Each of the U.S. armed services now excludes female members from active face-to-face combat. The nature and extent of the exclusion varies with each service. For the navy, marine corps, and air force, the exclusion is mandated by law. The law does not prohibit the army from employing women in combat. The army, however, has repeatedly assured Congress that it would not send its female soldiers into the trenches.

Why women were being excluded from combat has rarely been stated. Until recently, warfare was so clearly recognized as "men's work" that few people really thought to ask. When women began to enter the military, it became necessary to deal with the what, why, and how of excluding women.

The services have difficulty in defining what combat actually is in order to exclude women from it. In earlier centuries when weaponry was simple and its reach measured in tens or hundreds of yards, combat definitions were much easier. Before this century, the large majority of soldiers in the field and sailors at sea were combatants in the pure sense of the word. In battle they fought closely with their adversaries and attempted to kill or capture them. Consequently, all soldiers and sailors were generally considered combatants. Thus, we can derive the first of three components of combat that have traditionally governed the exclusion of women--that of function. A combatant is one whose duty involves direct action designed to kill or capture members of an opposing enemy force. Because almost all members of field forces had primary or secondary combatant functions, a female combat exclusion policy could and did equate with a military exclusion policy.

But what of those few soldiers and sailors whose function is and was explicitly other than killing or capturing the enemy? What about the physicians and their field assistants? By function, they are noncombatants, yet, they share all the hardships and dangers of the combatants because they are intermingled with them. The U.S. armed services have traditionally forbidden the employment of women as front-line medics because of the place in which the noncombatant function is performed. Similarly, women have been prohibited from serving as noncombatants on warships or as members of military air crews. Thus, we derive the second and third components of the combat definition--collocation with those engaged in active combat and the associated level of danger.

The function, collocation, and level of danger rules form the framework of past and present U.S. policy regarding the exclusion of women from combat. Simply stated, the rule has been that women would not be permitted to participate directly in military activities designed to kill or capture the enemy or to share the hardship and danger of the soldiers and sailors who were doing so. The function, collocation, and danger rules for many years prevented any female membership in the military services. Then, after women were admitted (first as auxiliaries and, subsequently, as servicewomen) the rules served to limit both the duties they were allowed to perform and the units and localities in which they could perform them. The logical basis and application of these rules are now, however, being challenged.

It is difficult to imagine the current women-in-combat debate taking place even a generation ago. At the turn of this century, American women could not vote, much less serve in the nation's armed services. Only forty years ago, there were no servicewomen except for nurses. In 1980 we find President Carter seeking authority to register women for a possible future draft. We find the military services under great political pressure to further increase their female content. We find litigation rising to the Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of drafting only males for future wars. Obviously, American attitudes on the nature and role of women in our society have changed, and have done so with startling speed. The question is: Should we take the final step and remove all barriers to employing women in combat?

The historical record is quite clear. War and soldiering, with few if any substantial pre-twentieth-century exceptions, have been an exclusive male preserve. One can point to the Amazons of Greek mythology but few real exceptions are recorded. Moreover, the pattern has been ubiquitous. The soldiers of Moses, Pericles, Darius, Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Wellington, and Washington were male only. The same has held true in primitive tribes throughout the world, across time. Sitting Bull's warriors were men. So were the warriors of aboriginal Australia, New Guinea, and so on. The pattern is too widespread and complete to have been a function of chance.

Pre- twentieth century man seems never to have seriously questioned the reservation of war for the male sex. He, wisely perhaps, left this to us. It was accepted that men were the hunters while women were the keepers of the home and bearers of children. Men had the hunting instinct while women's driving instinct was maternal. Men were aggressive while women were passive. In short, the innate emotional differences between the sexes suited men for war while ruling women out.

So, too, in the minds of our ancestors, did physical differences. Patently, women were smaller, weaker, slower, and had less physical endurance than males. All these attributes were essentially disqualifying in the era when all combat was characterized by strenuous physical activity.

Thus, for the five thousand years or so that we know about, women were not only excluded from combat but this exclusion was also accepted as right and natural. If someone had questioned this historic, unwritten exclusion policy, one can easily imagine the reply: "Women's unsuitability for combat is made apparent by the fact that they have never engaged in it. Thus, a posteriori, women are unsuited for combat." . . .