opinionWar

Women in Combat: Why Now, Whats Next

The Secretary of Defense has spoken. More than two centuries of male-only combat arms in the United States military have ended, and what’s surprising is that anyone is surprised. This didnt happen last Friday, or in 2013, and it wasn’t decided by Obama, or even Panetta. There was no feminist cabal at work. No assortment of ‘feminist’ professors scattered across the country who don’t know or care about the military made this happen; and it certainly wasn’t brought about by a very loose and rather small collection of military women – despite their enormous sacrifices – who weren’t even organized inside their own services, and who lived in constant fear of ending their careers when they spoke up.

This isn’t some social experiment. To see it that way is to have everything backwards. Military culture doesnt drive national culture in this country, its the other way around. The evolution of American society drives everything. It’s the pressure of this same evolution that has made the military end everything from flogging to racial segregation. National culture is what gave us a tiny military after the Revolution, and a gigantic one after WWII. And it’s American national culture that’s driving this; it’s the basic changes in American culture over the past thirty-odd years that have demanded it. Incessant war demands may have sped things up, but the end of gender segregation in the combat arms was inevitable, and has been for longer than most people understand.

The Cultural Shift

If you’re old enough, think back to the ‘50s. Only 3% of law students were women then, and it was considered natural. Everyone just ‘knew’ women couldn’t handle legal work. Now the percentage of women in law school is close to 50%. Many of the top lawyers are female, and the same is true in medicine. In the 1950s, a woman needed a man to get a credit card. Now some of the most powerful people on Wall Street are women. The examples are endless and encompass everything from educationto mixed martial arts. Theyre endless because there’s been a sea-change in the role of women in this country, a virtual revolution, and there’s been an equally enormous change in the way people look at how women should be treated and what should be expected of them (and what they can aspire to) especially among younger generations.

Take a look at the movies. More and more, male-female partnerships in action movies and TV procedurals feature a physical partnership. The woman kicks butt, too. She isnt just the poor thing that gets saved. The point isnt whether a smaller woman can knock out a much bigger guy, the point is Hollywood is giving people what they want. Hollywood doesn’t make money by preaching, they make money by giving people what they want to see, and the American public wants to see this. Box office receipts don’t lie. Neither do TV ratings. Americans want woman heroes. Women want women heroes, and they want it because their expectations are changing. Of course its not everyone, and its not everywhere. You can find lots of people in lots of places to say just the opposite, but if you cant grasp that this really is going on nationwide, that there is a fundamental shift underway in the role of women, then you are blind to whats going on around you, and you are most definitely blind to the future.

Panetta didn’t act because he was told to; he acted because he had to, because reality was staring him in the face.

Once upon a time there was a woman named