War dames: if America invades Iraq, thousands of female U.S. soldiers will fight on the front lines

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2002 by Phillip Carter

The second, more empirical reason is the physical disparity between male and female soldiers. Put simply, many military jobs require high levels of strength that most women just don't have. "You can't just let women into [infantry units]," argues Elaine Donnelly, a former member of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services who now chairs the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative group that opposes women in combat. "Lowering the standard like that for the infantry would be fatal."

Thus, in the 1970s, the Army employed a "risk rule" to determine whether a job would be open to women--literally measuring how close to battle any given assignment might require a soldier to be and barring women from those in which the likelihood was high. This kept women from a wide swath of assignments, and restricted opportunities even within fields they could legally enter, like the military police or intelligence, since almost every type of unit in the Army (even support units) could theoretically see combat. As a result, women could only be assigned to headquarters or other rear-echelon units at overwhelmingly low combat risk.

Street Fighting Women

But the American invasion of Panama in 1989 exposed the risk rule as largely ineffective. In several widely reported instances, female soldiers participated in firefights with Panamanian Defense Forces or local militia. Support units that included women took fire and returned it under conditions that any veteran would describe as "combat" When rear areas become combat zones, every soldier is expected to grab a rifle. Women wound up fighting under conditions that Would have earned them the Combat Infantryman's Badge had they been men and assigned to an infantry unit. Female convoy drivers were ambushed, and returned fire. Female helicopter pilots flew into battle zones, landed American infantry, and picked up casualties under heavy ground fire. Women assigned to military police units conducted infantry-style missions to cordon off and search Panamanian neighborhoods for enemy guerrillas--the same type of street fighting that could take place in Baghdad.

The Gulf War, too, featured an innovation in American military strategy that pushed the risk rule toward obsolescence: "maneuver warfare" This doctrine dictated that support units should push as far forward as possible to provide greater logistical aid to units in combat. The Army used this strategy with stunning success against the Iraqis. But since many U.S. support units were of mixed gender, women wound up serving farther forward in the Gulf War than ever before.

Some criticized women's performance in Iraq, pointing to ships and ground units with high pregnancy rates--even organized prostitution rings--as examples of women's harmful effect on unit cohesion and morale. There have also been charges of standards being lowered to let women into combat positions, such as at least one high-visibility aviation accident with a female pilot in 1994 who, critics charged, had been rushed into the cockpit to ensure that a politically motivated proportion of women earned their wings. But there were too few female pilots at the time for any meaningful studies to be conducted, and more recent reports from the air campaigns in Kosovo and Afghanistan indicate that women pilots performed as well as men, and, in some cases, even better.