WE KEEP hearing about how our new war on terrorism is going to be radically different from anything we've ever seen, that it's going to redefine modern warfare. If so much is going to change, then now is a good time to make a crucial change in our military: moving toward gender equity.
We will be hypocrites if the forces we send out to defend freedom and equality remain prejudiced against women. It is time to include women in the Selective Service registration for a national draft, which is the first step toward eliminating the blanket prohibition on ground combat positions for women. We should eliminate discriminatory policies that exclude women from certain positions based solely on their gender and not on their individual abilities.
I'm not suggesting that women and men have no differences, or that there are not times and places when some women shouldn't be put in certain situations. But there are differences within any group of men, and there are situations that certain men shouldn't be in. Not all men, simply by virtue of being men, are suited for any and every position in the military. Decisions about which men are suited for which position often are made on a case-by-case basis; it should it be the same for women.
In 1993, Congress repealed all remaining statutory restrictions on assigning women to combat posts, and since then women have been able to serve as combat aviators and on non-submarine combat ships. Even now, there is no law preventing women from serving in ground combat or submarines; however, Department of Defense policy does.
Today, while women can serve in almost all positions in the Air Force and Navy, 38 percent of positions in the Marine Corps and 33 percent of positions in the Army are closed to women as a matter of national policy, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. Individual commanding officers do not have discretion about whether a given woman would do a better job than a given man. It's not even an option.
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Many traditional arguments against women serving in combat are legitimate concerns, but they're not reasons why women as a group are unfit to serve in any combat job; they're reasons why certain women wouldn't be good candidates for certain positions.
For instance, the most common argument is that women are physically weaker than men; therefore, military effectiveness would suffer if women were allowed in combat positions. Women wouldn't be as able to carry heavy equipment or to fight in hand-to-hand combat against stronger male opponents.
This logic is extremely weak. Many of the positions women are prohibited from serving in are not ones in which muscle mass translates to success. The Army uses a probability model to assess which units have a high likelihood of becoming engaged in "direct combat," which has a much broader definition than brute physical combat. Plus, the nature of warfare - as we have heard so frequently - is changing. Manual labor and hand-to-hand combat give way to counterintelligence, surveillance and technological and biological weapons.
Furthermore, the biological argument relies on broad generalizations - sure, women on average have lower levels of muscle strength than men do, on average. But some women are stronger than some men. Women who aren't strong enough for the physical demands of a certain job wouldn't be required to be assigned to such positions, but they could be. That assessment should be made based on individual characteristics, not the presence of a second X chromosome. We don't need a blanket prohibition from women in combat units to guard against this; we need more individually focused guidelines and decision-making.
Other lines of argument are similarly thin. They seek to justify the exclusion of all women from combat based on traits that some women have, and they refuse to apply the same rigorous standards to men.
If we commit our armed forces to defending our nation and its belief in freedom and liberty, those forces should reflect those values. We cannot continue to send a military out into the world that betrays the principle of equal opportunity - a value we place at the core of our national identity.
President Bush has decided to begin a new kind of war, to revise traditional models for military use. That has renewed the possibility of changing our military for the better by working against gender discrimination. If we truly believe in the values we claim to be going to war over, we must seize that opportunity.
(Bryan Maxwell's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bmaxwell@cavalierdaily.com.)
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