Should women be allowed in combat Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Should women be allowed in combat - Essay Example Others suggest that women are not fit for combat service and are a detriment to the effectiveness of any fighting force. The truth is that women should not be permitted to serve in the armed forces in combat roles even should they wish to do so. Another argument, which is not currently relevant but which may occur at any time, is whether or not women should be drafted into the armed forced should a draft be reinstated. This raises interesting issues. In the course of this paper I will examine some of the objections to the idea of women serving in the armed forces and I will conclude by discussing the potential issues around a draft. The preponderance of evidence suggests that women are ill-suited for combat missions. Gender roles have changed a great deal in the decades since the 1960s when women began to enter the workforce in droves. The rise of human rights law required companies and the government to find ways to accommodate women, who were often unable to display the same streng th as men. Firefighting units altered their training regimes, for example, in order to accommodate women. All of these things are impressive achievements. We should celebrate the continued integration of our wives, sister, daughters, and mothers into society at large and into the workplace. Women need to play a more substantial and significant role in the world. But where can that line be drawn? Critics of deploying women in combat roles point to the various accommodations made to women in different sectors of society. They suggest that there is no room for accommodations in wartime. It would be nice to have more physically disabled people on the battlefield in order to encourage diversity, but they would compromise the mission. Only the most physically and mentally fit individuals should form the tip of the spear, the combat units that make up the military. This is the crux of the opposition to women in the military. In the American military today, women are not involved in combat roles. They make up only around 14 percent of the active Army (Army.mil). Catherine Ross served in Iraq as a civil affairs sergeant attached to a combat brigade and argued recently that women should be allowed to serve in combat roles. While in Iraq, I was directly attached to an infantry battalion. I went everywhere they did, lived as they did and faced the same dangers they did every time I went â€Å"outside the wire† to conduct infrastructure assessments, which was nearly every day. There is nothing special or unique about what I experienced. Many female soldiers have been or currently are in the same situation — going outside the wire and facing the possibility of I.E.D.’s, small arms fire and more. The fact is that as â€Å"support† we end up attached to infantry, artillery and other combat arms units, and make enemy contact. Despite this, I was blind to the big picture. I suppose I had just guzzled down the Kool-Aid and drove on. It took getting ou t of the Army for me to see how women in the military are truly viewed and treated (Ross). With due respect to Ms. Ross, her observations do not make an especially strong case for allowing to fight in the military. She may have returned in one piece from Iraq, but despite the fact that she was in a combat zone she did not have to survive the stress and difficulty of engaging the enemy in a combat sense. There are a number of powerful arguments which she overlooks when