Rules limiting female GIs’ careers could change - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Rules limiting female GIs’ careers could change

Ten months after she graduated from West Point, 1st Lt. Maxine Gourley was in Afghanistan.

During numerous route-clearing missions in the dangerous Pech and Konar valleys, her engineer platoon was hit at least 30 times with direct-fire engagements, indirect fire or improvised explosive devices.

Most engagements were not the typical hit-it-and-get-it. The area was littered with the professional and well-armed Haqqani network, and firefights lasting more than 10 hours were not uncommon. As ground commander, she had to communicate with higher headquarters, call for indirect fire and maneuver her soldiers into defensive perimeters and to repel assaults.

“I was platoon leader of an all-male platoon and I had zero issues,” said Gourley, who served with the 161st Company, 27th Engineer Battalion, 20th Engineer Brigade, XVII Airborne Corps, and is soon to receive the Bronze Star. “No one ever questioned my authority, and I never questioned the way they looked to me as a leader.”

Despite her accomplishments and her West Point pedigree, under today’s rules Gourley will always be a second-class combatant.

While the Army has long encouraged soldiers to “be all that you can be,” it has institutionally prevented women from reaching new heights as it restricts the career fields in which they can serve — namely, the combat arms community and direct-contact units.

Those restrictions seem destined to change as military and congressional leaders give careful consideration to softening — if not eliminating — combat exclusion rules.

“I’m confident that this is an area that is going to change,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said during an April 7 visit to the U.S. Division Center Camp Liberty in Baghdad. “Time scale of the change, I have no idea.”

Congress in the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act re-quired the defense and service secretaries to review policies “to determine whether changes … are needed to ensure that female members have an equitable opportunity to compete and excel in the Armed Forces.” That report is due to Congress on April 15.

The Military Leadership Diversity Council and the Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Service in the past month have submitted reports that call for an end to combat exclusion rules.

The reports say these “unnecessary barriers” are detrimental to the careers of women serving in uniform, prevent deployed women from getting necessary combat training and keep capable and qualified women from contributing to the strength of these units.

Damaging careers

The Army opened most jobs to women more than a decade ago. But combat-exclusion policies still prohibit women from serving in certain tactical and operational career fields, such as infantry and armor. Today, 9 percent of Army and 8 percent of Marine Corps occupations are closed to women. In comparison, 6 percent of Navy, 1 percent of Air Force and no Coast Guard occupations are closed to women.

Women serving in the remaining career fields often lose key assignments because they can’t be assigned to the units or jobs most likely to see direct offensive ground combat. When this restriction is added to the mix, only 70 percent of Army positions and 62 percent of Marine Corps positions are open to women, according to the Military Leadership Diversity Commission’s March 15 report, “From Representation to Inclusion: Diversity Leadership for the 21st-Century Military.”

These lost opportunities have a lasting effect. Today, 80 percent of general officers come from the tactical and operational career fields that are closed to women. Just one female soldier was selected for brigadier general in 2010, out of 100 military officiers chosen in all the services. Only 24 of the Army’s 403 general officers — or 6 percent — are female, though women represent roughly 15 percent of the force.

And these effects are felt all the way down the chain of command.

“I know a lot of medics who are concerned about promotions,” said Spc. (p) Stacy Dickey, a line medic who recently returned from Afghanistan with a Combat Action Badge. “Combat time and experience play such a big part, and we’re being cut out of a lot of those opportunities. To me, that is pure discrimination.”

That was reflected in a DACOWITS report released March 23, 2010. The vast majority of 336 combat vets surveyed, 70 percent of them women, said the lack of combat experience will render them less competitive for advancement.

But most women who deploy encounter some measure of combat, and the rules governing their assignments haven’t kept up with an ever-evolving battlefield.

Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey told Army Times the service is looking to make changes in assignment policies, and pointed to forward support companies, maintenance companies and medics as examples.

“I think we should be able to have medics in an infantry battalion even though they’re not performing an infantry task,” he said. “That’s something that we’re trying to wrap our arms around, because we’ve got to make the policy choices up here and not leave it to the company commanders.”

Resistance to change

Army policy says women can’t be assigned to “direct combat” units below the brigade level that engage an enemy “with individual or crew-served weapons, while being exposed to direct enemy fire, a high probability of direct physical contact with the enemy’s personnel and a substantial risk of capture.”

Good luck enforcing that one in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Three-fourths of female participants in the 2010 DACOWITS study said they were exposed to the possibility of hostile action from a threat to self or unit and more than half received hostile fire.

In the 2007 Rand report, “Assessing the Assignment Policy for Army Women,” participants said current policy did not reflect the environment in Iraq.

“Those officers that understand the policy would say it’s not relevant,” a commander said. “But most would not understand it.”

More than 259,000 of the 2.2 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been women, said Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez. As of April 1, 758 have been wounded and 137 have been killed.

Still, opponents see this as no reason to fully integrate women in direct-combat units.

Opposition to changing the status quo is nothing new. The Army War College in 1925 published a study that said close association of blacks and whites in military organizations was detrimental to harmony and efficiency, and that blacks were inherently more cowardly than whites. Similar resistance laid the foundation of the recently canned “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Some question whether women are physically, mentally and emotionally competent to handle the rigors of “direct combat.”

