Women in the U.S. armed forces are already barred from serving in combat positions (except for female fighter pilots, IRRC). But, according to a story aired yesterday on All Things Considered, now Congress is talking about rolling back their role still further: A subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee has adopted an amendment that would bar women from serving in forward support companies that work with combat battalions: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4652910
What’s the thinking behind this? If we’re going to let women serve at all, is it unfair (to either sex) to put their lives at risk?
My wild-ass speculation is fear of POW abuse + fears that our captured servicemen/women will get abused, as “payback” for our recent slate of high-profile scandals.
This is specious. A quick look* at the list of allied servicemembers that have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that many of the US women killed were not members of forward-support companies. I realize they voted this way to prevent women from being captured, not killed, but if you’re close enough to the action to get yourself on one casualty list, you could just as easily end up on the other.
Of course, such logic is not enough to prevent this policy from being implemented.
*by someone who knows what a forward-support company is, of course.
I think this is a slap in the face to all the brave women who have served in Iraq. Dozens of women have died and hundreds injured in service to their county only to be told they should go back to the kitchen. This rolls back the role women have been performing since the war began and even the Army is opposed to it because it forces them to break up units already together. This is payback to conservative politicians who don’t want women in the service in any capacity except the traditional roles.
If any one thinks women cannot perform in combat conditions I suggest you read this after action combat report about a recent ambush in Iraq with female MPs in an infantry like role.
That’s exactly the point. As it stands, female MPs are only excluded from certain platoons (3 out of 6, IIRC) within a divisional MP company. Most MP companies are assigned to a brigade that reports at the corps level (one step above a division). None of these corps companies are gender-restricted.
Right now, most of the actions by US units are of the type most traditionally associated with Military Police operations. Many other types of units are being pressed into service in these operations but in my day, we were the experts at urban combat. Only MPs and infantrymen got any serious formal MOS training in urban warfare back then. With the MP school now being co-located with the Engineer school, combat engineers may also be getting some. In any event, MOUT training is not emphasized in Armor, Cavalry, or Artillery training, let alone the schools for truck drivers or supply clerks.
Removing women from MP units would be disastrous for strength levels in one of the Army’s most critical specialties.
How likely would such an amendment be to survive the legislative process? I’m sure the actual brass in the services would, if allowed to speak frankly, tell the Congressmen that removing women from hot zones would put an unacceptable proportion of our field-support units in an understrength situation – and you can’t just yank a random male finance clerk from behind a desk and shove him into a billet in a field unit, then you now need one of the trained, experienced people to mother-hen him until he catches up, you degraded your effectiveness anyway.
In the Jessica Lynch incident, the whole unit was undergunned and undertrained and were easy prey for an ambush. Had they been all male the same thing would have happened. Oh, but it’s OK if a male gets maimed, abused, tortured, maybe even buggered while in captivity? Then you have at the opposite end the action linked by Icerigger – good training, good leadership, and the right tools for the job.
