Ready to Kill

But is empathy always bad? The Pentagon doesn't think so. Its new counterinsurgency manual stresses, "Genuine compassion and empathy for the populace provides an effective weapon against insurgents," adding, "Effective leaders are as skilled at limiting lethal force as they are in concentrating it. Indeed, they must learn that nonlethal solutions may often be preferable."

But it's not certain that military women are more empathetic. Anecdotal evidence from men who have fought alongside women hints that what's true for women generally may not be as true for women who join the military. As Sgt. Sam Alyassini, a Huey door gunner in Horner's squadron, puts it: "A lot of these female pilots have more balls than the male pilots. I don't know if they have something to prove or if they're just very confident in their skills, which are excellent."

In the military, that attitude about women is typical. While some civilians continue to argue over whether women are strong enough for combat, most soldiers have already concluded that women do have the physical strength, stamina and mental toughness to be effective, according to surveys by the U.S. Army Research Institute. Only about 14 percent of male and female soldiers say they'd change their career plans if women were to start fighting alongside men in direct ground combat. In a little more than a decade, military attitudes have done an about-face.

The attitude adjustment has been driven in part by changes in society. "We're the generation that grew up with our mothers working," says Lt. Col. Lawrence Killmeier, Horner's commanding officer in Iraq. His generation is used to working with women. "I still have those traditional thoughts -- men want to protect women. And some old-school types may have a problem. But today, most Marines are open and accepting of it."

The change in attitude is also driven by necessity. Since the male draft ended in 1973, fewer and fewer men have volunteered to serve. "The reason the all-volunteer force has worked is due to racial integration and women. They volunteered in large numbers," says retired Navy Capt. Barbara Brehm, now with the military women's advocacy group Alliance for National Defense.

Indeed, during the draft era, women made up about 2 percent of the 12 million people serving by the end of World War II and less than 1 percent in Vietnam, most of them nurses. In contrast, the all-volunteer force is now 15 percent female, with women serving in nine out of 10 military occupational specialties. Today's military can't go to war without women. The result: As the Army struggles to keep enough boots on the ground in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, a recent Rand Corp. study confirms that it has cut corners on its own strict policy of steering women clear of units that engage in direct ground combat.

In 2005, when Republicans in Congress proposed legislation that would have forced the Army to remove women from many of the jobs they'd been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the proposal ran into such fierce opposition from the Pentagon that it was abandoned. Even the retired general who heads the Association of the United States Army weighed in, writing to the House Armed Services Committee: "To impose this restriction on commanders as they prepare for deployment would be detrimental to their units that have trained and readied together."

If Army leaders have a high opinion of their female troops, it appears to be based on something other than empirical evidence. "I'm not aware of any formal study the Army is doing concerning female performance in combat," reports Army spokeswoman Maj. Anne Edgecomb in an e-mail. "And I would be surprised if there actually was a study. We see soldiers as soldiers, and we all train to the same standard required of our duty specialty. If you can achieve the standard to perform your duty, it doesn't matter what your gender is. We all have strengths and weaknesses that we bring to the fight, regardless of our gender."

So, from the military's perspective, it seems to make little difference who kills the enemy, male or female. But does it make a difference to society?

"We see our female soldiers with helmets and gear, and we're very proud of them. But the social costs are high," argues Elaine Donnelly, head of the independent Center for Military Readiness, which focuses on military personnel policy issues. "If we as a nation say it's okay to expose women to direct combat violence, it's a cultural shift, and not in the right direction."

On this issue, Donnelly is allied both with conservatives such as political activist Phyllis Schlafly on the far right and radical feminists on the far left. According to Mady Segal, the military sociologist, radical feminists contend that the many changes in gender roles since the '60s have been mostly one-way: Women have become more like traditional, aggressive men, but men haven't become much more nurturing. "The radical feminist view," says Segal, "is that women shouldn't be in the military, that we need to preserve some portion of humanity who don't become takers of life."

Before all those changes in the '60s, a woman's biological role as a mother generally kept her off the killing fields. In her book, Women in the Line of Fire, feminist military affairs writer Erin Solaro summarizes the historical research this way: "Women who, because of their sex, risked their lives and health bearing children should not also have to bear the burden of defending those children when men were available."