Women's Role in Combat Questioned

A little-known but controversial Pentagon agency that advises the government on issues affecting women in the military is being called into question, as the war against terrorism heightens the debate about women serving in combat.

The progressive organization that fought to place women closer to the front lines is criticized by some conservative women as advocating outdated feminism, and one Washington media report said conservative political appointees to the Defense Department are gunning for the civilian group.

At issue is the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, known as "DACOWITS." Founded in 1951 by then-Secretary of Defense George Marshall, the advisory committee consists of 31 civilian women and two men who make recommendations on the role of women in the services and on quality-of-life issues affecting military women. Among the changes that the committee helped bring about: the admission of women to the service academies and to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps.

In 1994, the Defense Department rescinded a longstanding policy known as the "Risk Rule," which had prohibited women from serving in military positions that might expose them to hostile fire or capture. With that change, urged by the advisory committee, thousands of new jobs opened up to women in the armed forces. They became bomber pilots, fighter pilots and sailors on combat ships-and combat is the fast track to military advancement. Today, the 200,094 women in the U.S. military comprise 14.7 percent of the 1,357,042 soldiers and sailors in the total force.

"As of 1994, 90 percent of all career fields were open to women," said Maj. James Cassella, a Defense Department spokesman. "It seems to be working well. For the Department of Defense, it's nothing new that women are flying combat missions over Afghanistan. That's unremarkable to us."

Yet Defense Department policy still prohibits women from being assigned to units that engage in "direct ground combat," such as infantry units. For a talented leader, infantry and direct ground are the route to the top.

In the final months of the Clinton administration, the Defense Advisory Committee made three controversial recommendations in an attempt to admit female soldiers and sailors to positions that some critics say are either completely unworkable, or just barely skirt the prohibition against women in direct ground combat.

Those recommendations included assigning women to submarines, to the crews of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, the large, tracked vehicles that launch rockets from the rear of combat areas and to the helicopter crews of Special Operations units, such as the Army Rangers.

Vickie McCall, chair of the Defense advisory committee on women, says the distinction between direct ground combat and combat support is already blurred. Women now pilot medical evacuation helicopters, Navy fighter jets and Army bombers that take them into life-threatening situations and could land them on the ground in a combat zone.

McCall was appointed to the Defense advisory committee in 1998 by then-Defense Secretary William Cohen. She became the committee's chair in November 1999. Her term ends in December. A licensed Utah real estate agent, she has been on the board of trustees for an aerospace museum and is past chair of the Ogden and Salt Lake Military Affairs Committee in Utah. She was also the first woman to have been appointed a Utah alcohol and beverage control commissioner.

McCall does not feel that opponents of the Defense Advisory Committee are targeting her personally, but says some vocal opponents get more of a public forum than the committee itself, which prefers not to get into public disputes with its critics.

"I have to say I'm somewhat frustrated," she said. "We focus on our work. We're not out launching a public relations campaign. There are those that would like to see us go away that do not understand our issues. We work for the Department of Defense; we focus on our mission."

Part of that mission, McCall pointed out, is to make military life better for all of its members by making it better for a specific group: military women. Women in the military are eager to serve their country to the fullest extent possible, willing to share difficult and dangerous tasks with their male counterparts and conscious that in many cases, their assignments already carry life-threatening risks, McCall and other Defense advisory committee supporters said.

"What we're saying is, 'Define direct combat,'"McCall added. "The lines are becoming amorphous. We've got women flying helicopters right now on search and rescue missions. We are not trying to get women into foxholes. Where it makes sense, we say, 'Why not give women the opportunities when we know they can do it?'"

So far, the recommendations remain just that: recommendations. The Army decided that Multiple Launch Rocket Systems fell under the definition of "direct ground combat" and similarly the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ruled out assigning women to special operations helicopters.

Submarines present another problem, according to the Navy: the cost and difficulty of retrofitting existing subs to accommodate women. The Defense advisory committee is now encouraging the Defense Department to consider ways that submarines on the drawing board could accommodate women, but no definite plan to integrate women and men on submarines has been announced.

Reaction to the Defense advisory committee recommendations illustrates why, in the words of one Defense Department spokesman, the group been a "lightning rod" that has attracted far more attention than other advisory groups.

Among the sharpest critics of the committee is Elaine Donnelly, a former committee member during the Reagan years who says the group is pushing an outdated feminist agenda.

"All of these things on the DACOWITS agenda are quite radical and are strongly opposed by military leaders who understand what combat is all about," said Donnelly, who now heads the Center for Military Readiness, a policy group on military personnel issues. "The majority of women in the military oppose being forced into combat, and yet DACOWITS continues to push for this agenda," she said in an interview.

