Tom Ricks’s article highlights the need to update our combat exclusion policy regarding women in combat.
For those women serving effectively on the front lines - like the FET teams, female military nurses, military police at checkpoints, intelligence HUMINT officers, or others operating in combat zones or supporting direct action combat units - we owe them the recognition of their willingness to answer the call to duty, and their excellence in serving in critical functions. Women want to be serving in many of these capacities, and we need them. Recall on a previous Ricks post that 200K women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, comprising 30% of our forces in those locations. When I was born in the early 70s, women comprised 1.8 percent of the military. Women now make up on 14% of the Army, 6% of the Marines, 16% of the Navy, 20% of the Air Force for a total of 14% over all Armed Services.
That figure has increased significantly over the past thirty-five years, but the proportional number of women in senior leadership positions has not.
The Department of Defense has traditionally excluded women from serving at the highest ranks of the Armed Services because of a lack of combat command experience, joint service, or special assignments. (GEN Ann Dunwoody recently broke through that brass ceiling.) Looking only at top-level military leadership (Generals/Admirals, Lt. Generals/Vice Admirals, Major Generals/Rear Admirals, and Brigidier Generals), women accounted for 6% of this group as of 2008. This is a gain of 2 percentage points since 2000, when women were 4% of top military leadership. Even with the optimistic assumption that women will continue to progress toward leadership at a constant rate, it will take nearly another century and a half for women to achieve parity with men at the highest levels of the armed forces. Why?

Under current DoD policy, women do not have the opportunity to serve in the combat arms branches: they will never be a rifle platoon leaders or an infantry brigade commander. These constraints do not acknowledge how broader engagement in full spectrum operations has created more opportunities for women to gain the combat experience that should allow for greater promotion rates to GO and senior leadership positions. At the level of crafting strategy and managing organizations – especially for units immersed in nation building, peacekeeping, or support and stabilization operations— we call upon many junior AND senior military women to use the same functional and leadership skills as male cohorts. We should change the law to reflect the reality on the ground.

One of my top-block Army female mentorees once told me, “I remember a female civilian professor at West Point saying she never wanted a daughter of hers to attend West Point or join the Army because she wanted her daughter to be part of organizations she could run.” Interesting thought.

It is wonderful that many of our senior leaders recognize the sacrifices and contributions these military women are making and promote and enable them when appropriate. I think that many Army and Marine men appreciate their sister warriors as well. COL (Ret) Pete Mansoor, LTC (Ret) John Nagl, and LTC David Fivecoat are a few I have on record in that regard. Opinionated thoughts aside, the FET teams are another great example of how women are serving as force multipliers as never before. The FET team success provides great evidence that a change to the combat exclusion policy is well overdue.

I wonder how the summary of FET teams' lessons learned in Afghanistan differs from similar studies about our experience in Iraq.

I wonder if this is a natural outgrowth of the Corps' Lioness Program started in Iraq?

Excellent follow-up Tom. I was one the the original resonders that urged caution. Sometimes it feels good to have been wrong!

I'll have to contact retired Colonel, Mrs. Sheryl Murray, Senior Executive Service to the Commandant and eat crow. :)

As a platoon leader in Mosul in the first half of the year, my most friendly (but not most successful) engagement occurred when I brought a long a HCT (Humint Collection Team) that included a female leader and female translator. They were able to get enthusiastic reactions from the women of the house, who they spoke to in an adjacent room, which also seemed to improve the attitude of the men I spoke to next door.

I never used them again, however. Both members of the team, male and female, were far too hostile and confrontational in one time interviews of Iraqi males on the street, falling too easily into the role they occupied when interviewing detainees in custody suspected of wrongdoing. Both were also disparaging to their female interpreter when she strayed a bit from what they wanted (she was pretty on point with what I wanted!), which didn't seem likely to help the cause of Iraqi women getting respect from their men. The downside was greater than the upside for the circumstances where I could use them.

My impression: female soldiers talking to female local nationals had a lot of merit, but they need to be focused on that task, and not bring baggage from other duties and world views along for the ride. The Marines sound like they're doing it right.

Ironically this advantage with the local populace might do more than surviving decades of conflicts in increasing the position of women in the military.

