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EDITORIAL: Break the 'brass ceiling'
Feb 14, 2012 (The Buffalo News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
By opening 14,000 more combat-related jobs to female service members, the Pentagon continues to inch toward full equality, but still falls short of allowing women to serve in infantry or special forces units.
The new rules will take effect gradually and undergo a review by Congress, which has traditionally opposed allowing women in combat.
While opening many jobs to women, the new rules leave more than 230,000 off-limits. That's about one-fifth of the active-duty military, according to the Washington Post, and virtually all of those jobs are in the Army and Marine Corps. This sluggish approach to change has meant that women are still kept out of the most dangerous jobs, but those are the jobs that offer the surest path to career advancement. This roadblock represents a "brass ceiling" that leaves women underrepresented at the top levels of the military.
Although women have been excluded from combat roles in order to keep them off the front lines of battle, they have been allowed into dangerous roles that show how outmoded the notion of "front lines" is in modern warfare. Department of Defense statistics show that, by the end of 2011, 144 women had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2 percent of the troop deaths in those wars.
While officially prohibited from combat, women are playing an important role on the Afghan battlefield. As temporary "attachments" to infantry units, they are able to interrogate Afghan women without offending the country's traditional culture.
Is America psychologically prepared to handle the possibility of mothers, sisters, daughters and wives getting killed at the same rate as men? Based on some conservative response, the answer would be no.
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said men have a natural instinct to protect women, and could lose their focus alongside women on the battlefield. He said moving women closer to combat could be "a compromising situation where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved."
That statement is not just patronizing, it shows a lack of confidence in the training provided by the armed services. And Anu Bhagwati, former Marine Corps captain and executive director of Service Women's Action Network, said, "American men and women are fighting and dying alongside one another in Iraq and Afghanistan, and have been for 10 years."
If some military specialties have particular physical requirements, those requirements need to be spelled out so that women can be allowed to compete for them. Women should have an equal chance to serve their country and advance in their chosen field.
___ (c)2012 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.) Visit The Buffalo News (Buffalo,
N.Y.) at www.buffalonews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services
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