Panetta formally lifts women-in-battle ban

Policy will now reflect reality, he states

Army Lt. Col. Tamatha Patterson of Huntingdon, Tenn., waits Thursday at the Pentagon for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to hand her the memorandum he had just signed that ends the 1994 ban on women serving in combat.

Army Lt. Col. Tamatha Patterson of Huntingdon, Tenn., waits Thursday at the Pentagon for Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to hand her the memorandum he had just signed that ends the 1994 ban on women serving in combat.

Friday, January 25, 2013

— Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday formally lifted the military’s ban on women in combat, saying that not every woman would become a combat soldier but that every woman deserved the chance to try.

photo

AP

Capt. Sara Rodriguez, 26, of the 101st Airborne Division, helps carry a litter with sandbags during training last spring at Fort Campbell, Ky. The end of the ban on women in combat is expected to affect hundreds of thousands of front-line positions.

They said the new policy is in many ways an affirmation of what is already occurring on the battlefield, where women have found themselves in combat over the past decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that it is essential that the military offer fully equal opportunities to women and men.

“They’re fighting and dying together, and the time has come for our policies to reflect that reality,” Panetta said at a packed Pentagon news conference.

Dempsey, like Panetta,said his views have evolved as he has encountered women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he first got to Baghdad in 2003 as a division commander, he said, he got into a humvee for his first trip out of his base.

“I asked the driver, you know, who he was and where he was from, and I slapped the turret gunner on the leg, and I said, ‘Who are you?’” Dempsey recalled. “And she leaned down and said, ‘ I’m Amanda.’ And I said, ‘Oh, OK. So a female turret gunner is protecting a division commander.’”

Panetta and Dempsey said they had worked together on lifting the ban for more than a year and had regularly briefed President Barack Obama on developments. They described him as highly supportive of the decision but not intimately involved in the process.

“Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger, with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love,” Obama said in a written statement.

In December, Pentagon officials said, Panetta and the Joint Chiefs reached a tentative agreement that women should be permitted in combat. Panetta thought about it over the holidays and returned early this month to receive a letter dated Jan. 9 from Dempsey strongly recommending the change.

In the most vocal official opposition to the changes, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is to become the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, warned that some in Congress may seek legislation to limit the combat jobs open to women.

“I want everyone to know that the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which I am the ranking member, will have a period to provide oversight and review,” Inhofe said in a statement. “During that time, if necessary, we will be able to introduce legislation to stop any changes we believe to be detrimental to our fighting forces and their capabilities. I suspect there will be cases where legislation becomes necessary.”

Pentagon officials said the different services will have until May 15 to submit their plans for carrying out the new policy, but it wanted to move as quickly as possible to open up combat positions to women. Military officials said there are more than 200,000 jobs now potentially open to women in specialties such as infantry, armor, artillery and elite special-operations commando units like the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers.

If a branch of service determines that a specialty should not be open to women, Pentagon officials said, representatives of the service would have to make the case to the defense secretary by January 2016.

Officials said repeatedly that they would not lower the physical standards for women in rigorous combat jobs like the infantry, but they said they would review standards for all the military specialties in coming months and potentially change them to keep up with, for example, advances in equipment and weaponry. Marine officials also said they will look at changes in the initial physical standards that recruits have to meet before they are sent off to boot camp.

At a Pentagon briefing about the changes, reporters asked several times about two women who entered the Marines’ rigorous Infantry Officer Course in Quantico, Va., last year as an experiment, since neither at the time would have been allowed to serve in the infantry. One woman dropped out on the first day, and the other withdrew later because of physical ailments, including stress fractures. Many men fail the course, as well. Marine officials said they are determined to open up jobs to women as long as the women qualify for them.

Pentagon officials and military officers said it remains unclear how many women will apply to join the elite commando and counter terrorism forces, and some of those combat jobs might be proposed for exclusion. A high percentage of men fail to make the cut for those units.

Army leaders said an important initiative would be to create a cohort of female officers and noncommissioned officers who could provide leadership in combat units that would be accepting female soldiers for the first time. Policies may have to change to allow those officers to move from one military specialty to another.

The Army also has conducted studies on the psychological, cultural and social aspects of integrating women into units that have long been male-only. Those studies are expected to guide how the ground forces alter their base housing, training and deployment infrastructure.

Dempsey suggested that eliminating the ban on women in some combat roles could help with the ongoing sexual-assault and harassment problems in the military.

“When you have one part of the population that is designated as warriors and another part that’s designated as something else, I think that disparity begins to establish a psychology that in some cases led to that environment,” said Dempsey. “I have to believe, the more we can treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.”

Troops asked about the change said they just want comrades who can do the job.

“This gives us more people to work with,” said Sgt. Jeremy Grayson, assigned to field infantry at Fort Bliss, Texas. “But they would have to be able to do the physical stuff that men do. Like in some jobs in infantry you’re out there for a long time, or in artillery there is heavy work. And they have to be able to pull their own weight.”

Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch called the change good news for the U.S. military and said women have long been integral to victories in the fight for freedom.

The West Virginia resident was 19 when she was captured after her Army unit took a wrong turn and came under attack in Iraq in 2003. She was rescued after nine days in captivity.

Information for this article was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker of The New York Times; and by Lolita C. Baldor, Robert Burns, Julie Pace, Sagar Meghani and Juan Carlos Llorca of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/25/2013