Military

DATE=07/08/05

TYPE=English Programs Feature

NUMBER=7-39950

TITLE=Women in Combat Controversy

BYLINE=Andrew Baroch

TELEPHONE=619-0929

DATELINE=Washington

EDITOR=Rob Sivak

CONTENT=

INTRO: The U.S. military's ban on women in ground combat is being severely tested in the Iraq War. Female troops in Iraq see far more combat than in prior U.S. conflicts. And while the Pentagon's decade-old prohibition remains in place -- as VOA's Andrew Baroch reports -- policy is colliding with the reality of urban, guerrilla war.

TEXT: U.S. women soldiers in Iraq have performed heroic rescue missions, dragging wounded male colleagues to safety, in the middle of -- and while returning -- enemy fire. At least 35 female troops have died and hundreds have been injured in terrorist attacks and other fighting.

In some units, they serve as military police. In others, women guard truck convoys with machine guns.

Lory Manning is a specialist on military affairs for the Women's Research and Education Institute, a women's advocacy group in Washington, D.C. She says that U.S. female soldiers have shown that -- if permitted -- they can fight as well as men.

DALET CUT ONE - MANNING

What we have seen in Iraq is actual women in actual combat-type situations, which in the U.S. at least, we haven't seen much of before. The women are handling themselves. In the old days, in the Gulf War even, they [women] were there, but they couldn't shoot back [according to U.S. military policy]. Women are shooting back now. The women over there now, based on the early experience in Iraq, have been trained to defend themselves, to defend their units.

TEXT: A total of about eleven-thousand female troops serve in the Army and Marine Corps in Iraq for six-month tours. While the other branches of the U.S. military - the Air Force and Navy -- have assigned women to combat missions since the early 1990's, that's not the case with the Army and the Marines.

These services ban women from ground combat missions. Specifically, their regulations prohibit women from .direct ground combat, which is defined as engaging the enemy with weapons while being exposed to direct enemy fire and a high probability of direct physical contact.

Lory Manning explains that women serving with U.S. ground forces in Iraq are trained to fight but placed in non-combat assignments. They are doctors, nurses, engineers, truck drivers, and serve other exclusively support positions.

DALET CUT TWO - MANNING

When we talk about women in combat over there, they're not in offensive, aggressive combat - but they're in defensive combat. When they're in a motorcade that's attacked, they know how to drive a truck defensively, they know how to handle their weapons. They know how to throw a grenade. [And] they're not just junior women. These women have been battalion commanders -- command sergeant majors over there -- through the whole chain of command. They're in all sorts of combat support jobs -- short of actual infantry, armor and Special Forces, themselves -- in a way they never, ever, were before.

TETXT: Army and Marine Corps regulations also ban women support personnel from co-locating, a military term that means moving support troops into a possible combat zone. But in some cases, there has been co-location - at times, simply because of the lack of demarcation lines in an urban guerrilla war.

Lory Manning -- with the Women's Research and Education Institute:

DALET CUT THREE - MANNING

I would do away with the co-location policy and allow women, who are combat support people, to co-locate with infantry, armor, whatever, and I would wait to see how that goes.

TEXT: Not everyone is ready to change the rules barring women from battle zones. Elaine Donnelly is the president of a conservative women's group called the Center for Military Readiness based in Livonia, Michigan.

DALET CUT FOUR - DONNELLY

Those regulations remain and they should. I think we need to be very clear as a nation exactly what will face young women if they decide to go into the armed forces.

TEXT: Elaine Donnelly served on a Presidential commission in 1992 that recommended against deploying women in combat. She says there are several key reasons why the policy makes sense.

DALET CUT FIVE -- DONNELLY

Because of physical disparities, women do not have an equal opportunity to survive or help a fellow soldier to survive, direct ground combat. There were other reasons as well. The dynamics of sexual relationships, unit cohesion, deployability, and pregnancy -- all of these issues were part of it. But the primary reason the presidential commission voted against the use of women in land combat had to do with our cultural sensitivities, and it was very simple: 'Do we as a nation want to subject our female soldiers to deliberate combat violence at the hands of the enemy?' We in the majority [of the commission] said no. There is no military or demographic reason to do that. We should not do that. And that's why we voted against the use of women in land combat.

TEXT: But the commission's findings are outdated, says Lory Manning of the Women's Research and Education Institute. She says today, unlike the 1990s, the Pentagon relies heavily on the presence of women ground forces in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.

DALET CUT SIX - MANNING

The fact that you have 11-thousand there means there were another 11-thousand there six months ago, and another 11-thousand before that. There are 210-thousand women on active duty today and another 147-thousand in the reserves.

TEXT: Pentagon officials apparently want to keep their options open on the question of the role of women in ground combat. Some members of the U.S. House of Representatives recently introduced a measure to codify the ban. The Pentagon opposed the measure, and it was withdrawn from House consideration. Some experts believe that with military recruitment proving more difficult because of the war in Iraq, and with a military draft ruled out by President Bush, the Pentagon might be compelled to ease or end its ban on putting women soldiers on the front lines.

(SIGNED)Ab/rms