g
hemant rawat
PERSPECTIVE
Ready to Lead: Women officers marching on the eve of Air Force Day held in Feb 2013 at Hindon Air Force Station
In a dramatic policy shift, outgoing US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the 1994 military ban on women serving in combat in January 2013. This landmark initiative will allow uniformed women to be closer to front-line combat roles from mid-2013 onwards, provided the move is not opposed by the US Congress. India, which faces crippling shortages of over 13,000 officers in its armed forces, can take a cue from this initiative. It can make a virtue out of necessity by enrolling more women officers to make up its deficiencies. Raj Mehta examines the complex dynamics involved.
UP for the challenge
T
he recent American announcement allowing uniformed women to enter the hitherto ‘male only’ preserve—the combat zone—has aroused strong emotions worldwide. The maledominated military world is not excited and a flood of articles have questioned the validity of the policy change. Understandably, women’s rights activists and equal-opportunity enthusiasts the world over are delighted because another male bastion has fallen by the way side. A dispassionate analysis, however, reveals that the forward movement to ‘officially’ allow uniformed women to enter combat is in actuality a small, breakaway step from the www.geopolitics.in
otherwise glacial evolution of allowing American women to enter hardcore combat. It has, however, stopped short of officially allowing women to serve in combat. The fine print of the policy change allows women to be permanently assigned to a combat battalion as radio operators, medical officers/orderlies, tank mechanics and other critical jobs: assignments barred by the now-rescinded 1994 combat exclusion policy which prohibited women from being assigned to ground combat units.
Are women closer to combat now?
That exclusion was, in real terms, never strictly applied by the armed forces but
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was informally bypassed and therein lies a tale. America has a uniformed strength of 1.4 million of which a significant 14 per cent are women, both in enlisted and officer ranks. It has deployed over 280,000 women in Iraq and Afghanistan since 1990 with casualties of 144 women killed in service and more than 865 wounded. Under severe manpower availability pressures, the US military got around the exclusion rules by ‘attaching’ women in certain jobs to battalions, which meant they were working in combat situations without getting any official credit for the same. Army women veterans wryly say that the new policy has merely legitimised existing arrangements. “We’re already doing March 2013