Let Women Be Warriors It's time to stop questioning whether women should be in combat units.

Let Women Be Warriors
It’s time to stop questioning whether women should be in combat units.



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Eighteen women made history in May 2017 by graduating from Army infantry training.CreditCreditMelissa Golden for The New York Times


In the nearly three years since the Pentagon allowed women to join front-line combat units, questions about the policy have not gone away. Two former Marines — Owen West, now an assistant secretary of defense, and his father, the military writer Bing West — said women in the infantry would “swiftly reduce combat effectiveness.” In The American Conservative, Scott Beauchamp could see no benefit in bringing women into combat roles and suggested that the Pentagon was cynically trying to bolster recruiting during ill-conceived wars. And even the man who is overseeing gender integration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, recently expressed a surprising level of ambivalence about the policy, saying that there are still too few women in the infantry to determine whether having them fight in close quarters is a “strength or a weakness.”

Yet women have joined combat units at Fort Campbell, Ky.; Fort Hood, Tex.; Fort Bragg, N.C.; and other bases. And several countries have allowed women into combat units for years, including Canada, Israel, Norway and Sweden. The evidence does exist, and is growing, that gender-integrated combat teams are effective.

Recently I visited Sweden to talk with conscripts in mechanized infantry, artillery and army ranger units. I learned that the performance of women in those units was not at issue. What was, at times, was the ability of their male peers to accept them. Sweden, which sent troops to support the American-led war in Afghanistan, first integrated women into combat jobs in 1989 and began a gender-neutral draft last year. Swedish recruit training barracks look close to a “Starship Troopers” ideal of coed rooms and showers. One room housed 10 men and four women, all in bunk beds, and the recruits viewed this integration as crucial to unit strength. One night I accompanied a female corporal down a barracks hallway where a junior soldier stood without shirt or pants, one hand in his underwear, talking on a cellphone. We shrugged.

Two Norwegian researchers, Nina Hellum and Ulla-Britt Lilleaas, have found that having male and female troops live together has a “degenderizing” effect that makes soldiers act more like siblings, reducing harassment.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/opinion/let-women-be-warriors.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage