American Women Are Signing Up for Combat in Unexpected NumbersWomen have qualified for combat jobs at double the rate U.S. Army officials expected, but their future is uncertainby KEVIN KNODELL
“I have to admit that there was a time when I was on the other side of the argument,” Rachel Washburn said. “I thought, like maybe full integration isn’t what’s best.”
In college, she was a Philadelphia Eagles cheerleader before she commissioned as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. She’s hardly the traditional archetype of an American warfighter.
However, when the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command launched a program to attach women to special operations units as members of “cultural support teams” to help with intelligence gathering, Washburn felt called to at least try.
“Even though I wanted to go in and I wanted to be close to combat, and I was obviously felt called to do something like the cultural support mission — or maybe if things had been different I would have branched infantry—[but with] the politics of integration, I was kind of hesitant about what does integration really look like?” she explained.
“[Then] I got on a team and saw how much value added there is to harnessing all sorts of talent regardless of gender.”
During Washburn’s first deployment as a junior officer, she was attached to a small U.S. Army Special Forces team doing when the Pentagon called “village stability operations.” She lived in a small mud compound and helped gather intelligence and track insurgents.
Along the way she got in firefights with the Taliban and navigated Afghanistan’s rugged landscape. Sometimes she would be accompanied by just one fellow soldier or an Afghan interpreter. It was a high risk, high stress assignment — and it transformed her view of herself and what she could do.
“All those stereotypical arguments people have against integration, I saw them first hand debunked,” Washburn said.
“You have the hygiene concerns, you have men wanting to defend women, you have women falling out of very long movements, women not reacting properly to a firefight — I saw all of those things not manifest in the way people are worried about, and it just made me incredibly passionate for the need for women to have the ability to pursue any job they want to in the military.”
Washburn is a member of a unique generation of women in the U.S. military’s history. In 2016, the Pentagon officially opened all military jobs to female applicants as part of an initiative laid out by the Obama administration.
The shift followed the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy enacted under the Clinton administration. Those rules banned openly gay troops from joining or serving in the military. A separate rule — since repealed by Congress — criminalized consensual same-sex conduct within the military.
The integration process is already well underway. In December 2016, the Army reported that a higher number of women than expected had been joining and qualifying for ground combat jobs as both new recruits and transfers — double the number senior leaders had predicted. Many have already reported for duty at their units.
“The female attrition rate is lower or the same as men,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Hugh Van Roosen said. “These are women who are physically fit and absolutely prepared for this.”
In January 2017, the U.S. Marine Corps reported the first batch of female infantry Marines were arriving at their units at Camp Lejune, North Carolina, all of which had to meet the Corp’s new, tougher standards for combat units. Even though women are joining and succeeding at a higher rate than many military leaders predicted, it will still take time before full integration.
“Relatively small cohorts of female and male officers are currently being trained together and assigned to the same company as a way of gradually adjusting the culture in male-dominated units before female enlisted soldiers begin to graduate this summer,” an Army news release stated.
The prospect of full integration of women into ground combat jobs has evoked heated debate between those who argue it’s about equal opportunity and broadening the talent pool and those who argue it will threaten military readiness.
Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory cast some doubt on the potential future of a fully gender integrated force. Trump — a military high school graduate who got five draft deferments and once boasted that avoiding sexually transmitted infections was his “personal Vietnam” — suggested during the campaign that he might move to reinstate the military’s policy of combat exclusion.
As proponents of a gender integrated force prepare for a potential battle, a 2013 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the U.S. government brought by several female veterans challenging the policy of combat exclusion could find new relevance.
Despite the Obama administration’s move to integrate women, the ACLU never dropped the suit.
“Both the Combat Exclusion Policy and the order repealing it are at the discretion of the Department of Defense,” Colleen Farrell, a Marine who was among the women party to the suit, explained. “The new administration’s Secretary of Defense could re-impose the ban on women in combat.”
“Additionally, a Republican congress could legislate a ban,” she continued. “Until women are fully integrated in every service, our lawsuit will remain relevant.”
