The Pentagon Is Closer to Deciding on Women in Combat

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter is expected to receive by October 31 a recommendation from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on opening combat arms positions to qualified women. This will give him two months to make a final determination on which, if any, military positions will remain exclusively the domain of men.

At a press conference on October 23, Carter declined to comment on a leaked brief detailing results of the US Marine Corps' yearlong assessment of combat arms units that include both men and women (or "gender-integrated units," to use the DoD's terminology), stating only that his decision on the matter will be "analytically based." He also noted that the decision goes beyond the issue of of fairness to female service members, because it relates to the military's overall ability to effectively staff an all-volunteer force.

"The more Americans that I can draw on, who can meet the standards — no change in standards here — but who can serve in the way that we need people to serve, the better off I am and our forces and my successors are," said Carter.

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The Marine Corps' experiment, which found that all-male units generally outperformed gender-integrated units, was criticized by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus in a September interview with NPR. Mabus suggested that the study was tainted by both confirmation bias and by a low bar for female participants to enter the study.

The experiment is just one source of information that Carter may use to make his final decision regarding whether any military positions will remain closed to women in 2016.

"The Secretary wants as much information as possible in making these decisions. The Secretary may choose to solicit input from any source he wishes, including Service secretaries, the Service chiefs, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," said a Defense Department spokeswoman in response to a VICE News inquiry.

Top Army and Marine Corps leaders have also commented on women in combat. On Oct. 1, Marine Commandant Gen. Robert Neller, addressing Marines at an assembly in Quantico, recalled female Marines who were killed in Iraq and stated that it was "personally insulting" to him to continue to debate the issue of women in combat.

Two weeks later, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was quoted as saying, "I don't know what the debate is." The comments from both service chiefs refer to the de facto reality of America's 21st-century wars, in which women serving in combat support roles -- in other words, jobs that are supposed to help out the guys doing the actual fighting -- have nonetheless found themselves in the line of fire on battlefields with no clear front lines.

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Other military officials have been reticent to comment on the matter since an October 2 memo from the Secretary of Defense sternly warned that until he made his decision, "further public discussion…is neither helpful nor prudent."

Since it's difficult at this point to argue that women have not actually been in combat, what's truly at stake here is the question of specific jobs: namely, whether positions in infantry, artillery, and the like should be opened to women.

"Formally, women were attached to, not assigned to units, in both the UK and American forces, but the fact is, by any normal sense, a person who is attached to an infantry unit for months on end, who is under fire, who fires their weapon — I don't know how you can describe that as anything else [than combat]," said Anthony King, a sociology professor at the University of Exeter who has written extensively on modern militaries. "It's semantics."

King called then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's decision to rescind the combat exclusion policy in January 2013 a ratification of what had already occurred during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If women are approved to enter infantry and special operations positions in 2016, the United States will become one of only a handful of countries without restrictions on women serving directly in ground combat units. The Canadian Armed Forces have the distinction of being the first Anglophone military to allow women to serve in all military roles: most restrictions were removed by 1989, with the submarine service being the last to accept women in 2000.

Getting the right standards in place for the Canadian Armed Forces was an important piece of the puzzle, according to Karen Davis, a defense scientist for Defense Research and Development Canada.

"It was pretty evident that if women didn't meet the exact same physical standards as their male counterparts, there was no chance they would ever be accepted," she said.

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Over the course of the first ten years of gender integration, some standards in Canada were adjusted — not, Davis said, because women couldn't meet the standards, but because the standards themselves were discovered to be arbitrary in some cases.

"They were changed to better reflect what was required to do the job," said Davis.

Canada's example suggests that the biggest effect of opening all military positions to women might not be what some misogynists may fear: huge numbers of women on the front lines. After a quarter of a century, women comprise only about 2.4 percent of Canada's combat arms forces. The end result may in fact be a further professionalization of the military itself, where the ability to perform to a validated standard becomes the only test of a soldier.

"It does absolutely do this reverse-engineering thing in terms of professionalism," said King. "It impels the armed forces to go through all their standards and ask, 'are they appropriate?' And 'are they too hard?' But here's the [other] thing [to ask], 'are they too easy?'"

In fact, even as the US military awaits Secretary Carter's final decision, the US Army announced that it's opening some 19,700 field artillery jobs to women, and the Marine Corps has already instituted gender-neutral physical standards for 29 of the most demanding occupational specialties.

New standards elsewhere in the military may not be far behind — and so perhaps the US military will finally help to redefine what it means to fight like a girl.

Follow Jacquelyn Bengfort on Twitter: @jacib

Photo via DVIDS