Congratulations, women in the military! You’re about to get more opportunities to fight in the wars of the future. Someday. After a long, long process of review.
As of Thursday afternoon, by act of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the 1994 Direct Combat Exclusion Rule for women is no more. But it won’t be gone gone until 2016. Between now and then, the services will present plans for gender integration, due May 15, and then gradually integrate women into combat occupations — as well as assess which tasks they’re going to keep all-male.
Lots of the military’s most wired jobs are already open to women. Women in the Air Force can be drone pilots, for instance, as only elite special-operations jobs in the flying service are male-only. (The Air Force is already 99 percent gender integrated.) Crucial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance positions are performed by women every day. So are cybersecurity tasks. Women serve on massive ballistic-missile submarines. And the wars of the past 11 years have proven that even officially non-combat roles like truck driving become combat roles the instant an insurgent decides to attack.
“Female servicemembers have faced the reality of combat,” Panetta recognized in a Thursday press conference at the Pentagon.
Across the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force, there are about 237,000 positions excluded to women in the combat professions. They break down in two ways. First are the 184,000 positions excluded by specialty: infantry, artillery, serving on small fast-attack submarines, things like that. Then there are 53,000 positions inside combat units that exclude women — even though the jobs themselves, like medics or headquarters staffs, are open to women in other units.
The whole purpose of lifting the ban is to open those jobs up — or to figure out which ones the services really, really believe they can’t.
That is: the presumption inside the services will officially be that all combat roles ought to be open for women. Any service that wants to keep a combat role all-male will have to satisfy the Secretary of Defense that it’s got a good reason. “The burden used to be that we would say, ‘Why should a woman serve in a particular specialty?’,” Dempsey said. “Now it’s ‘Why shouldn’t a woman serve in a particular specialty?’”
And before combat units get fully integrated, Dempsey and Panetta indicated they expect women to fill leadership slots, both officers and enlisted, so women can see they have a career path upward and can “compete for command” with men.
For the next several months, and particularly over the summer, the services will reevaluate the standards they have in place for these combat positions, particularly the physical-fitness standards. A host of Defense Department officials swore to reporters on Thursday morning at the Pentagon that they’ll neither lower physical-fitness standards nor establish different standards by gender, something they say would violate federal law, anyway.
So the likely outcome of those tests is to find which jobs will remain excluded to women. An example a senior Marine official cited involved a loader on a tank crew. Loading a tank round requires a certain degree of upper body strength. You need to hoist a 50-odd pound, 120-mm round, removing it from its rack and loading it into the breach — here’s a video demonstration — all in a space that doesn’t really allow a lot of lower body strength to supplement. When the Army and Marine Corps explore job openings for women, that’s what they’ll test — whether a soldier or marine can do that, repeatedly, in relevant and realistic conditions, regardless of gender. (Although Dempsey mentioned one of his tank gunners when he was a division commander in Iraq was named Amanda.)
“For us it comes down to, it’s the physical standard and can they do it,” the Marine official said. “Those that can will have a greater opportunity and we’ll have a bigger pool to draw from. Those that can’t, no harm, no foul.” Or, as Panetta put it: “There are no guarantees of success. Not everyone is going to be able to be a combat soldier. But everyone is entitled to a chance.”
There’s also a reality the military will need to face: this is a cultural change, much like allowing open gay and lesbian service was. And while Dempsey and Panetta talk about moving “expeditiously” to integrate the combat professions, the services will likely want to move more deliberately. Gen. Robert W. Cone, who runs the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, advocates integrating field artillery positions first — suggesting that allowing women into infantry positions will happen closer to 2016 than 2013.
Dempsey made a subtle argument that touched one of the most explosive issues the military faces: a spate of sexual harassment and sexual abuse cases, some of which have involved general officers. While Dempsey didn’t present gender integration as a panacea, he expected it to have an ameliorative effect on one of the military’s persistent sources of dishonor.
“When you have one part of the population that’s designated as warriors, and another part of the population that’s designated as something else, I think that disparity begins to establish a psychology that, in some cases, led to that environment,” he said. “The more we can treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.”
That won’t satisfy people who argue that treating people equally is not the military’s central function; winning wars is. Panetta has a response to that: “I fundamentally believe our military is more effective when success is not based solely on ability, on qualifications and on performance.” And it might take years to fully put that proposition to the test, but Panetta has in a big way staked his legacy at the Pentagon upon it.
Here's How the Military Will Finally Accept (Most) Women in Combat
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Here's How the Military Will Finally Accept (Most) Women in Combat
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Here's How the Military Will Finally Accept (Most) Women in Combat
