Justice  /  Comment

The Iraq War’s Legacies for Women in Combat

The armed forces continue to grapple with integrating women into an institution historically designed for men.

On March 20, 2005, two years to the day after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, Army Specialist Ashley Pullen drove a Humvee in a routine patrol south of Baghdad. Pullen was a member of the 617th Military Police Company and, like all women in the military at that time, officially a noncombatant. But when her convoy came under attack, Pullen found herself in the middle of combat. After discharging her M4 rifle in the direction of the ambush, she heard the screams of a fellow soldier and ran 300 feet to him, where she protected him with her own body during a subsequent blast. For her actions, Pullen received the Bronze Star with valor device, a designation only awarded for meritorious service in combat. Yet, according to her official status, she should never have been in combat at all.

Twenty years after the American War in Iraq began, and fifty years into the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), countless servicewomen have had similar, seemingly contradictory experiences. Although women have served in both unofficial and official military capacities throughout U.S. history, the advent of the AVF in 1973 marked a sea change in women’s experiences and opportunities. Facing the prospect of being unable to recruit enough men, the armed forces began to rely on women to meet personnel requirements to an unprecedented degree. These changes occurred in an era of expanding legal and social equality for women, and so as the military increasingly relied on women, it also began to remove longstanding restrictions on the jobs they could perform. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s and 1990s, women entered the military in record-setting numbers, integrated the service academies, performed jobs previously closed to them, and broke all manner of brass ceilings.

However, it was not until the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Department of Defense removed the last remaining restriction on women’s service: the restriction against participation in ground combat.

Women like Ashley Pullen highlighted the impracticality of the restriction, both for its inapplicability on the ground and for its underlying assumption that women could not, or should not, engage in combat. In a war without clear fronts, where improvised explosive devices caused 60 percent of American fatalities, and where counterinsurgency necessitated the use of American women to interact with Iraqi women and children, the combat restriction that limited women’s participation in the war soon proved unsustainable.