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January 27, 2005

Women Move to the Front

The Army has decided to place women in Forward Support Companies (FSCs) dedicated to direct support of combat units. The official line is that this does not put women into combat roles, as the FSCs are not assigned to front line units, but the truth is that these women will almost certainly see combat in the kinds of wars we face today.

Forward Support Companies are a relatively new part of the Army. Up until the late 1980s, each combat unit contained its own organic support elements: mechanics, cooks, medics, and so on. The Army shifted gears to place those elements in the Headquarters and Headquarters Companies (HHCs) of each battalion to consolidate the elements in the late 1980s. This didn't change much in implementation, however, as HHC still provided maintenance teams and medics to each line company to keep the support where it was needed. In the mid-1990s, the Army's authorized end strength was cut back to its current level, and the Army faced a choice: eliminate some divisions, or reshape those it had. The Army chose plan B. Divisions shrank from ten combat battalions to nine, and support elements were completely removed from combat battalions and consolidated in the Forward Support Battalions. Each FSC included fuel and cargo vehicles replacing the combat battalions' support platoons, and a maintenance section to replace the combat battalions' maintenance platoons. I have never served in a battalion equipped with the new MTOE (Modified Table of Organization and Equipment), but I know that the consensus among combat arms officers was that this reorganization was a bad idea because it placed critical support elements under the command of a battalion commander who might have other priorities than that of the combat arms battalion commander. That's another topic for another day, however. What's important to note is that the FSCs were now officially attached to noncombat elements, but would still be expected to provide support to frontline units.

If the Army is now planning to assign women to these units, then they will be placing women directly behind the front lines. While combat battalion doctrine places support elements behind the fighting, it is normally only one terrain feature back. In other words, if the fighting is taking place in an open field, the company First Sergeant will keep the company trains behind a ridge or hill or forest closest to that field to balance force protection and responsive support. In today's combat zones, a single terrain feature behind the front lines is likely to face a significant threat. The idea that the Army can place women in these units while preventing them from combat operations is questionable.

How will this affect units? A definitive answer is unlikely to be accurate without more experience, but there are a few things we can expect. There will be plenty of sex, for one thing. You can't place young men and women together without a sizeable fraction of them getting together. Biology is simply too strong a pull for people at that age, particularly when added to the stresses of combat. I don't have anything against sex per se, but sexual relationships tend to complicate life in short order. Soldiers who know that their girlfriend/boyfriend is involved in combat face additional distraction at a time when distractions can be fatal. Even men not sexually involved with women in the unit may find the screams of wounded or dying women to be a dangerous distraction. Whether from biological or sociological roots, men tend to be protective of women, and it is plausible to assume some men will take undue risks when fighting alongside women. Conversely, men and women have fought together already on the modern battlefield, most notably at Nasiriyah, and while those results were grim, I'm not aware of any evidence that the mix of male and female soldiers affected the outcome. So, while my personal preference would be to fight without women, it's possible placing women in support units near the front can be achieved without degrading combat capabilities.

More to the point, it's likely that the Army has little choice in the matter. With a limited pool of manpower, the Army has to maximize its use of males for pure combat roles. This means that women will be overrepresented in support units, and that support units simply are no longer able to function without females because there aren't enough men to fill the billets. In other words, we have here still more evidence of the stresses being placed on the Army by our policies regarding force structure. Regardless of how one feels about the use of women in combat units, the decision has been taken out of everyone's hands as long as we refuse to alter our force structure.