Helen Benedict, professor of journalism at Columbia University, is author of two books about the Iraq War, including The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq.

Army Specialist Laura Naylor, a Wisconsin native, spent a year in Baghdad with the 32nd Military Police Company in 2003 and 2004. During that time, she—like all of the more than quarter-million women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—was officially banned from ground combat. That technicality didn’t slow down Naylor when an IED hit her convoy and it began to take fire from a nearby building. “We had to search this house nearby, thinking they were the ones doing the shooting, and I was the lead person the whole way. I had a flashlight in one hand, a pistol in the other, and I’d kick the door open with my foot, look both ways, give the all clear, go to the next room, do the same thing,” she recounted to me a few years later. “We were interchangeable with the infantry.”

A friend in her unit, Specialist Caryle Garcia, was wounded when a roadside bomb went off beside her Humvee. Garcia was her team’s gunner, her body exposed from the chest up above the Humvee’s roof. Their close friend, 20-year-old Specialist Michelle Witmer, became the first National Guardswoman ever killed in action after being shot during another ambush. Witmer’s death was a grim marker in a steady march that has seen one woman after another achieve milestones in military service since the September 11, 2001, attacks that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago. During the Vietnam War, female soldiers were not even allowed to carry guns.


In early 2013, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, with the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, finally lifted the ban on women serving in ground combat, belatedly admitting they had already been doing so. “Women have shown great courage and sacrifice on and off the battlefield,” he said, “and proven their ability to serve in an expanding number of roles.” President Barack Obama heralded the move, which remains politically controversial on Capitol Hill, saying, “Valor knows no gender.” Since Panetta’s decree, the debate has centered on whether, now that women can serve in previously all-male combat units, they have the ability to actually do it. The Marine Corps, Army and Special Forces have all been busily, and publicly, putting women to the test, running them through training courses and assessments, and announcing gravely how many have passed or failed.

Yet to many female soldiers and the men who have witnessed their competence in battle over the past 13-plus years, this debate seems like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted—ignoring that the distinction between “rear echelon” and “front line” in these wars is obsolete. Of the roughly 300,000 American women who have deployed to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars since 2001, at least 800 have been wounded, and, as of last count, at least 144 have been killed. Two women have earned Silver Stars, the military’s third-highest award.

For generations now, the debate over women in combat has put the onus on women to prove they can handle the infantry and other traditionally all-male units. Yet today’s wars have made it clear that the military’s problem lies not with its women, their ability or their courage. The military’s problem, instead, is with some of its men—and a deeply ingrained macho culture that denigrates, insults and abuses women.

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In eight years of covering women at war, I have noticed a pattern in attitudes toward women in the military: The men who have served with women are more than satisfied with their work, while the men who are most resistant to serving alongside women have never done it.

For generations, the debate over women in combat has put the onus on women to prove they could handle the infantry and other all-male units.

“Oh, it’s too rough for women,” such men tend to say. Others complain, “Women would ruin our camaraderie” or “We’d be competing for women instead of looking out for ourselves.” As retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff, wrote, lifting the combat ban against women would be “confusing” and “detrimental to units.”

These attitudes reveal deeply patriarchal, condescending and creaky stereotypes about women, as if they are capable of being nothing more than soft, sexy objects of romance—or sexual prey.

Open In New Window OPTICS: What happened to the first women of West Point? (Click to view gallery.) | Photo by David Burnett/Contact Press Images

Some of the very same types of prejudiced objections were once raised against black and gay men entering the military, even though they had demonstrated their military prowess long before they were openly welcomed into the ranks. As former chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Shalikashvili wrote in 2007, many within the military were originally concerned that “letting people who were openly gay serve would lower morale, harm recruitment and undermine unit cohesion.”

And yet, even after President Harry Truman forced the racial integration of the military in 1948 and even after the fall of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2011, the military is still standing. And nobody questions any longer whether black or gay people can serve as well as straight white men.

Canada, Denmark and Norway have allowed women to serve in combat since the 1980s. Canadian commanders found no “negative effect on operational performance or team cohesion,” according to one report; neither did military leaders in Norway. Israel, which added women to combat units years ago, has found that they “exhibit superior skills” in discipline, shooting and weapons use.

Today’s debate about women would be less antediluvian if, instead of questioning whether women can do the job they’ve already been doing for years, it focused on why so many men in all-male companies still don’t want to work with women. To what sort of all-male camaraderie are they clinging, and why?

