Aspin Plans to Expand Women’s Combat Jobs : Military: Infantry may be excluded. Some officers, unhappy over gay issue, are expected to resist new effort.

Defense Secretary Les Aspin said Wednesday that he is preparing a package of initiatives to open new combat positions to women throughout the armed forces and that he expects to take action within six months.

Final decisions will not be made until Aspin and military leaders conduct a full review of possible female combat roles. But Aspin left no doubt that at the end of the review women will be given greater job opportunities in the military services.

“I think we need to do something on it,” Aspin said in an interview with wire service reporters. “We’re already thinking of things that would happen before Oct. 1.”

The drive to open more positions to women, however, is expected to meet resistance from some military leaders, many of whom are already unhappy with the Clinton Administration’s push to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces. In addition, Aspin’s timetable for expanding the roles of military women roughly coincides with the period in which the Administration is moving forward on the gays issue.

The defense secretary decided to review the issue of women in combat after the Navy sought permission last week to open four new classes of ships to women. That step was billed as an interim measure toward a longer-term Navy objective of opening all ships, including submarines, to women within four years.

Rather than allowing the Navy to move ahead on its own, Aspin said he decided that the subject must be reviewed as a single package extending across all the services. “Consistency--that’s got to happen,” he said.

Although Aspin supports expanding the number of combat positions for women, he has already indicated ambivalence or even opposition to some roles--such as allowing women to serve in ground combat. Pentagon officials also said Aspin has not yet decided on such crucial issues as whether women will be permitted to fly combat aircraft.

A knowledgeable Pentagon aide said, however, that Aspin is studying every possible option and that the secretary would consider allowing women to fly combat planes on a test basis.

Aspin appears prepared to take some steps beyond the recommendations of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in Combat. Last November, the commission recommended allowing women to serve on all surface combat ships except amphibious vessels but keeping them off the crews of combat aircraft and out of ground combat units.

Then-President George Bush acted on none of the commission recommendations, leaving the sensitive issue to the new Administration.

Aspin told Congress last week that he probably will accept the commission’s recommendation for women to serve on most warships but not in ground combat. However, he left open the possibility that he might reject the commission’s recommendation to prohibit women from flying warplanes in combat.

“We’re probably going to accept the commission’s report . . . of course with the possible exception of the combat aircraft,” Aspin told the House Armed Services Committee.

Army and Air Force officials are scrambling to respond to new pressures regarding the role of women in the military.

Air Force, Army and Marine leaders, however, are expected to resist efforts to broaden the role of women in their ranks. Gen. Merrill McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff, has said in hearings that he personally opposes allowing women to fly in combat aircraft, and Army and Marine leaders have consistently opposed any opening of infantry positions to women.

Efforts to open combat engineering posts and combat helicopter crews to female soldiers also have been resisted by the leaders of the Army and Marine Corps.

Indeed, in the Air Force, there have been indications that women are losing ground in their bid for expanded job opportunities.

The Air Force recently instituted a new system of choosing instructor pilots that will have the effect of foreclosing a key class of jobs for women pilots. Under current rules, many of the service’s most promising new female pilots are permitted to return to their training units to become instructors of future fighter pilots. After July, however, the service is expected to recruit new combat-instructor pilots exclusively from combat units, in which women are not now permitted to serve.

“It certainly wasn’t the intent” to close off opportunities to women, said Brig. Gen. Walter S. Hogle Jr., an Air Force spokesman. “The intent was to produce the best possible pilot we can.”

If Aspin is to reverse such trends, experts said, he and the Administration will have to intervene forcefully with the military services. That will be especially difficult since the Administration is now engaged in the bruising battle with the military and Congress over gays in the armed services.

“It’s usually been the civilian leadership that’s pressed the military to face up to the changes going on in our culture,” said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Jeanne Holm, author of “Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution.” She said that “the military is inherently resistant to social change.”

Holm and others noted that Aspin’s task could be greatly slowed by the absence of civilian secretaries at the heads of each service. Pentagon officials said the White House has been slow to approve and name those leaders, who have broad oversight over the armed forces’ personnel policies.

“The defense secretary can’t do all of this by himself,” Holm said.