Women in Combat

Does a woman need to have combat experience in order for the country to accept a woman as president? Well I don’t know that answer, but what I do know is that it would help. There are several arguments raised against women in combat that in some ways parallel the arguments against a woman being the leader of the free world. As a female Armed Force member that has served in one capacity or another and listed as a GI (government issue) since 1991, I would like to reflect on the arguments against women in combat, namely - physical, psychological, and practical, so that I can summarize how women in combat would help a woman running for the presidential office.

To start I will elaborate on where the argument comes from and why I have the opinion that I do. First of all, I would like to tackle the “physical” argument against women in combat. “Women are the weaker sex, that is why there are no women in the NFL,” said Kathleen Parker on NPR, “that they weaken military effectiveness because they are generally weaker.” Kathleen is just like many others that place the microscope on the “weaker sex” and narrow women down to; half the upper body strength, lower aerobic capacity, prone to more stress fractures, an average of 5” shorter, along with that women are not equally geared for aggression (i.e. men have ten times the amount of testosterone in their bodies). At this point, I’m not going to bore you with fancy counter statistics, being this is my reflection paper, but rather a piece of my story. By all accounts, I am an average woman. I’m 5’6” tall, 160 pounds, not overly fast or strong, and I have lived an average life. If Kathleen Parker were right, then I would have weakened military effectiveness because of this, which is not the case.

During coed physical testing of over 400 airmen/cadets, I started out in the last flight of thirty and finished as one of the first dozen. The only variation on the course for the female was a wall had a second lower shelf for any girl that did not or could not scale the “male” wall, and the rest of the course was identical for both genders. First hand I got to see the value of my “average” nature as men struggled or fell into the water pits all around me. One time I was hanging onto very wet monkey bars trying to pass an extremely long water obstacle when two of these elite men with enormous upper body strength slipped off in front and behind me while I stayed the course and finished without incident. I’m not amazing physically, not even remotely, yet I was able to outmaneuver the majority of the men there that day. This wasn’t an exclusive physical test either. During emergency survival training, triage training, combat litter carry training, weapons training, siege defense training, and aircraft repair training, and many others, at no time did my physical “specs” prevent me from excelling against the majority of my male comrades. And, as far as combat, I saw a glimpse of what this would look like during siege defense training.

Many women in that combat exercise were just as aggressive as the men in defending the commander’s post and capturing the raiding militia. Even when our fort was under siege with automatic M-16’s firing all around, at no time was there a division between our women and our men in the noisy conflict. We worked as a team where our objective and thoughts were on our job plus the success of our unit, and not remotely on if the person you were fighting with had breasts or bulging biceps. I don’t believe that a soldier in combat thinks about gender. However, the argument continues to women lacking the strength to pull or move a fellow wounded combatant to safety, even when there are many cases of nurses doing that in Korea; or that women lack the strength to engage in hand to hand with a male opponent army, when the Vietcong women were extremely effective doing just that against our soldiers. I’m of the opinion that a unit is more effective with both genders presented within it.

Ultimately, I believe the military effectiveness was improved with my presence. Another example is when I transferred from Air Combat Command to Air Mobility Command during Desert Storm. They had a KC135 tanker that was not flight capable for over eight months, a time in which the entire male GAC squad had been not been able to repair it. The importance of this was that during a wartime situation, the planes break down more often due to extended uses. Even the loss of one air refueler is sorely missed in a day, none the less eight months. After only two hours of working on the plane, it was fixed and cleared for flight capability. Regardless of women’s physical weakness they are an asset to our military’s effectiveness, because it is not the “specs” that make a good soldier, but the desire to protect. Which leads me to the second and third argument, psychology and practicality.

These arguments haven’t been taken as far as they will before the end of sexual prejudism against women in combat, so I will just cover the current key elements and my rebuttal. When America suffered its first female POW (prisoner of war), she was asked to write a letter by her jailers. In her own words, her first thought was to code a message in it for her young daughter. Being that was her first priority, she was then considered psychologically unsuitable for the military or combat. I find this argument one of the weakest because every soldier thinks of those they love in those conditions, and nearly every soldier carries a letter in their pocket for their loved ones in the event that they give the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But this will not stop those against women in combat to make women appear weak when in truth their heart and desire to protect is what makes them so strong. Again this argument has been generalized in order to state that all woman, especially those with children, psychologically cannot handle being soldiers and therefore become unviable in the military. That pregnant women are unable to deploy and the units are less cohesive units due to love affairs. I like how Colonel Barbara Wilson USAF retired addressed women unable to deploy due to pregnancy, she said, “The reality is that yes some women were undeployable for reasons due to pregnancy – as were many more men undeployable for substance abuse, alcoholism, court martials, sports related injuries, off-duty fight related injuries and pending charges of domestic violence.” When it comes down to it, women are no less effective then men, and the asset they are to a unit is undeniable, even with love affairs. Every unit I’ve been in was tight and natural in their defense of one another, the way they pushed each other to do better, to calm down, to be decisive in their actions because it plays out on the entire unit was impressively cohesive.

If there is a job that requires a skill, then those with that skill and capacity should fill to the exclusion of those that can’t. And if we base our exclusion on gender, then we are going against our own constitution. Therefore, if a woman is inhibited from serving in our countries defense, then one would probably not be considered a contender as leader of the free world. Which is why women should be allowed to serve in combat as a necessary step in the progression of women's rights.