In some ways, it may seem hard to blame the men who feel this way. Military training inculcates these attitudes deep into their souls. Drill instructors dress down recruits by taunting them with suggestions that their girlfriends and wives are being unfaithful. Military cadences and songs can be astonishingly misogynist. One example from the Naval Academy: “ Who can take a chainsaw / Cut the bitch in two / Fuck the bottom half / And give the upper half to you…”

Long after racist language was banned from training, drill instructors regularly insult male recruits by calling them “ladies,” “pussies,” “girls” and worse. As an Iraq veteran wrote about his time in Marine boot camp in 2008, “The Drill Instructor’s nightly homiletic speeches, full of an unabashed hatred of women, were part of the second phase of boot camp: the process of rebuilding recruits into Marines.”

In other words, stoking men’s hatred and suspicion of women is a way of firing up those men to kill.

One of the most common objections put forth by men who don’t want to work with women is that they would be so concerned with protecting the women in their units that it would risk the mission. That is, they would be too chivalrous to be good soldiers.

But as more data on the military’s rampant sexual harassment and abuse come out, this chivalry argument becomes harder to believe. Given that half the women deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan reported being sexually harassed, and one in four reported being sexually assaulted, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs study, evidence of this gallantry is, to say the least, scant. Former Army Sgt. Rebekah Havrilla, who says she was raped while serving in Afghanistan, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee: “I had no faith in my chain of command as my first sergeant previously had sexual harassment accusations against him and the unit climate was extremely sexist and hostile in nature towards women.”

If the military wants to get serious about inviting female soldiers to play ever-larger roles in war, it will have to find ways to change the attitude of so many of its own soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

Stories from recent years about the depths of the military’s misogyny are legendary. In 2013, the head of the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention office at the Pentagon, Jeffrey Krusinski, was himself arrested and charged with sexual battery by police in Arlington, Virginia, after allegedly accosting a woman in a parking lot. (He was later acquitted by a jury.) An Army sergeant at Fort Hood who worked as a sexual abuse educator was investigated for running a prostitution ring. The married Army general in charge of Fort Jackson, who oversaw training for many Army recruits, was suspended after allegedly physically attacking his girlfriend.

If these are examples of the people in charge of ensuring respectful treatment of women, is it any surprise that new recruits see women as less than equals? Not long after Krusinski’s arrest, West Point’s rugby team was disbanded after lewd emails about fellow female cadets surfaced that the school said suggested “a culture of disrespect towards women.”

As one victim of sexual assault in the Air Force has said, ‘This is a predator problem, not a female problem.’”

Until the military recognizes women as equal human beings, how can it recognize them as equal soldiers? As Colleen Bushnell, who was sexually assaulted while in the Air Force and now is an advocate for survivors, has said, “This is a predator problem, not a female problem.”

Military culture may well be the last bastion of male protectionism in modern society, so it is no surprise that its arguments against admitting women fully are the same as those used whenever women first enter a previously all-male field—whether that is firefighting, policing, politics, sports or voting. Indeed, many of the objections macho military types make to women today mirror those their grandfathers and great-grandfathers made when women were trying to enter public life.

Yet there’s precious little evidence that all-male cultures produce anything better than co-ed cultures, just as there is no evidence at all that the presence of women as voters, golfers, politicians, police officers, firefighters—or presidents—ruins anything other than male privilege.

Elena Woods, 24, cleans her gun after returning home from a forward operating base in Helmand, Afghanistan, in April 2010. | Lynsey Addario/Getty Images Reportage

War has changed. It is simply unfeasible to keep women off the front lines. “We’re getting blown up right alongside the guys,” as one female soldier who served in Iraq told me. “We’re in combat! So there’s no reason to keep us segregated anymore.”

Admitting that the military’s problem with female soldiers is actually a man’s problem, however, will necessitate stronger military and political leadership than we have yet seen. It will require a wholesale shift in how the military builds respect among its troops. And it means teaching the men who don’t want to work with women that they must either respect their female comrades or leave. As Australia’s Army chief, David Morrison, put it to his troops in 2013, “Female soldiers and officers have proven themselves worthy of the best traditions of the Australian army. … If that does not suit you, then get out. … There is no place for you amongst this band of brothers and sisters.”

American military leaders, take note.