Services Integration Act,89 which opened permanent assignments for women on non-combat ships and temporary assignments (less than six months) on combat ships not expected to have a combat mission at the time.90
In 1981, then-Army Chief of Staff General Edward Meyer directed the creation of a Women in the Army Policy Review Group (WITA), which was tasked to review issues regarding women in combat and to provide policy recommendations. WITA defined direct combat as engaging the enemy with individual or crew weapons while being exposed to direct enemy fire, a high probability of direct physical contact with the enemy’s personnel, and a substantial risk of capture. Direct combat takes place while closing with the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock…show more content… All positions were assigned a code, P1 through P7, where P1 represented the highest probability of engaging in direct combat and P7 the lowest. P1 positions would be off-limits for women. Based on this analysis,
WITA concluded that twenty-three additional specialties must be closed towomen.92 The DCPC is still used today as the means to identify which Army positions are closed to women.
In 1988, the DoD created what is now known as the “risk rule” to further identify and narrow which traditional non-combat positions could be closed to women based on the mission and location of the job on the battlefield. The rule stated that the “risks of exposure to direct combat, hostile fire, or capture are proper criteria for closing non[-]combat positions or units to women, provided that . . . such risks are equal to or greater than experienced by combat units in the same theater of operations.”93
These policy and legislative lines were not so cleanly drawn on the battlefield. Seven hundred seventy women deployed to Panama in 1989 in support of Operation JUST CAUSE, serving in various “combat…show more content… “Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said onMarch 1991, ‘Women have made a major contribution to this [war] effort. We could not have won without them.’ Commanders in the field echoed similar sentiments. According to the Coalition commander, Gen. H. Norman
Schwarzkopf, American military women had performed ‘magnificently.’”95
Congress almost immediately began to consider repeal of the forty-three yearold combat exclusion laws. On December 5, 1991, the president signed the 1992
Defense Authorization Act,96 which included a provision repealing the law that prohibited women from flying combat aircraft.97 Under the new system, the restriction on women flying combat aircraft was left to the DoD’s discretion. The new legislation also directed the creation of a Presidential Commission on the
Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces to “study and make recommendations on a wide range of issues relating to service of women in the
Armed Forces, with principle focus on combat roles.”98
President George H. W. Bush created the Presidential Commission in
