Equality Is Always a Struggle : Combat role for women is nothing to fear

The Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, was perhaps more honest than he knew in his congressional testimony this week. “Even though logic tells us” that women can conduct combat operations “as well as men,” he said, “I have a very traditional attitude about wives and mothers and daughters being ordered to kill people.”

The general, along with other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified in hearings of the House Armed Services Committee on gender discrimination in the military.

McPeak’s obviously pained ambivalence about the role of women is common to many military careerists who simply can’t imagine having women in every military role.

The mixed signals that McPeak and his counterparts have for so long conveyed about women’s abilities and opportunities, echoing down the line to officers and enlisted personnel, have been misconstrued by a few men as a license to taunt and grope. But to many others those mixed signals from the brass merely led understandably to confusion about whether women are their equals or men should still be their protectors.

The now-infamous Tailhook sexual assault scandal last year occurred not only because of the egregious actions of a few drunken naval aviators but because of the broader reluctance of military leaders to insist that servicemen treat women fairly, and because the inherent contradictions in military policy toward women make it hard for them to do so.

Sexual harassment will continue until the military’s double talk ends, until women no longer hear: You are the equal of any man, but your gender--and your gender alone--automatically renders you incapable of doing some jobs.

Indeed, many Americans once believed that women could not possibly make good police officers. But experience in city after city, including Los Angeles, has proven that women not only perform police duties as well as men but in some circumstances even better.

The urban setting in which most beat officers work is indisputably different from a battlefield. But the terror, violence and need for bravery are inescapably similar, and those similarities argue powerfully for an end to the services’ ban on women in combat roles.

In recent years, women have been admitted to military job categories--for example, helicopter pilot--that bring them to the very edge of combat. The line between combat and non-combat is now blurred. And the experience of, for example, Melinda Rathbun-Nealy, an Army specialist taken prisoner by the Iraqis in the Persian Gulf War, revealed that that line can sometimes be a distinction without a difference.