[demecleze]

You can't place women in the military without possibly exposing them to combat. The more support jobs they have the greater the chance of combat.

You may restrict them from being in combat units whose primary function is direct contact with the enemy (kind of fuzzy I guess). This will REDUCE the number exposed to said combat (as in Iraq with a relatively low proportion being KIA as compared to men).

It must be also kept in mind that mobile warfare seeks to attack the support units with flanking and exploitation of armored penetrations. If the US is ever up against a nice worthy stand a fight like a man foe (like the Germans in WWII), there may be catastrophic casualties in support units.

And of course during an insurgency the rebels are looking for relatively soft targets and probably go after support units as often as they can.

To me it is about semantics. And talking from both sides of the mouth.

[DMZFrank]

One of the problems in assesing the impact of this issue vis-a-vis the Iraq war is the fact that we handily defeated them initialy with the forces that were already in place in the invasion phase. Due to a combination of the skill of our superbly trained, equipped, motivated soldiers; and the ineptitude of our enemy (but they are getting better) our casualty rate has been thankfully far lower than we should have been reasonably able to expect given historical precedents. Notwithstanding this the question must be asked as to what would happen should we face an enemy that could inflict the sort of casualties on us has was the case during the fighting in northwest Europe in WWII? The United States Army was forced to comb out military personnel who had been assigned to the Army Specialized Training program as technical personnel (aircrew, radar operators, etc) and convert them to infantry to replace the staggering losses. Since 14% of the Army is not deployable to such duty (women) this does not bode well for such an eventuality.