AF, Marines to Open More Jobs to Women

The Air Force and the Marine Corps, following the Navy’s lead in opening jobs to military women, announced Tuesday that they will drop restrictions barring females from about 4,000 jobs near the front lines of combat.

The services’ initiatives, approved by Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, will permit women to serve in the elite units of Marine Corps guards posted at U.S. embassies, aboard Air Force and Marine reconnaissance planes and in Navy and Air Force construction units.

Carlucci also directed all the services to take steps to combat sexual harassment, which, according to the Task Force on Women in the Military, “remains a significant problem in all the services.”

The new measures had been recommended by the task force, which former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger established last October after the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services had complained of widespread sexual harassment and obstacles to promotions for women.

The new directives will leave unchanged a 1948 law barring female soldiers and sailors from positions that would bring them into direct combat with an enemy. Although Congress is pressing for new opportunities for women, it has no plans to alter the combat exclusion law.

Carlucci’s moves were hailed by Jacquelyn K. Davis, chairwoman of the advisory committee. “We’re very happy with the task force’s results and endorse the broadening of opportunities for women,” she said. The measures, she added, “go about as far as you can possibly go within the existing congressional restrictions.”

Vigilant on Promises

But Davis warned that her committee, a formal advisory group to the Pentagon, will be vigilant in demanding that the services follow through on their promises. Past efforts to open spots to women have sometimes met resistance from field commanders, who have been asked to alter their installations and facilities to accommodate women soldiers and sailors.

Marine embassy guard jobs had been open to women until the late 1970s, when some guards--all men--were taken hostage in Iran. Davis noted that women Marines were particularly irked by their exclusion from this 1,400-man force.

Even under the steps announced Tuesday, women will not be able to serve as Marine guards in countries, including many in the Middle East, where local customs frown on such roles for women.

In addition to opening embassy guard and reconnaissance plane jobs to women, Carlucci directed that women be eligible to serve in the Navy’s mobile construction battalions, or Seabees, and in the Air Force’s Red Horse and Aerial Port squadrons, both civil engineering and construction battalions.

Face Shrinking Numbers

Those actions are part of a Pentagon-wide effort to draw enlisted women into skilled specialties traditionally filled by men. As the military services face shrinking numbers of males of recruitment age through the end of this century, they are eager to integrate women widely into their forces.

Tuesday’s announcements follow a Navy decision, announced in late December, to open 9,000 positions aboard its logistics ships to women. The Navy also allowed women to fly its P-3 Orion reconnaissance planes, an initiative that Carlucci’s task force recommended after the fact.

As for the Army, Carlucci ordered it Tuesday to review a 1983 policy that bars women from serving in units if any elements of those units might be exposed to combat.

Women in the armed forces currently number 221,000 and make up 10.2% of the nation’s military, according to Pentagon estimates.

Integration Hampered

But social factors, as well as the 1948 combat exclusion law, hamper the further integration of women into the armed forces, concluded the Pentagon task force, which is chaired by David J. Armor, assistant secretary of defense for force management and personnel.

“Sexual harassment continues in spite of clear policy guidance . . . and in spite of specific policies and programs developed to combat it,” the task force’s report concluded. A recent Navy study found that more than half of 1,400 Navy women surveyed said that they had been victims of sexual harassment.

The commission urged the Defense Department to establish complaint channels outside the usual chain of command. It noted that there is “reluctance to use the chain of command . . . when some level of the chain is perceived as a participant in, or thought to condone, pejorative attitudes toward military women.”