As Pentagon Opens Combat Roles to Women, What are Special Forces' Concerns?
As Pentagon Opens Combat Roles to Women, What are Special Forces' Concerns? By Anna Mulrine, Christian Science Monitor
With the lifting of the ban on women in special operations forces earlier this month, female service members are no longer automatically disqualified from being Navy SEALs, Delta Force operators, and Army Rangers because of their gender.
The Pentagon’s next big step is figuring out how to make it work. To this end, Defense officials launched a couple of big studies earlier this year to give them a sense of the major concerns and points of resistance among the troops who do these jobs.
What they found was that, while the men in these elite units express concerns about women meeting the grueling physical standards, they are generally quick to concede that they all know a woman or two who could make the cut…