Post date: Jan 24, 2013 12:42:36 PM
A groundbreaking decision from the Pentagon will allow women to serve their country on the front-lines.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE - The U.S. military will formally end its ban on women serving in front-line combat roles, officials said on Wednesday (January 23), in a move that could open thousands of fighting jobs to female service members.
The move knocks down another societal barrier, after the Pentagon scrapped its "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" ban in 2011 on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military.The decision by outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is expected to be formally announced on Thursday (January 24) and comes after 11 years of non-stop war that has seen dozens of women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They have represented around 2 percent of the casualties of those unpopular, costly wars, and some 12 percent of those deployed for the war effort, in which there were often no clearly defined front lines, and where deadly guerrilla tactics have included roadside bombs that kill and maim indiscriminately.
The decision overturns a 1994 policy that prevents women from serving in small front-line combat units and would be implemented by 2016.
It comes nearly a year after the Pentagon unveiled a policy that opened 14,000 new jobs to women but still prohibited them from serving in infantry, armor and special operations units whose main function was to engage in front-line combat.
Asked last year why women who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan conducting security details and house-to-house searches were still being formally barred from combat positions, Pentagon officials said the services wanted to see how they performed in the new positions before opening up further.
Nearly 300,000 women have been deployed in the U.S forces in the Iraq and Afghanistanwars over the past 11 years, or about 12 percent of the total. Women have counted some 84 hostile casualties in those wars.