However, whether in official combat jobs or not, women have already been fighting for years.
Despite the official ban on women in ground combat units that was in place for most of the post-9/11 era, women were regularly in the line of fire in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is a military maxim — the enemy always gets a vote. The chaotic nature of counterinsurgency warfare doesn’t allow for cleanly delineated boundaries between “combat” and “non-combat.” There was — and is — always the potential for a fight.
In March 2005, a group of around 50 Iraqi insurgents ambushed a U.S. military convoy. Members of the Army’s 617th Military Police Company fought back.
One of the soldiers in the unit was then-23-year-old Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester. For her actions, which included killing three enemy insurgents, Hester received a Silver Star, the third highest award a soldier can receive for valor in combat.
In Iraq, American commanders regularly sent military police units — not technically combat units — on patrols and to advise and train local police. These jobs took the military cops “outside the wire” and into harm’s way. Some soldiers called them the “co-ed infantry.”
“It was that one job where you can get out there and get dirty and be in an infantry-type environment,” Hester later told The Tennessean. “I guess it was one of the more exciting jobs in the military for women when I enlisted and it still is now.”
But it was far from the only job that took women into battle.
Women took part in convoy operations down bomb infested roads, diffused bombs as members of explosive ordinance disposal teams, worked with local officials as members of civil affairs teams and went out into insurgent territory as human intelligence gatherers.
Each job was potentially fatal.
“I really found that the formative years for me were when I was a captain,” said Kate Germano, a Marine veteran who’s now the chief operating officer of the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group for women serving in uniform.
Germano is a combat veteran who served in Iraq and deployed on several emergency humanitarian operations during her time with the Marines.
“I would say that the Marine Corps is very, very good at putting differences aside when it needs to most and that’s what I take away,” Germano said. “My best memories are those types of bonding experiences with my peers.”
She said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally changed many of the discussions about the role of women in war.
“Women were operating in every MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] except for the ground combat jobs for the past 16 years, proving themselves more so than in any other combat environment in our history,” Germano explained. “It made it more difficult to defend women not being in combat.”
The questions for military professionals became less about whether women could endure combat. The conversation turned to how the military should deploy female troops in combat, and whether that meant incorporating women into traditionally male dominated fighting units.
For instance, the U.S. military had long included women on missions to help build trust among local populations, or if needed, to search local women for weapons or contraband. Over time, military leaders began creating specially trained teams of women that received extra combat training and were attached directly to combat units.
Cultural norms concerning relations between men and women are a complex matter in the Middle East and South Asia — where many of America’s recent wars have been fought. The Free Syrian Army at one time had more female combat leaders than the U.S. military. War Is Boring documented Kurdish women in combat in Iraq.
But many regions are much more conservative than others, and violating local norms can cause long lasting problems. For instance, a man putting his hands on a woman to search for weapons could be seen as an obscene violation.
Farrell, who followed her sister into the Marine Corps, originally trained as an air support control officer, akin to a military air traffic controller, but ultimately spent little time in the job. When she learned that newly formed Female Engagement Teams needed recruits for duty in Afghanistan, she jumped at the opportunity.
“I have always been an athlete and interested in the military,” Farrell explained. “I chose the Marine Corps because of the history and traditions, the discipline and physicality, and the esprit de corps.”
“As soon as I got to the fleet, I volunteered for the Female Engagement Team and spent a majority of the next three years training and deploying with the team,” she added. “All Marines want to fight at the tip of the spear, and the Female Engagement Team allowed me to do that.”
As part of these units, increasing numbers of women went on missions carrying the same equipment as men, sometimes for days at a time. Not all of the men were immediately on board with the idea.
When Washburn went to Afghanistan in a cultural support unit attached to an Army Special Forces team, she observed growing pains as the team’s male soldiers adjusted.
“We were the first females they’d ever worked with,” she said. “Frankly they weren’t sure how best to utilize us … we kind of had to win their hearts and minds first.”
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