Women’s ENews ran an interesting article about the history of women in the U.S. military that included a fascinating statistic about the makeup of Operation Iraqi Freedom — almost 15 percent of soldiers deployed to take part in the war were women.
As Shauna Curphey wrote before the war began, “it will likely be the largest deployment of women to a combat theater to date — and the first major test of women’s expanded combat roles since Desert Storm.”
Which also begs the question of conservatives and other opposed to that expanded military presence. If women harm unit cohesion, threaten quick deployments with high pregnancy rates, etc., etc., then how do you explain the U.S. military rolling through Iraq in just a few weeks with almost no appreciable casualties (during World War II, more Americans were killed in action every day on average than lost their lives in Operation Iraqi Freedom)? Shouldn’t the ability of the U.S. military to fight a war have been seriously degraded by now if women really undermine military preparedness?
From here it looks like women can be integrated with minimal problems into a fighting force that remains without peer in the world today.
Source:
1 in 7 U.S. military personnel in Iraq is female. Shauna Curphey, Women’s ENews, March 22, 2003.