Opening Combat Units To Women

In their article "Combat Roles for Women: A Modest Proposal" (Parameters, Summer 2001), Majors Kim Field and John Nagl seem to suggest that because the Army has shifted, for the moment, from warfighting to "operations other than war," now is a good time to drop the ban on females in combat-arms units.

Let me see if I have this straight: infantry units are doing military police work, women are in military police units, therefore, women should be in infantry units. The authors have drawn a false conclusion. If mechanized units are doing the job of military police units, it seems to me the correct argument is to develop more military police units. Rather than expand the number of branches that allow women, we should stand up more units that already admit women. If the authors believe the military will be doing more operations other than war, expanding the number of military police units might be more career-enhancing than duty in a combat unit that does not deploy.

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The authors fail to understand the difference between the role of the military police and mechanized infantry forces. The military police are qualified, through training, to investigate crime, apprehend suspects, and otherwise enforce the law. Criminals do not seek, in the normal course of their activities, to close with and defeat military police. Criminals, generally, would rather avoid contact with military police. In other words, military police do not have a force trying to prevent them from doing their jobs. Mechanized infantry forces, on the other hand, are designed to close with and destroy the enemy as they take and hold terrain, while the enemy tries to prevent this from happening.

Developmental changes in warfare are not an excuse for social experimentation. The technological development of the aircraft carrier, tank, and amphibious warfare cannot reasonably be placed on the same plane with the concept of mixed-gender forces primarily because the former (in their own way) fundamentally changed the way war was fought. The authors fail to demonstrate, using the above examples, what fundamental changes in warfare will result from mixed-gender combat units.

The argument that only a few women want to join infantry units is also hardly a good reason for doing it. No one doubts that there is at least one woman out there who can shoot better or run faster than the average combat-arms soldier. The questions should be: Are there enough women to justify the change? Will the change improve combat effectiveness? What are the likely negative consequences? Can we live with those negative consequences if combat effectiveness is improved? The argument might be stronger if half the West Point women wanted to be infantry, but five out of 133 is hardly a mandate. (One wonders if the percentages would change if female ROTC cadets and women at Officer Candidate School were polled.) However, suppose the number was not five, but 65. In that case there might be enough women (complemented by the appropriate number of female NCOs and female enlisted soldiers) to justify creating an all-female infantry battalion. The Army could then run that battalion through the same training as an a ll-male battalion and draw some objective conclusions.

Finally, the argument that integrating women into the combat arms is similar to integrating blacks into mainstream units is disingenuous. Black units proved themselves to be very capable fighters during and since the Civil War. Their ability to do the same job as white units was not the stumbling block to integration; the problem was racial prejudice. If the idea of a female warrior has any merit, the argument should be for the creation of an all-female infantry unit. Objective testing and evaluation would provide an answer to the questions of capability, cost, and reasonable accommodation. Testing might even determine if all-female infantry units enhanced the combat effectiveness of larger units. Even then there would remain the question of whether the American public, despite the polls, is ready for female infantry warriors. That question may only be answered after the ultimate test--combat.

Major Alan Farrier, USAR

Fort Polk, Louisiana

The Authors Reply:

We appreciate Major Farrier's interest in our article. Unfortunately, he appears to have missed the central argument of our work, and there are both logical and factual flaws in the critique he makes of comparatively peripheral points.

"Combat Roles for Women: A Modest Proposal" is built upon the contention that the functional imperative of military service can justify infringements upon the liberty of individual service members only when its demands are essential for military effectiveness. We firmly agree that combat effectiveness is the imperative function for which military forces are organized, but contend that the Army's current policies unduly limit individual rights while failing to maximize combat effectiveness. Under current policy it is not the most capable soldiers who are selected to perform the most demanding missions, but male soldiers. They are selected not for their specific ability to perform combat tasks, but for their gender. Meanwhile, female soldiers, even if capable of performing all combat tasks to a higher standard than the males who currently fill a combat MOS, are forbidden from serving in those positions merely because of their gender. This, we suggest, is both a detriment to the combat effectiveness of our arme d forces and a violation of the basic American principle of equal rights for all of equal ability.