Living Legends and Full Agency

Chapter 1 Introduction: Women and the Military

On January 25, 2013, the then U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that the long-standing policy in its various iterations, known in its last form as the combat exclusion policy that bars women from any jobs, occupations, and/or assignments that engage them in direct ground combat, will be repealed (Christensen 2013; Migdal 2013). According to the former secretary, full integration of women into all occupations in the military will be achieved by 2016 (Evans 2013) unless any branch of the military can demonstrate that there are certain roles for which women are either ill-equipped or simply not yet prepared to assume the roles (Sutton 2013). To that end, each military branch was asked ...