If the military wants the best available troops fighting the nation’s wars, argue supporters of opening combat ranks to women, it can’t rule out half the population. 36 sec.).īut plenty of women are above average, and some are extraordinary. (Gender-specific physical standards acknowledge the fact: a 22-year-old male soldier has to run 2 miles in no more than 17 min. “There is a monumental difference between fitness,” a Marine major wrote in a 2013 study, “and fighting in a hand-to-hand match to the death.” Even advocates of opening combat to women concede that the average male military recruit is stronger and faster than the average female military recruit.
A tidy concept like fitness doesn’t touch the gory reality. “And women’s higher injury rates certainly don’t add strength to combat units,” she says.Īdvocates of preserving the status quo cite the life-and-death brutality of close-in combat–blood-spitting, skull-splitting fights with knives, rocks and bare hands.
A Marine study last summer reported that 13% of female Marines were injured in infantry training, compared with 2% for men. “Women don’t have the brute strength that’s needed in combat,” says Jude Eden, a woman who served as a Marine sergeant in Iraq for seven months in 20. Marine ground-combat units, which make up 25% of Marine slots, should remain all-male bastions, according to recommendations from corps officials. While the Army, which currently allows women in 82% of its jobs, is green-lighting all jobs for women so long as they can meet certain physical standards, the Marines are holding out, Pentagon officials say. But that has been a relatively easy choice compared with the decision to add women to the ranks of combat infantry in the Army and the Marines. The Air Force and Navy, which do little fighting on the ground, have already opened up 98% of their slots to women, and their uniformed leaders have approved going all the way. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is expected to decide in January if women should be permitted in all military roles, including the ones reserved until now for brothers–not sisters–in arms: the infantry grunts, those riding tanks and artillery into battle, and special operators. But in 2013 then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered a review of the physical demands of combat slots and any justification for the Pentagon’s policy that keeps women out of front-line combat billets. Women have been edging closer by serving in intelligence, logistics and other support roles. But when it comes to combat on the ground–generally the dirtiest and bloodiest jobs in any military, and a required ticket-punch for ground-force promotions–progress has been slow. They climbed into Air Force fighter-jet cockpits in 1993 and aboard Navy submarines in 2011. Women have been advancing toward the front lines for more than a generation. A generation ago, the possibility of women serving on the front lines seemed as unlikely as, well, a female President. military? That’s the historic question now pending inside the Pentagon. Good enough to be assigned to the toughest combat jobs in the U.S. “When the chips are down, a good soldier is a good soldier.” “It changed my opinion about where women ought to be in the fight,” he said. While she had come along on the mission in case female Iraqis needed to be searched, she proved capable of far more than that. But on that grim day in 2006, her commander didn’t care. The woman wasn’t an infantryman but an Army lab technician who spent most of her time spinning vials of blood back at the unit’s base, not trying to kill rooftop attackers 100 yards away. Completely phenomenal! She’s just f-cking awesome!” “As she’s dragging him back, she’s shooting one-handed with her M-16 toward the bad guys. “Getting in and out of the vehicle with all of your kit on is difficult enough on its own, especially if you add smoke, fire and the chaos of getting shot at, and bullets pinging off the outside of the armor, but she does it anyway,” he continued in an interview for an Army history project. “She pulls him out of this burning vehicle, which is amazing in itself,” her commander recalled.
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