monica Brown, who was recently awarded the Silver Star for heroism under fire (before subsequently pulled from theater for breaking those same stupid rules).