Forces entrenched at the Pentagon keep trying to push women onto the front lines of combat, despite the fact that U.S. law forbids it. The latest bid: A push to start assigning female soldiers to act as "forward support" personnel (such as mechanics), living alongside combat troops who are often in battle. Last week, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) moved to block that with an amendment to the 2006 Defense appropriations bill. The Pentagon and Democrats howled in protest. But why? Who wants more women to be shot? This is a small scene in the larger drama over the feminization of war. Another scene was Gen. Janis Karpinski's appointment in 2003 to head the 800th Military Police Brigade where she was in charge of the prison at Abu Ghraib. That appointment didn't turn out well, to put it mildly. President Bush finally signed the order last week to demote her to colonel. Which happens to be the same rank she held in 2002, when (according to the Army investigation that led to her demotion) she was caught shoplifting in a Florida department store. Why was someone like that made a general? Since 1951, a powerful Pentagon committee has been pressing the services to recruit and promote more women into high positions. It has also lobbied Congress to assign women to fighting units. Since the '60s, this group, the presidentially-appointed Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS), has contained retired female officers, military family members and feminist ideologues. Using allies in Congress to pressure its Pentagon bosses, DACOWITS demanded that, rather than subjecting women to the military's tough regimens, the services must lower their standards. By the '90s, women who couldn't pass the competence exams required of men were cleared to fly jets. Other women were assigned to Army maintenance companies, though they lacked the strength to change a truck tire or carry their toolboxes. Over the decades, Pentagon brass have been so cowed by congressional liberals that they've tried to make this fantasy work, while running an actual war-fighting military at the same time. The U.S. military is now 15 percent female but with hard-core fighting units (combat infantry, armor, artillery, special forces, submarine crews) still all-male. But the Clinton administration announced in 1994 that women in non-combat jobs could be ordered to travel in high-risk zones. So now young enlisted women from National Guard units get sent all over Iraq in supply convoys exposing them to bullets, bombs and rape. On Feb. 9, a roadside bomb near Baghdad Airport blew up a truck driven by Army Sgt. Jessica M. Housby of Rock Island, Ill. She was 23 years old, with the Illinois National Guard's 1644th Transportation Company and the 31st American woman killed in Iraq. For some, this isn't enough. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) wants women put into "direct combat" units. Why? "Every time a woman is excluded from a position [in the military], she is devalued." Military women don't buy it. In polling by the Army Research Institute, 90 percent of enlisted women and 81 percent of female officers say they believe women should not be sent into combat. But feminists such as former Rep. Patricia Schroeder insist: "The only thing these [combat exclusion] laws protect women from is promotion." Apparently, women in the ranks fail to understand that the important thing is not their lives or their country's security, but that women reach the highest levels of everything. And you can't make it to, say, the Joint Chiefs of Staff without combat command experience. For a favored candidate (as Karpinski once was) to be assigned command of the 82nd Airborne, women as a class need to be allowed in combat. No, that wouldn't mean sending Gen. Karpinski crawling through the mud toward the enemy with an M-16 in her teeth. That's not for generals. That duty would go to young girls from the sticks who joined the service because they needed a job. It's a weird inversion of values: Women sent to die for the ideologues' fantasy world, instead of the nation defending and protecting its women. Among certain desk-pilots at the Pentagon, the dream of women warriors persists, like a video game they can't stay away from. It will be the job of more normal souls, both military and civilian, to keep these people locked in the arcade.
Remember Rescued POW Jessica Lynch
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