BREAKING: Secretary Panetta removes military ban on women in combat

[Are_grits_groceries]

“@BloombergNews: FLASH: Secretary Panetta removes military ban on women in combat -- @AP”

Twitter is a good news source if you follow reputable organizations and reporters. If there is time, most link to longer articles. In cases like this, you get the lead out just like every media source until you can release a longer story.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

1. Here's a little bit more from AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior defense officials say Pentagon chief Leon Panetta is removing the military's ban on women serving in combat, opening hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando jobs after more than a decade at war.

The groundbreaking move recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff overturns a 1994 rule banning women from being assigned to smaller ground combat units. Panetta's decision gives the military services until January 2016 to seek special exceptions if they believe any positions must remain closed to women.

On edit: I forgot the link. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/panetta-opens-combat-roles-women

[Are_grits_groceries]

2. Thanks! nt

[Lone_Star_Dem]

3. I updated with a link.

I forgot it in my initial post.

[MADem]

4. What will Newt Gingrich have to say about THIS!!!!!

He was so concerned about "infections in the foxholes" as I recall....he also had something to say about male giraffe hunters way back when. Amazing that this asshole managed to rehabilitate himself sufficiently to tromp back on the world stage.

The lifting of this ban is important, though. The ban on female service personnel in combat was a MAJOR justification for states' failing to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. The chivalry card was played, exhorting voters to vote against the amendment because it would force little Susie Cheerleader into the foxhole with that giraffe hunting brute from the wrong side of town (the draft being a fresher issue back in those days).

[pinboy3niner]

6. Good point

It's a big step forward--and finally catches up to the reality that women have already been serving, and dying, in combat.

[Victor_c3]

8. I understand that the last statement is geared more towards a draft oriented society

but the warmongers need to come to the realization that if a war isn't good enough to send your daughters to die in too, then maybe we shouldn't be fighting it.

[MADem]

11. Good point. To put that POV in perspective, though, those were the "bayonet" days!

There were front lines in wars, and that paradigm was only starting to change with the spread of terrorism in places like Lebanon and London.

Now there are no real "front lines," a "foxhole" is a quaint notion, and a person can engage in combat from a trailer in the western desert of the USA.

I guess, if we are fighting, all of us should be fighting, and gender should not be a barrier in an AVF to a woman working in a military field of her choosing because of outdated notions of chivalry. After all, the rocket that took off Tammy Duckworth's legs didn't say "Oh, wait, that's a LADY flying that chopper, let me go the other way."

Perhaps a few more women imparting their combat experience around the "operational" tables in some of these war games -- and in the room doing the actual warplanning--might work out well for us. The best military personnel regard war as a last resort. It's what happens when deterrence fails.

The cowboys who have never put on the uniform are the ones who hold these outdated, chauvanistic attitudes, who cheer on the idea of war, and watch and re-watch their favorite fake, bullshit war films with the dramatic gunfire and thumping music, and put their couch-sitting selves in the picture, in their mind's eye. If they're sitting in Congress, they put on their khaki slacks and Eisenhower jacket and a ball cap, then clamber aboard a military transport and do a quickie CODEL to the war zone (posing in the body armor/helmet like tough guys) so they can take pictures for their reelection campaign. They love the glory, but the heavy lifting, isolation, stress, moments of sheer terror and grunt work they choose not to appreciate or understand. Perhaps the "other half" of our population will be better able to articulate these issues and concerns and inform our opinions about some of the military efforts we choose to undertake.

[pinboy3niner]

17. Well said

And it's those who've never been there who are eager for war. You and I, El-Tee, have a somewhat different perspective, don't we?

[MADem]

18. Tell me about it!

You have to wonder what goes through their heads--visions of sugarplumed glory? The reality sucks--and is often smelly on a GOOD day...!

[Victor_c3]

20. exactly

Isn't is amazing, though, that those of us who have fought directly in wars seem to be the ones the warmongers out there want to hear the least from - especially when it comes to an anti-war message?

They all have visions of the sorts of glory that guys like us took part in. I'd imagine that your opinions on what you did in Vietnam probably isn't too far off from mine. I didn't feel any overwhelming sense of patriotism or glory during any of my combat experience. For me, it was more a sense of guilt and shame that came afterwards.

Thanks

[Recursion]

5. Services have until 2016 to generate transition plan and file for exceptions

Panetta seems to want to go out with a lot of noise, I take it.

[MADem]

12. It's good timing, and I will bet Hagel is in the loop.

Panetta didn't need to be beaten up about this, day in, day out, from "slow adapters," and Hagel can take an arms' length approach and say "You already got your marching orders--you've been told to develop your implementation strategy and if you have exception requests, they'd better not be bullshit."

Should have happened years ago.

What will be interesting to see will be the requests for exceptions. It will tell us who's moving forward and who's reluctant to adapt to new paradigms!

[progressoid]

9. We could get them to register for the draft too.

Maybe that would push people to demand the dismantling of the draft registration.

[MADem]

13. That SHOULD happen--combat exclusion was an impediment to that.

And all that fed into reasoning to deny progress on the ERA.

[Earth_First]

10. How about just removing combat?

[RandiFan1290]

14. Woohoo!!

Equality to die for the MIC 1%!
How exciting for all of us!

[duffyduff]

15. Phyllis Schlafly is probably having a fit right now

She and her Eagle Forum used the draft/combat argument in their successful block of the ERA.

She also bellyached about "unisex bathrooms" and same-sex marriage.

[MADem]

19. Her and the damn "Florida Sunshine Tree" songstress, Anita Bryant.

They were quite the pair.

When I had a mixed gender command overseas, we had unisex heads....it made it easier for everyone to do their business, but in my heart I have to admit another motive was to stick it to that despicable individual.

It just wasn't fair to make one gender wait and wait and wait because a smaller complement of the other gender also needed a crapper--easier to put locks on all of 'em (they were one holers, basically) and play catch-as-catch-can.

[WilliamPitt]

16. So much for "the weaker sex"

Regarding women being allowed in combat roles, and speaking to the issue of equality, I offer a tremendously uncomfortable truth: the fighting in and aftermath of American wars have, in many instances, been great leaps forward for civil rights.

African American Union soldiers in the Civil War were widely regarded as ditch-digging serfs, until the need for combat soldiers pressed them into the fight, where they served with distinction...and once someone has worn the uniform of an American soldier and served under fire, only the basest racist had the gall to deny them equality.

This was further enforced in WWII, where African American service in war further obliterated the distinction between Black and White when it comes to full citizenship for those who have worn the uniform in combat.

...and only a fool would dismiss the leap forward made by American women after Rosie the Riveter basically won the war...a fact that showed women, along with the culture at large, that they belong in the workplace right next to everyone else. Rosie was arguably the first modern American feminist; ask Betty Friedan, who knew she was made for more than housecleaning in the post-war ennui, and started a revolution.

Like I said, a tremendously uncomfortable truth: war has led to greater equality for segments of the society that had been marginalized until they served. This is not to say that war is good; far from it. It is to be hoped that these marginalized people would have, in the fullness of time, won their equality by other means. But this is America, and America has been about war for a couple of centuries now, and so war has been the avenue to that hard-fought equality for many.

This is one of those moments. Like it or lump it: women will serve in combat, and no one henceforth will be able to ply that "weaker sex" bullshit anymore.

Once again, war is the avenue for a necessary and long-lacked advance.

It is what it is.

'Murica.