Women in Combat: Reconsidering the Case Against the Deployment of Women in Combat-Support and Combat Units

Abstract

The issue of women serving in the military has repeatedly been subject to much debate and controversy. There are essentially two fundamentally opposing positions on the issue. One position holds that any form of exclusion of women in the military constitutes an act of discrimination or sexism, the sole objective of which is to irrationally defend a ‘man’s domain’.¹ The central intellectual flaw in this line of argumentation seems to be that it turns a point of fact into a point of motive. It tends to trivialize or even ignore the overwhelming biological and sociological evidence stacked against women gaining unlimited access to all facets of military life, while simultaneously alleging a discriminatory agenda on the part of those objecting. The opposing view holds that the full inclusion of women, particularly access to combat roles, results in force degradation and a general lowering of standards to the point where modern militaries largely stand to forfeit their sustained deploy-ability and war fighting capabilities. To substantiate this allegation, the case against women in combat-support or combat roles tends to emphasize biological and sociological limitations.

Although 97 per cent of US Army officer career fields and 83 per cent of enlisted occupations are open to women, women can serve in less than 70 per cent of the job slots because the remaining slots are in combat units or in units that collocate with combat units (GAO 1999: 30).