Most women cannot perform equal to men in combat situations, Donnelly said, and women would be problematic on a submarine crew because if a submariner discovered she was pregnant during a mission, the mission would have to be disrupted while she returned to land.

The debate about these ideas heightened recently when Defense advisory committee supporters and critics alike noted an item in the Oct. 29 "Whispers" column of U.S. News and World Report. That item, attributed to an anonymous Defense Department official, suggested that Bush appointees to the Department of Defense are gunning for the group, by "planning to sideline the organization that fought to put women closer to the front lines."

Not so, said Defense Department spokesman Cassella. The Defense advisory committee has drawn criticism out of "confusion over the advisory nature of their role," Cassella said. The committee makes recommendations, not policy, and is "one of several sources of valued advice for the Secretary of Defense and the services," he said.

But some observers say the influence of the advisory committee was declining even before the Bush administration took over.

One is author Stephanie Gutmann, who studied the integration of women into the new military fields in the 1990s in her book, "The Kinder, Gentler Military: How Political Correctness Affects Our Ability to Win Wars," which was released in paperback in August.

"I think DACOWITS has been less important, marginalized, throughout the Clinton administration," she said. "If it gets any more marginalized, it will get in trouble. Often, the people that come in just don't have enough knowledge to start out with. Most of their short tenure is spent getting up to speed. I could see that it could work; I don't think it's working now."

Supporters of the advisory committee say it still has a vital role and that critics mistakenly think the group's sole focus is pushing for women to gain access to jobs now rated as combat positions.

Many changes that have improved the lives of military women came about because the advisory committee simply initiated a discussion with commanders or Pentagon officials and raised questions about a previously accepted practice or policy, said Barbara Glacel, vice chair of the group's equality management subcommittee.

"I'll tell you what often happens--we ask questions that affect their comfort level, so sometimes we don't even have to get to the recommendation stage," Glacel said. "The way Elaine Donnelly describes us is as a bunch of bra-burning feminists who would sacrifice the mission to get the woman in, and that's not true."

Marene Allison, vice chair of the advisory group's forces development and utilization committee, also sees the civilian organization as providing a service that goes beyond the attention-getting recommendations.

Allison graduated from West Point in 1980 in the first class to include women and pursued a career as a military police officer until she felt that too many obstacles were blocking her career advancement. Then she worked as an FBI agent for six years before becoming head of security for the A&P grocery store chain. Today, she is vice president for business initiatives at A&P.

As for Donnelly's argument that a pregnant submariner could disrupt a mission, Allison points out that a male submariner who had a heart attack or developed prostate cancer would also have to be returned to home port.

She predicts that women will eventually serve in full combat positions. Many already hold command positions in the military that were unthinkable when she entered West Point in 1976. She cites a woman classmate who is now a full colonel and a brigade commander of a helicopter field aviation unit in Korea.

These women owe at least part of their progress to the Defense advisory committee, she said. "I have to tell you, if there wasn't a DACOWITS, women probably wouldn't have gone into the service academies, they wouldn't be on fighter aircraft, they wouldn't be pushing the envelope," she said. "We raise the consciousness."

..............................................................................................................

WHEREAS, during the Equal Rights Amendment fight, our opposition effectively fanned the flames of fear that women would be drafted and thrown into foxholes in some strange and distant country; and
WHEREAS, with women soldiers playing a more significant role in the Persian Gulf than ever before in our military history, we may have an unprecedented opportunity to bring to an end the long debate over whether women should be in combat, to expand career opportunities for women in the military and to remove what has been an overwhelming obstacle to women's equality and the Equal Rights Amendment; and
WHEREAS, exclusion of women from positions arbitrarily defined as "combat" is based on archaic ideas of what women and men are physically and emotionally capable of doing and outdated ideas of what modern military theory and combat are; and
WHEREAS, the definition of "combat" is ambiguous and varies from branch to branch; armed conflicts since World War II rarely involve readily definable front-lines, rear echelon units may be a 30 second missile flight from the so-called front-line, and in modern military theory rear support troops are destroyed first before assaulting those up front; and
WHEREAS, the combat exclusion does not protect women; 80-90% of the casualties in conflicts since World War II have been civilians and the majority have been women and children; women and children are subjected to violence every day on the streets and in our homes; rather than creating restrictions on women under the guise and illusion of protection, we would all be better protected by seeking diplomatic, economic and other non-violent ways to resolve international differences other than armed conflict; and
WHEREAS, the exclusion of women from combat in the modern military is a fraud only to perpetuate a second class status of women in the military; economically and educationally disadvantaged young women cannot use the armed services, which are the largest vocational training grounds in the U.S., in the same way young men can to help themselves; young men can join, get training, a possibility of pension and often veterans preferences in hiring when they leave the military; young women face higher entrance requirements and quotas limiting the numbers of women who get into the military -- and once they get in, women receive less training and fewer promotions; women are almost 11% of the military, but fill only .9% of the military's top 1000 officers' jobs and only about .8% of the top 15,000 senior enlisted positions; and
WHEREAS, the combat exclusion hurts our country's defense and foreign policy; women are effectively eliminated from most high ranking leadership positions in the military by being excluded from career enhancing, command positions defined as "combat"; and with women's perspective missing from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military policy bodies, our country's public policy is poorer; and
WHEREAS, all of us are better protected when those serving in the military are selected based on their individual strength and ability to do the job and not on an automatic presumption that all men and no women are qualified for the 50% of the military jobs defined as "combat";
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that NOW demands equality for women in joining the military and in training, job assignments and benefits in the military; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that NOW actively supports elimination of statutory restrictions on women in the military.

