Women's work

The Pentagon was accused of infringing on the rights of some military personnel

"The enemy doesn't discriminate between genders," said Jennifer Hunt, 28, a staff sergeant in the US Army Reserve. Hunt, along with other servicewomen, filed a lawsuit seeking to declare unconstitutional Pentagon rules that restrict female service members from participating in combat. Women not only strive to defend the interests of the United States on an equal basis with men, but also demand that their merits not be diminished because of their belonging to the fair sex.

There are four plaintiffs - in addition to Jennifer Hunt, they are 27-year-old Captain Zoe Bedell, 26-year-old First Lieutenant Colleen Farrell and 36-year-old Major Mary Jennings Hegar. Hegar is now completing his active duty service, and the other three have already been transferred to the reserves. The ladies claim that they took part in combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then faced injustice. Their interests in federal court are defended by the leading human rights organization - the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The total number of active personnel in the US armed forces is approximately 1.4 million people, women - about 14 percent, that is, in the region of two hundred thousand. According to the Ministry of Defense, approximately 280 thousand women took part in the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns over the past eleven years, 144 of them were killed and more than 860 were injured. At the same time, as the ACLU calculated, 85 percent of all women who served in active units after 9/11 had a chance to visit Afghanistan and Iraq. And almost half claim that they had to participate in combat operations.

According to regulations established by the Pentagon in 1994, women are prohibited from serving in a unit below the brigade level if its primary mission is direct ground combat. Simply put, women were only allowed to be on the battlefield as part of large groups of troops. Women were completely banned from fighting in the infantry. "These rules have shut down entire careers and thousands of positions for women in the military," said ACLU attorney Ariela Migdal, who represents four of the plaintiffs in California.

Military women who filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon. Photo from presstv.ir

Critics say the restrictions are outdated and out of touch with overseas operations, which, as Marine Capt. Zoe Bedel put it, have "no front lines and no safe zones." Bedell commanded a 46-member all-female unit in Afghanistan in 2009, which was stationed with a combat infantry unit. The captain's subordinates took part in patrolling the area, carried exactly the same weapons as male Marines, and came under fire in the same way. However, Bedel's service record states that her unit was not combat, but auxiliary.

The authors of the lawsuit claim that the military constantly resorts to vague language and other tricks to retouch the real role of women in combat operations. For example, women are attached to combat units on a temporary basis, and auxiliary women’s units can be regularly recalled from the conflict zone to the main base: even if this interferes with the progress of the operation, the unit will formally remain non-combatant. So it turns out that female veterans seem to have no experience of participating in combat.

Jennifer Hunt was driving a Hummer carrying engineering personnel in Iraq in 2007 when it hit a mine. The staff sergeant received shrapnel wounds to her face and arms, as well as a burn to her back. Air National Guard Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar flew a casualty helicopter in Afghanistan that was shot down by the Taliban in 2009. Despite her injuries, Hegar was able to land the vehicle, return fire, and ensure the successful evacuation of the wounded. Both women received Purple Hearts and other awards, but did not formally participate in combat.

The Ministry of Defense has already responded to the lawsuit, in which the head of the Pentagon Leon Panetta himself is listed as a defendant . Ministry representative Eileen Lainez recalled that some of the former barriers have already been removed. In February 2012, a decision was made to adjust the 1994 rules, opening up more than 14,000 more positions in the armed forces to women. In particular, women were officially allowed to serve in units based together with combat units, as well as in combat formations at the battalion level.

“Our goal is to ensure that the best trained and most capable people, regardless of gender, perform the assigned tasks,” Lainez assured. According to her, Panetta and his subordinates are doing everything possible to ensure that personnel policies in the armed forces fully comply with the principle of gender equality. In short, the process is underway, but it is unclear when it will be completed. Meanwhile, as the ACLU notes, 238,000 positions are still closed to female military personnel, they cannot fight in infantry units, they do not have access to some educational institutions, and they are less likely than men to receive veterans' benefits. Promotion is difficult due to lack of combat experience.

“Nearly a century has passed since women gained voting rights,” Hegar and her colleagues said in the lawsuit, “but restrictions on participation in combat deprives them of an important part of full citizenship - the opportunity to participate equally in the military defense of our country.”

Opponents of “combat equality” doubt that female soldiers, purely physically, will be able to bear the hardships of war on an equal basis with men, but dissatisfied warriors will apparently achieve their goal in the foreseeable future. The California initiative is not the only one of its kind: a lawsuit filed against the US Army by two female reservists is pending in federal court in Washington, who also demand that the current rules be declared unconstitutional.

Vasily Chepelevsky

Women's work

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