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Posted by on Jan 24, 2013 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

Women in Combat

 

By now, you’ve probably heard that the U.S. military is taking steps to open up ground combat positions for women servicemembers. I’d just like to point out that the rest of the DoD is lagging behind the USAF by 20 years on this one. (That’s right, I just linked to Fox News. What of it?) When I was still active duty, I served with women who fully expected to fly into combat. Badass women like my classmate Esther, who if I’m not much mistaken became the first woman ever to have to punch out of an F-16 back in 1999.

I don’t know what college bull-sessions are like at a civilian university, but at the service academies they would occasionally involve lengthy discussions about the role of women in combat. The general consensus was that women should be allowed to do everything that they are able to do, but there were a few regressives who put forward a sort of argument from chivalry, rooted in the notion that women are generally helpless and in need of male protection. More often than not the topic would drift into what sorts of things can happen to POW’s, and that’s when things got really dicey, for obvious reasons. The women that we talked to were generally annoyed by the idea that they should be considered any more fearful of sexual assault or sexual humiliation than men should be, in the context of combat.

The best picture I could find to prove that I was once in the USAF.

It’s weird to me how so many disparate discussions are ultimately grounded in the idea that women should be treated as especially fearful in situations where men aren’t. I’m tempted to relate this back to Phaedra Starling, but instead I’d like to take the chance to salute all the American women in uniform, and especially all those ground combat veterans who will now finally be treated as equals.

  • http://www.www.skepticink.com/incredulous Edward Clint

    People, and the rest of the branches of the military don’t count Air Force combat as combat. Not to dump on Army soldiers, because I worked with lots of terrific ones, but I actually heard “chair force” type jokes from a few soldiers, or similar ones to the effect of the “cushiness” of the USAF. I even heard this from soldiers who had never deployed while I have two tours in Iraq under my belt. /rant

    Anyway combat in the American psyche means small arms firefights with grounds troops, and the Air Force has no personnel specifically intended to be this sort of troop (except, I would argue, Security Forces which defend forward bases, and have included women for years).

    • http://www.skepticink.com/backgroundprobability/ Damion Reinhardt

      Yeah, yeah, heard it all before. Certainly, in my case it is quite accurate. I’ve never been exposed to more danger than the possibility of a badly-packed parachute.

      That said, getting lit up by Iraqi IADS week after week during ONW/OSW was surely no picnic.

  • Peter

    Canada crossed that bridge over two decades ago. And women have served with distinction in combat roles ever since most recently in Afghanistan.

  • http://www.facebook.com/brian.curtis.3994 Brian Curtis

    Predictably, most of the opposition to this change has come from far-right conservatives, who loudly worry that the armed forces are ‘lowering their standards in the name of political correctness.’ They cite the concern that women won’t be able to march 20 miles with an 80-pound pack and full body armor as combat soldiers do all day, every day (allegedly), etc.

    Of course, they overlook that there is both screening and training for those very tasks, which involve both strength AND endurance.

    What’s even more interesting is the sudden hand-wringing about the picture of “putting OUR DAUGHTERS in harm’s way.” Apparently sacrificing -sons- wasn’t a big deal, but this? This is going Too Darn Far.