It’s been 10 years since women were allowed to serve in combat. There’s a lot left to accomplish
BY LEON E. PANETTA AND SHELLY STONEMAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 01/28/23 2:00 PM ET
In January 2013, during our final days in the Pentagon, we announced a historic decision — that the Department of Defense would overturn the “ground combat exclusion policy,” a Pentagon rule barring women from serving in direct combat ground units below the brigade level. One decade after lifting one of the last major barriers to equal opportunity in the U.S. Armed Forces, there is much to celebrate. There’s even more left to do.
For years we worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to address challenges facing women in the military. We assigned a senior Pentagon official and several of our senior military advisors the task of analyzing the impact of formally allowing women to serve in combat roles. In 2012, we opened more than 14,000 positions previously closed to female candidates. Yet while American women had been serving in battle since the Revolutionary War (with some 177 women in uniform killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in this century alone), the ground combat exclusion policy stubbornly endured, disqualifying women from some 200,000 positions across infantry, artillery and other combat roles.
The question we kept returning to was this: Why should a woman who meets the same minimum standards required of a man be barred from fighting on the front lines? After months of debate, and on the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs and with the strong support of President Obama and Vice President Biden, we rescinded the prohibition on women in combat and gave the services three years to review their test and evaluation procedures accordingly. One of my successors, the late Ashton Carter, built on that success in January 2016, scrapping the services’ ability to request waivers to continue excluding women from certain positions. The Armed Forces would open all military occupational specialties to qualified applicants regardless of sex — no exceptions.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3834021-its-been-10-years-since-women-were-allowed-to-serve-in-combat-theres-a-lot-left-to-accomplish/
