PDA

View Full Version : Women's Roles in the Military



Jolie Rouge
05-19-2005, 07:05 PM
Panel's decision reheats women-in-combat debate
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Martha Kleder says she grit her teeth when she heard about Army Pvt. 1st Class Sam Huff of Tucson, who was killed last month in Iraq. A sentimental country ballad about a father and his daughter was played at the 18-year-old female military policy officer's funeral. "You don't play Butterfly Kisses at the funeral of a warrior," said Kleder, a policy analyst for Concerned Women for America, a conservative group.

But the rehab wards of military hospitals and the graves of national cemeteries are filling with such female warriors, which is one reason why Republicans in the House of Representatives tried earlier this week to limit the number of jobs women can hold in the Army.

Since the war in Iraq began, 34 female soldiers and Army civilian employees have been killed and 260 wounded. Women make up 15% of the Army.

The panel stopped short of clamping down on the military's ability to assign women to combat-support jobs and instead instructed the Pentagon to study the issue. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, says he raised the issue because of "incredible confusion" among Army leaders who he said misled Congress about where and in what roles women can serve.

In January, the Army sent to Iraq a reconfigured brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division that was smaller and more deployable than conventional units and which included 31 women in combat-support jobs. Hunter says Congress was left "out of the loop" on the deployment, the first of its kind. The committee's action "was a way of getting the Army's attention on this," he said.

The Pentagon study is part of a defense authorization bill and must still pass the full House. The Senate passed similar legislation without a parallel provision. The provision about women's roles in the military may not survive. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., says no changes in a 1994 policy about women in combat situations will be made before a Defense Department review is concluded in March. But he says conservatives were "concerned there will be some creep and some movement away from that policy" as the Army reorganizes into smaller, "modular" brigades.

Women's advocates and Democrats suspect they are seeing the opening salvo in a renewed cultural battle over the role of women in uniform. They are backed up by Army Lt. Gen. James Campbell, who says Hunter's original proposal would have closed nearly 22,000 positions now open to women. Currently, 9,400 women serve in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I'm concerned there's been a push to continue to roll back women's opportunities in the military and this is just part and parcel of that effort," says Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the liberal National Women's Law Center. "Women want to serve to their fullest capacity. This is sending a signal that the military isn't a place for you."

"Our generals didn't ask for this," said Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif. She worries about a slippery slope that could pull back women serving in Iraq as military police and interpreters and at checkpoints and in house-to-house searches in which they deal with Muslim women and children.

The debate about women's roles in the military isn't new. When Army flight surgeon Rhonda Cornum's helicopter was shot down in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, her ordeal as a prisoner of war helped spotlight the issue. Cornum, now a colonel, commands Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the first stop on the way home for wounded troops evacuated from Iraq.

A presidential commission cleared the way in 1994 for women to fly combat aircraft and serve on surface warships. Direct ground combat, including the infantry, armor, artillery and special operations units, as well as submarines, remained off-limits. The House panel's action would also turn the current policy into law.

Still, women serve nearly everywhere else on the ground, as fuel handlers, intelligence analysts, truck drivers and supply officers. And amid an insurgency like Iraq's, American troops don't need to carry an M-16 to be at risk. "The reality is that the Army is faced with an increasingly asymmetric battlefield without the distinction of a frontline," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. "The Army is restructuring its forces in a way that makes sense to meet this new challenge."

That has angered conservatives, who say the Army is skirting the policy at a time when recruiting is down 15% so far this year. "The Army has decided to play games in what it defines as combat," says Kleder, "because it is sucking wind for bodies to put into combat."

David Segal, a University of Maryland military sociologist, says the push to rein in women's roles comes as liberal groups are using their success in Afghanistan and Iraq to argue for opening even more jobs to them. But he also concedes that the Army is "acting within the letter of the law but probably not within the spirit of the law" by permanently assigning women to rear units while temporarily attaching them to combat units for up to a year. "It's a legal fiction that there's any difference, (but) the Army has been doing it for a while," he says.

Such a "loophole" is just the opening liberals want to bring down the remaining barriers that keep women out of ground combat jobs, says Elaine Donnelly of the conservative Center for Military Readiness based in Michigan. "If the Army gets away with this," she says, "they could make more changes."

Some military veterans don't side with conservatives on this issue. The current debate is "ludicrous," says Dan Christman, a retired Army lieutenant general who says Congress should defer to Army leaders. "The American people have moved beyond this."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-19-women-combat_x.htm?csp=24&RM_Exclude=Juno