Does anyone who supports women in combat want to explain to me why the same people who see combat roles for women as just another career opportunity are exactly the same as the people who are against the US having a strong military?

I'll tell you why: Because the only thing Clinton accomplished by lifting the risk rule besides pandering to his feminazi mistresses was to weaken our military's capabilities and morale.

So to all of those who support ordering non-combatant women into the combat zone where they'll have a greater chance of being captured, tortured, and raped, I just have one thing to say to you: The baby-killers down at NOW would be SO proud of you!


How about the new highway named for Clinton in his home stste of Arkansas? It's a little crooked, and has a long yellow streak down the center. Be careful if you drive on it, it's a little slick. Manufacturers announced today that they will be stocking America's shelves this week with "Clinton Soup, to honor one of the nation's most distingushed men". It consists primariy of a weenie in hot water.
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DACOWITS ought be dissolved. Its role has never been other than subversive of good order and discipline in the armed forces. Along with bootin those pests the number of females in the armed forces ought be dramtically reduced. The presence of young women in any tactical formation is nothing but a standing inducement to indiscipline, cliqueishness and a whole litany of troubles which interfere with the mission of the unit. The armed forces are not the equivalent of any civilian entity and the prescence of large nubers of females in them has done nothing good and a great deal of evil. The armed services could make up for female presence by concentrating recruiting in high unemployment areas where traditional culture is still strong, rural Texas and what uesd to be the Penn-Ohio steel belt for two and by returning emphasis on soldiers being soldiers once again. The recent excellent performance by combat arms types in Iraq was not due to the current culture in the armed forces but in spite of it.

"Women now pilot medical evacuation helicopters, Navy fighter jets and Army bombers that take them into life-threatening situations and could land them on the ground in a combat zone."

I thought the Army's only fixed wing aircraft were C-23 and C-12's

"...if a submariner discovered she was pregnant during a mission, the mission would have to be disrupted while she returned to land."

That would be nothing new. It happens on surface ships all the time when some young E-2 doesn't want to deploy.
"I luv Petty Officer Johnny and, oops, I forgot to take my pill. When do I get that chopper ride home?"
Or if before deployment, "Will I be working at the base admin office?"

Or am I wrong? You recent sailors tell me. I saw back in the 80's when they first allowed women on support ships.

The outdated part of DACOWITS seems to me to be the 31 civilian women. With so many women vets these days, this should be changed to at least a 50-50 military-to-civilian ratio. Then at least half of the women making recommendations would know the realities of military life.

women belong back in as safe an area as possible
end of story
social experiments the femanist agenda or axes to grind have no place on the battlefield
the stakes are too high..other lives besides their own are at stake
not to mention the security of the rest of us
not that this has any importance compared to the needs of the dacowitches-wacoditzes of this world

I agree completely. Women do not belong on the battlefield. They do not belong in combat in any way. Their presence 1) puts the men in greater danger and 2) degrades the different roles of man and woman. I'm a firm believer that one of man's roles is as the protector of woman. A soldier can't be expected to both do his military job and protect the women soldiers around him. It's foolish and dangerous.

Submarines present another problem, according to the Navy: the cost and difficulty of retrofitting existing subs to accommodate women.

First question: what needs to retrofitted on a sub to support women?? They can go to the bathroom just like men, right? As far as sleeping arrangements, they would just have to hot-bunk like the men do. I really would like to hear someone else's ideas on this. I don't see any need to retrofit or redesign a sub. Don't women already do marine research in similar conditions?

...and women would be problematic on a submarine crew because if a submariner discovered she was pregnant during a mission, the mission would have to be disrupted while she returned to land.

That is not going to happen! We don't spend a billion dollars on a boat so it's mission can be disrupted by an unintended pregnancy. If a woman were to get pregnant, then she would just be stuck on the boat until it's mission is over. Period. Average mission length is 3 months, so again I don't see why she would have to leave immediately.

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