Congress Nears Lifting Combat Ban for Women

Congress, emboldened by public acceptance of the death and imprisonment of female soldiers during the Persian Gulf War, is about to eliminate the last statutory barriers to allowing women to serve in combat.

With the backing of the Pentagon, the House Armed Services Committee has approved legislation that would give the Defense Department a broad mandate to expand women’s roles in the military, but would leave it to the armed services to decide where to draw the line.

The Senate Armed Services panel is expected to consider the measure in mid-June, in time for final passage by both houses by the end of the summer. No serious opposition is expected in either house.

The new push reflects a change in lawmakers’ assessments of voters’ perceptions about women’s roles in combat in the wake of the war.

Army helicopter pilot Maj. Marie T. Rossi, for instance, was killed when the aircraft in which she was ferrying troops crashed along the border with Iraq. And Iraqi forces held a female U.S. soldier as a prisoner of war.

The conundrum for the Pentagon is that, as the Persian Gulf War demonstrated, women already are serving in jobs where they are exposed to dangerous areas near or at the front lines. And women pilots and sailors often are as vulnerable as men serving in “combat” situations.

As a result, any further expansion of women’s roles in the military services is virtually certain to bring the barriers, which were set up in 1948 to exclude women from combat service, tumbling down, and it will be the Pentagon that will have to take credit or blame.

That is just the way lawmakers want it, according to women who have been active in pressing for the repeal of the current barriers. By approving the vague language now on the table, they will have taken a symbolic step but avoided having to hammer out the details.

“They don’t want a roll call vote on whether women should go to war,” said Carolyn Becraft, a consultant to the Women’s Research and Education Institute. “That’s not a clip they want sent to the home district” next time a war flares up, she said.

But Pete Williams, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, says the Defense Department welcomes the new legislation because it wants the armed services, rather than Congress, to have the authority to decide specifically when women should be given combat roles.

The issue has been so sensitive that the last time the Senate Armed Services Committee seriously debated it in the early 1980s former Sen. John Tower (R-Tex.), then the chairman, closed the hearing to the public and cleared the room of all the panel’s women staffers.

Today, however, the legislation has been debated openly, and Becraft says there is a widespread feeling among lawmakers that after the women’s performance in the Persian Gulf, female GIs must be rewarded with expanded opportunities.

But the real decisions--over specifically which combat jobs will continue to be denied to women--probably will be debated between Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and the military services. And those are likely to be conducted with as much secrecy and emotion as congressional debates in the past.

While the military services may seem to be ducking the issue in public, the top brass from each service are conducting intensive sessions to determine how many more positions should be opened to women once the new legislation is passed.

Not everyone in the military is enthusiastic about reducing current barriers. Marine Corps and Army officials fear that women will not have the physical strength for most infantry positions, and are pondering new ways to enforce standards for strength.

The Navy is mulling how to permit women to fly carrier aircraft without opening all positions aboard such warships. And all the services are concerned about the disruption and discipline problems that the introduction of women could bring.

So far, Air Force personnel chief Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Hickey has taken the most visible public stance on behalf of removing the final barriers.

“The last impediment (to allowing women to be assigned to fighter-jet units) is the law, which precludes us from doing it,” Hickey said. “There is not . . . a mission in the U.S. Air Force that women are not physically and mentally capable of performing.”

In the end, Becraft contends that Cheney and the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force are likely to have to set the pace and tone of the deliberations, and their leadership will determine how fully the final barriers to women GIs are broken down.

Historically, every major new round of openings for women in the military services has been a result of civilian leadership on the issue, she said.

Cheney’s view, however, is still unclear. He has stopped short of calling for outright repeal of the combat exclusion laws--which legally affect only the Navy and the Air Force--and of the Army policies that have sprung from them.

But he also has said since the Persian Gulf War ended that he “wouldn’t be at all surprised” if the roles for women in the services were expanded “in part as a result of the experience derived in the war just passed.”

In April, a Pentagon panel on women in the military voted 29 to 4 to seek repeal of the laws barring women from combat. Panel leaders, chaired by Becky Constantino, a Wyoming Republican, met before the final vote to discuss the issue with Cheney.