House Panel OKs Combat Role for Women

The House Armed Services Committee voted for the first time Wednesday to authorize the Pentagon to allow women pilots to fly fighters and bombers in combat. If the provision survives, it would mark a major expansion of the role of women in the military, opening a wide gap in the historic ban on women in combat.

The panel also completed its deliberations on the $278-billion 1992 Pentagon budget, voting to cancel the B-2 Stealth bomber and sharply curtail the “Star Wars” anti-missile program.

Current law and regulations prohibit women from holding front-line combat jobs, although the distinction between the front and the rear in battle has become increasingly blurred. For example, three women reservists were among 28 soldiers killed in a Scud missile attack on a barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, during the Persian Gulf War.

In the Gulf deployment, 13 women died--five in combat and eight in accidents--21 were hurt and two were taken prisoner, according to the Defense Department. But in each case, officials said, the women were in jobs that were technically classified as noncombat.

Some 35,000 of the 541,000 U.S. troops sent to the Persian Gulf were women, in jobs ranging from physicians to truck drivers to transport pilots.

“The women in Desert Storm did themselves proud,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), a member of the Armed Services Committee and sponsor of the women-in-combat amendment. Schroeder and other liberal Democrats have tried for years to broaden the opportunities for women in the military, but they have been resisted by senior military leaders who believe that women should be kept behind the lines.

Schroeder’s amendment to the defense appropriations bill--if approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bush--would allow the Air Force and Navy to permit women to fly combat missions but would not require them to do so. It would be up to each branch to decide how to implement the law.

The language of the bill does not specifically address the Army’s attack helicopters, since the Army’s ban on women in combat is enforced by regulations, not by law.

A committee established to advise the Pentagon on the status of women in the military recommended last month that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney seek repeal of laws dating to 1948 barring women from serving in combat. Before 1948, the use of women in combat was not an issue because they served in separate support units.

Citing the performance of female GIs in the Gulf War, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Military Services adopted the recommendation April 24 after a closed meeting in Washington. Cheney has not publicly responded to the recommendation.

The Air Force has gone the furthest to integrate women into its ranks, opening 97% of its job specialties to them. The Marine Corps, in contrast, allows women in just 20% of its classifications, while the Army gives women access to 52% of its job categories.

In other actions, the Armed Services Committee, staking out its bargaining position in the coming debate over the shape of future defense budgets, shifted billions of dollars from the Administration’s priorities while complying with the overall spending ceiling set by the 1990 budget summit.

While many of the House committee’s actions are likely to be refashioned or rejected in negotiations with the Senate and the Administration, they signal broad and deep dissatisfaction with the military’s two most costly programs--the B-2 and “Star Wars.”

The panel voted to cut the Administration’s B-2 request from $4.8 billion to $1.6 billion, limiting spending to research and development only and barring procurement of new planes. The committee also voted to slash the Administration’s “Star Wars” request from $5.2 billion to $3.6 billion.

Members of the committee spread the savings from the two systems among several politically popular, job-rich programs that the Pentagon does not want or claims it cannot afford, including the Navy’s F-14 fighter, the Air Force’s F-16 fighter, the Marine Corps’ V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft and the Army’s M1-A2 tank.

As it did last year, the House committee voted to terminate the B-2 bomber program after completion of the 15 aircraft already authorized. The Air Force and the White House want 75 of the radar-evading, bat-wing planes at a total cost of about $60 billion. The program was saved last year by the Senate.

The committee also went further than any congressional panel in limiting the funding and direction of the controversial “Star Wars” program. It eliminated all funding for a plan dubbed “Brilliant Pebbles,” intended to put 1,000 or more small interceptors in space to knock down incoming ballistic missiles.

The 53-member committee’s package also indicates that the Gulf War will have little long-term impact on the defense budget and the size of U.S. military forces. Defense spending will continue to decline and uniformed forces will shrink by 25% over the next five years despite the war.

“Congress has not been rewriting the budget around Gulf War lessons,” independent military budget analyst Gordon Adams said. Cheney “has made it very clear that the Gulf War will not change the long-term (downward) trajectory very much.”