Pentagon: Military must justify any woman exclusions
Chiefs of services have until Oct. 1 to ask for exceptions.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Ash Carter is giving the chiefs of the military services until Oct. 1 to tell him which combat posts should remain closed to female service members and is requiring them to provide documentation to justify the exclusion.
Carter said Thursday that the historic achievement of two women, 1st Lt. Shaye Haver and Capt. Kristen Griest, in earning Army Ranger tabs indicates that female fighters are able and willing to take on greater roles in the nation’s all-volunteer armed forces.
“Clearly, these two women are trailblazers,” Carter told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “And after all, that’s what it means to be a Ranger. Rangers lead the way.”
Carter said he would offer his personal congratulations to Haver and Griest, graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Haver, an attack helicopter pilot, and Griest, a military police officer, will graduate today with 94 male Ranger candidates at Fort Benning, Ga.
The two women, however, cannot join the 75th Rangers Regiment on active duty under Pentagon rules blocking them from the ranks of the elite special operations command along with most armor, infantry and artillery units.
Those closed doors may soon open. Carter said that he will review his service heads’ recommendations after Oct. 1 and make his final decisions, which will be subject to congressional oversight, by the start of next year.
“The department’s policy is that all ground combat positions will be open to women unless rigorous analysis of factual data shows that the positions must remain closed,” Car- ter said.
Carter said the landmark accomplishments of Haver and Griest, who had to pass a 62-day course of grueling physical and emotional tests, brought him “special satisfaction” because, as deputy defense secretary under then-Pentagon chief Leon Panetta, he oversaw the January 2013 initiative to open more ranks to women.
That initiative, mandated by Congress in the 2011 Defense Authorization Act, removed the prohibition on women engaging in “direct ground combat” and gave the military services three years to conduct studies on whether some jobs should remain off-limits. The results of those studies will be reviewed by Carter after Oct. 1.
But well before the January 2013 change, the line between direct and support combat roles had been blurred in Afghani- stan and Iraq, where 161 American women fighters died in action.
In a report released Tuesday, the Congressional Research Service, which studies issue for Congress, said that a 1994 policy that banned women from “direct ground combat” had become “less useful” because “of the nonlinear and irregular nature of the battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Among other assignments in Iraq, female ser- vice members in the Army and the Marine Corps searched Iraqi women for weapons, joined door-todoor foot patrols and participated in convoy escort missions that came under fire.
Despite the formal prohibition against it, women in Afghanistan were embedded with special operations forces in Cultural Support Teams operating in villages as they engaged with local women, the report said.