Two Army soldiers are about to graduate Friday from Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga. What is remarkable about that is that the two are the first women to graduate from that grueling course.
The two, Capt. Kristen Geist and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver, are both graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which itself was unheard of for generations. It was not until 1976 that women were first admitted to West Point.
Now the fact that women are accepted as cadets and serve as West Point graduates is in itself unremarkable. That Geist and Haver made it through Ranger School points to the future where women serving at the sharp end of the spear will also become routine.
First, of course, the services themselves have to accept that. In 2013, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered the U.S. military to fully integrate women into its ranks. With that, the Army and the other services have until Jan. 1 to decide whether to seek waivers to continue to exclude women from certain assignments.
As things stand now, neither Geist nor Haver is allowed to serve as a tank or infantry officer. And, although graduates of Ranger School, they are specifically barred from joining the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment.
All the services face similar choices, although the most akin to the Army’s is the Marine Corps. There, the two services seem to be taking a different route. Retired Army Col. Ellen Haring, who now studies the role of women in the military at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis told Military Times she thinks the two’s approach was different from the start, saying, “I think the Army has approached this more as, ‘how will we do this,’ not ‘whether we will do this.’ And I think the Marine Corps’ approach has been more of an investigation into whether we should do this.”
Those different takes could be problematic in that many infantry jobs within the two branches are much alike. They also suggest that the culture of each branch may have as much to do with how quickly women are accepted in combat roles as the women’s ability or qualifications.
The process of fully integrating women into the military is well under way nonetheless. And with the nature of America’s wars in recent years, the distinction in the services between combat jobs and noncombatants has blurred.
Military Times has reported that a total of about 300,000 women have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 150 have been killed.
It also says that, in recent years, roughly 91,000 military jobs that had been restricted to men have been opened to women. That leaves something like a quarter of a million positions still limited to men.
Change takes time, but over the years the military can expect to find that there is little if any legitimate reason to perpetuate those exclusions. Airplanes do not know the sex of their pilots (Google “night witches”) and Haver is an Apache helicopter pilot. Likewise, it is unlikely that tanks perform differently with a woman at the controls. Upper body strength is probably the determining factor in some military roles, but, even there, if a woman can pass the test, what is the issue?
Capt. Geist and Lt. Haver are the Army’s first women Rangers. They will not be the last. They are the 21st century face of America’s armed forces.