Women certainly are able to provide valuable contributions - just by virtue of being women - that men are often unable to make. The trick is to not read too much into this. I hope that we don't try to take these theater-specific and mission-specific anecdotes and turn them into justification for a sweeping policy change.

Well, count me as an obsolete dinosaur on the issue of women intentionally put in harms way. Women have a role in the military but it is not one of carrying an M4 on patrol with a combat unit. This policy is feel good political correctness, which no serving officer will criticize if he wants further promotion.

Since combat in our era is not exactly ‘Bloody Ridge’ on Guadalcanal or forcing ourselves ashore at Tarawa but rather insignificant skirmishing which in past wars would barely be mentioned in dispatches we have gotten away with such a silly policy with little cost. Women should be in support roles only not at the point of the spear.

Maybe an essential part of the Afghan campaign is to use more FETs who speak Afghan languages. So use more women, and train them in the Afghan languages. Language training can take place in the military or online on their own or in US high schools.

I notice a four-footed trooper in the middle of the pictured column. Rottie? MOS?

It occurs that dogs are something Afghans have used in both hunter and security role for millenia. The locals can learn to kick that to a new level in terms of explosives detection and drug/money interdiction, without US/NATO/ISI pumping more ordnance into the communities. No need to tear an innocent's hooch apart, if a beagle can do the scan with his nose.

Afghans and Iraqis have a need for mine detection the forseable future, whereas we're hoping to not to be trolling for those mines ASAP. Why not leave producing and training their K-9s and mine clearing in general to the local economy?

(The FET discussion is interesting. Hope to see more of it. My observation is that female presence can drive male behavior either way, moderating or exacerbating the testosterone thing. For US or the locals. )

...you'll be okay.

I think it is obvious to everyone that the strongest men will be superior fighters compared to the strongest women in a combat situation. Men are, on average, stronger, faster, bigger, and meaner.

But the military is a volunteer operation, and in it we may not always have the strongest man (though we may have the strongest woman). If women choose, as full adult citizens of our country, to join the armed forces and put themselves in harms way, it is our duty to put them to their best use in ensuring our protection.

This means using them where their special skills bear the most fruit- in the world of interpersonal relations. You don't need to care about people to shoot them, but you do need to care about them to cull information from them. Just as men, on average, are better at carrying, running, and killing, women are better at cultivating personal connection. This is especially important in a culture like Afghanistan's, where the military, primarily male, is cut off from half of the possible prospects for human intelligence.

The women who join our military are tougher than their civilian counterparts, much as their male brethren are tougher than theirs. She might not be able to carry the M60, but she can keep up, she can shoot a rifle, and she might just keep you alive.

Just feel like I have to bring the fact that Mr. Ricks has now come full circle from "A Soldier's Duty", where the presence of female soldiers in Afghanistan was described as being only inflammatory to the locals.

Thanks for bringing this approach up, maybe this is what will finally allow the US effort to diverge from the Russian and British efforts which have so infamously failed.

Americans will simply not have the guts to see an American woman tortured and abused as a POW. It would stop the war cold. Women may have advantages in the field, but the sight of a suffering woman will tear the heart out of the US public. Pictures of McCain in pain are heroic. I'd die seeing Hillary Clinton as a POW with broken bones.

I am intrigued by the N.B. at the bottom of the initial post: US military leaders are the main barrier to women in combat. Little is known about current senior leaders' attitudes toward women. We recently published an article in Military Psychology on up and coming Army leaders comparing them to civilians with like education on attitudes toward women in the military and combat specifically.

See Matthews, Michael D., Morten G. Ender, Janice Laurence, and David E. Rohall. (2009). “Role of group affiliation and gender attitudes toward women in the military,” Military Psychology, 21(2):241-251. Might be available at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g910066987

Bottom line, future officers (male) appear less accepting than their civilian counterparts of women's roles in the military. In fact, future male officers appear to have the same the attitude of the American public 30 years ago.

mge

For all the talk of leadership in the military, sometimes there is a significant lack of leadership. With all of the roles that women have and are fulfilling, the dinosaurs still want to put progress on hold. Like the old saying says...Lead, follow, or get out of the way...it is time for military leaders to give women in combat their deserved place...as equals...