Former Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway says women don’t want things to change.

“First of all, with regard to women in combat arms, I don’t think you will see a change because I don’t think our women want it to change,” he told the Military Leadership Diversity Commission in 2010. “There are certain demands of officers in a combat arms environment that our women see, recognize, appreciate, and say, ‘I couldn’t do that — in fact, I don’t want to do that because I don’t think it best prepares me for success if I am trying to do those things against the male population at lieutenant, captain, major and lieutenant colonel.’”

But his opinion is proving to be the exception, not the rule, among defense leaders.

“I’d be hard-pressed to say that any woman who serves in Afghanistan today or who served in Iraq over the last few years did so without facing the same risks of their male counterparts,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said Nov. 4 at the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Women and War Conference in Washington, D.C. “Time and time again, they show us that courage and leadership recognize no gender.”

With more than a decade of combat from which to draw, numerous studies have answered this question, and the short answer is: Yes, there are women who can hang.

“There will probably be fewer women that can do things that require a great deal of strength. That should not surprise anyone,” said Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, who leads Comprehensive Soldier Fitness. “But there is no evidence that women, especially women in the military, are less psychologically strong than men. And our global assessment, which we’ve been doing for the past year and a half, has shown no difference in that mental strength.”

Both the MLDC and DACOWITS reports are adamant that the military not lower qualification standards for combat arms positions as it eliminates the combat exclusion policy.

“Not every woman can fill every assignment, but neither can every man,” said DACOWITS member Nancy Duff Campbell. “That is why we need to ensure appropriate standards are applied.”

Cornum echoed that position, saying she is “absolutely Draconian about not lowering the standards.”

“If you don’t maintain the standards, then you set people up to fail,” she said. “It’s like letting someone who is not very smart into medical school. You set them up to fail, which is bad for the group they came out of, it’s bad for them personally, and it’s bad for the patients who get them. You can’t lower the standards and expect a good outcome.”

And many would challenge the idea that standards need to be lowered in the first place. The 2010 DACOWITS report found an “overwhelming majority” of participants felt women should be able to fill all roles in the military for which they are qualified. Military leaders also said a service member’s capabilities are a higher consideration than one’s gender when assigning personnel to combat jobs or missions. When asked what would be legitimate reasons for not allowing women to serve in combat roles, most participants cited “none.”

Tough enough

The MLDC report makes clear that “research evidence has not shown that women lack the physical ability to perform in combat roles or that gender integration has a negative effect on unit cohesion or other readiness factors. Research has also not revealed that women are necessarily more likely than men to develop mental health problems from combat exposure.”

Both “PTSD in Women Returning From Combat: Future Directions in Research and Service Delivery,” a 2008 study by the Society for Women’s Health Research, and “Women at War: Implications for Mental Health,” a 2011 study in the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, found that women in combat theaters were more likely develop post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of sexual assault by fellow soldiers than from combat exposure. In fact, men are slightly more likely than women to suffer PTSD as a result of sexual assault.

Women have proven over and over they have what it takes to get the job done.

From the likes of Margaret Corbin, who supplied cannon ammo to her husband and took his place when he was fatally wounded during the attack on Fort Washington in 1776, to “Doc” Dickey, the 148-pound medic who pulled a 230-pound soldier with 50 pounds of combat gear to safety following an IED attack, the physical fortitude of women has been shown time and again.

So has the courage of wo-men, such as Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, who received the Silver Star in Iraq in 2005, and Pfc. Monica Brown in Afghanistan in 2007. And the leadership of women, from Ann Simpson Davis, who braved enemy-occupied lands to deliver orders from Gen. George Washington, to Gourley today. And the mental fortitude of women, from Dr. Mary E. Walker, who was imprisoned as a Union spy and later became the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor, to Cornum, a prisoner of war in Desert Storm.

Gourley said a woman who doesn’t meet physical or moral standards will be detrimental to unit morale. But members of her unit said she is a good example of women who are soldiers first.

And that perspective is essential on both sides, Cornum said.

“It is hugely important to identify with the activity, not the gender of the people who are participating in it,” she said. “If you want to be treated like an officer, then you have to act like an officer first, not a girl. … You not only have to act like the profession, not the gender, but you have to ensure everyone else treats you that way.”

The way ahead

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs sees women eventually leading forces.

“Let’s face it, when that day comes and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of 2040 looks at her leadership team, those of us who are still here will not want to have to answer the question, ‘What took you so long back in 2010?’” Mullen said in November.

DACOWITS member Campbell said the advisory committee is considering how best to implement such changes. It is drawing from lessons learned when women were assigned to combat ships, aviation units and submarines.

A likely scenario would see groups, rather than individual women, assigned to such units to provide mentorship for junior troops and equity for all.

The MLDC recommends that women should immediately be able to be assigned to any unit that requires their career field or specialty, but there should be a phased approach to open direct-combat career fields.

Cornum said she is confident the military services will take it in stride when it happens.

“I think that as long as women receive the same training and opportunities, you will see the same spectrum of performance that you see in men,” she said. “Some will be spectacular; some will be not very good; and most just be good, hard working, solid soldiers. And the percentage of each gender that fit those three things will be about the same.”