Women In Combat

informedPress, August 14th, 2007

    Kathleen Parker published a column in the Washington Post entitled The Mother of All Blunders, which can be accessed at Townhall.com.  In this piece Kathleen champions an old theme, that women should not be allowed in combat roles in the military.  She is also working on a book about this same topic.  After the op-ed in the Post blogs and news shows alike picked up this story and the debate became furious.  Kathleen is very well read on this subject and she puts forth her case eloquently.  It is important to note - as Kathleen does often in her interviews and explanations - that the proponents of her position are not making claims about women in the military et al .  Rather they feel that there are plenty of suitable roles in the military for women.  This issue is very divisive and most people have strong and well set opinions that fall clearly on one side of the debate or the other.  However one of our goals at informedPress is to "wage an epistemological war on the media" to quote my colleague.  This means that we feel it is our duty to analyze the reasoning and arguments in the media for truth and accuracy.  This means not just gathering solid statistics but also using sound arguments and valid reasoning.  For an argument to be valid the conclusion must follow logically from the premises, for it to be sound it must also be based on true premises.  To this end I will distilling and analyzing Kathleen and her supporter's positions to discover the arguments underlying their rhetoric.

    The arguments used break down into two basic categories.  The first centers on physical and psychological traits of men and women.  The second falls into the social and political realm.

    There is a truckload of statistical data to support that on average men have more muscle mass than women; men are taller, bigger, have more upper-body strength, etc.  Men have a larger natural supply of testosterone leading to more aggression, less inhibitions to violence etc.  Psychologically women are nurturing and caring; neither one of these traits are particularly useful on the battlefield.  Therefore on the front lines men will be better suited to fighting, killing and surviving than women.  Kathleen is insistent that she is only concerned with what is best for our military; what will make them more effective in battle.  Given the physical and psychological differences a group of men are more likely to survive than a mixed unit.  First the immediate thought that leaps to mind is: aren't these neat little pigeon holes we have been stuffed into?  Regardless of average physical stats one should reasonably expect to find in any given population some women who are big strong and fast and some men who are short slow and weak.  Each of these individuals can be explained by statistics, however each should be evaluated individually.  We have an all volunteer army and that means that the military has to make do with what they can get.  I am certainly opposed to watering down the standards we impose on new recruits - as we have unfortunately done in the case of women in our current military - that being said if any recruit is strong enough and fit enough to pass the tests we have imposed then of what consequence is their gender?  I have recently heard that women comprise only 15% of our armed forces, but that 15% is significant!  Even if very few of those women are currently in combat positions do we want to exclude anyone who is fit to serve?  Given man-power (no pun intended) shortages in today's military we should be proud to incorporate anyone willing to take arms in service of our nation.  Basically average physical differences are irrelevant in the face of individual evaluations and to confuse the two is simply bad reasoning.
    In addition to this confusion of reasoning we should consider the average physical traits that speak to women's fitness to serve in combat roles.  Specifically on average women make better marksmen then men, this makes them significantly better snipers.  The Russian's and Vietnamese found this out to their benefit and heavily utilized women as snipers.  Women also make better pilots than men.  Ironically it is some of the same physical traits that Kathleen uses to rule them out of combat that make them such good fliers.  They have less muscle and bone mass than comparable men making it easier to fit in to cockpits.  Women also tend to have better hand-eye coordination and reaction times making them more effective as fighter pilots.  While neither of these two roles are standard infantry they illuminate an important difficulty in excluding women from "combat roles".  How does one define what a combat role is in modern warfare.  Taking only Iraq as an example highlights this, many people have been kidnapped or killed who were not in forward combat positions at all.  Snipers face a larger than average risk of being killed or captured behind enemy lines because they usually operate alone or with only one spotter.  Pilots in a conventional war often have drastically shorter life expectancies than their infantry counterparts.  If the argument is that women should be excluded from infantry positions only then what criteria is being used to defend this position?

    On the social and political front opponents of women in combat claim that there is a significant negative effect on soldiers morale to have a female compatriot shot next to them as compared to loosing a male compatriot.  Additionally there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence from current and former military personnel testifying to their disagreement with women serving in combat.  Kathleen sites - in her NPR interview - several Israeli soldiers telling of the trauma they suffered seeing women killed in combat.  These soldiers felt that the death of these women was far worse than the death of their male soldiers.  Kathleen also writes of the degradation of our society if we find it acceptable to send our women off to be raped.  All of these stories - and in fact most of the visceral reactions to this issue - stem from the role women have in society.  In western societies men are taught to cherish women, to protect them and above all to not harm them.  Going back all the way to the ideals of chivalry in medieval Europe, men have been ingrained to treat women in a certain way.  Not just to treat them in this way but to react more strongly when women are subjected to violence.  It is certainly true personally it would affect me more to see a women killed than a man.  However does this mean that women are unfit to serve in combat?  Or instead perhaps our society has programed us fell stronger empathy for women  I believe that it is clear that the later does not imply the former.  That means that simply because we have some centuries of tradition prompting us to act a certain way, or feel a certain way in no way requires women to actually fit those stereotypes.  Our society encountered these same themes when women fought for the right to vote, and then again when they fought for equal protections in the workplace.  How many executives 75 years ago thought to themselves, "There are plenty of good roles for women in my company just not in upper management."  I am not suggesting that the military be held to the same standards of equality as corporations.  However is our unwillingness to allow women in combat a symptom of the way we view women; or are they really unfit to fight and die in combat.  For an answer to that we can turn to historical societies who had different socialized roles.  In ancient Sparta women and men trained alongside one another, they also competed together in the Olympic Games.  According to historical evidence these Spartan women often beat the best men from other nations.  When villages were threatened women would fight just as fiercely to protect their families and there is not much evidence that the negative psychological effect of these female deaths on the men caused Sparta to suffer.  In more recent years the United States has found itself fighting against women and men together.  In Vietnam many units of the NVK were of mixed gender - in fact the Marxist government required equality among the sexes - and these men and women killed and died in one of the most brutal wars that part of the world had seen.  It is scary to think of changing our social view of women and perhaps they shouldn't serve in combat until those social views have changed.  However to use the very socialized psychology to illustrate the unfitness of women to fight is a circular argument from which there is no escape.

There may be many good arguments for and against the idea of women serving in combat, however I find the arguments in this current debate to be less than convincing.  Lets hope that Kathleen can come up with something more convincing for her book length attempt at the same topic.  In the end we have to face the realities of our War on Terror.  With military recruiting attempting to keep pace with troop deployment we may need to accept the fact that our military make-up will change.  One clear alternative is to reinstate the draft, although this carries its own socio-political perils.  Interestingly in a recent Democratic Presidential debate the candidates overwhelmingly supported the idea that women should be subject to the Selective Service Act.  So even reinstating the draft may result in women in combat situations.  Regardless of these hypotheticals , the burden of proof is once again on Kathleen Parker and her allies to put forward a convincing case against combat service for women.