The Pentagon's decision to end its ban on women in combat is a triumph for equality and common sense. By opening infantry, artillery and other battlefield jobs to all qualified service members regardless of sex, the military is showing that categorical discrimination has no place in a society that honors fairness and equal opportunity.
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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who overturned the ban this week, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who unanimously urged him to do it, deserve praise for bringing military policy in line with reality. Women have been in the thick of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade. More than 280,000 have been deployed there, thousands have been injured and more than 150 killed. With the rule abolished, such service and sacrifice will no longer be unofficial and unrecognized.
It is encouraging that the push for change came from the top, from leaders who said integration was no bar to a stronger, better military. The Pentagon also was facing pressure from lawsuits, including one brought last November on behalf of four service women and the Service Women's Action Network, an advocacy group, claiming that gender-based discrimination was unconstitutional and unfairly harmed their careers.
One plaintiff, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar, an Air National Guard helicopter pilot who was shot down and wounded in Afghanistan, said she could not seek combat leadership positions because, in the Pentagon's view, she had not officially seen combat. Major Hegar is only one of untold thousands of women whose career paths have been sharply limited by that gap in their résumés.
When the new policy is fully in place, we hope many more women will apply for jobs that they wouldn't have considered, in certain schools, leadership courses and in those branches of service — namely the Army and Marine Corps — where their opportunities have been most proscribed. The result will be more diversity, from a deeper pool of talent, and thus a stronger, better military.
There will also be grumbling. When the news broke Wednesday afternoon, military news sites like Army Times and Marine Corps Times lit up with comments, some ranging from laughably sexist to reprehensible. "They shouldn't be bused in from the field every 3 days for a shower while the guys stay out for 45 days," said one commenter. "The castration of the U.S. Army continues," said another. "God help us all."
Some right-wing commentators rehashed false stereotypes that women couldn't hack it, and warned that women would be captured and raped and men would get shot trying to protect them instead of killing the enemy. These lurid hypotheticals deny the reality that military women face far greater danger of sexual assault and harassment from their fellow troops — a crisis that the Pentagon has slowly been addressing, and that full combat integration should help to remedy. Adding women to the leadership corps will foster a healthier military culture freed from testosterone-soaked abuse and scandal.
Many in the military already understand that many women can do combat jobs as well as men, if not better, but none have the chance to prove it. "Fully support," one Army Times commenter wrote of the new policy, "as long as the training and the physical standards for such positions remain what they need to be to accomplish the mission and make every team member able to provide support and cover for their teammates."
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