What do we know, anyway?

Are women likely to compromise military missions? Probably not. So why grant them fewer opportunities for career advancement on the basis of their sex?

That is the question being asked by much of the United States right now. And the answer is simple: women are just as capable as men, and it’s unlikely that they would compromise military operations. Women should serve on the front lines.

However, since the Pentagon opened up the possibility for women to serve on the front lines (although as medics and radio operators and not officially in battle), some people—including potential presidential candidate Rick Santorum—stated that this decision could be problematic.

According to Santorum, allowing women to serve on the front lines of combat could lead to compromising situations simply because of the emotions involved.

Though he later clarified that he was referring to the emotions of the male soldiers and their supposed need to protect women in combat, this did not stop his views on the issue from sounding belittling to women.

The real question here is not how Santorum views women, but whether his argument is correct and if the presence of women on the front lines would indeed compromise military missions.

Throughout history, women have served in the military. However, the United States is not one of the nations in which women have ever served on the front lines. Until now, that is.

A handful of other countries already allow women to serve on the front lines, and many women do not want to be protected and would rather be held at the same standards as the male soldiers. Most women who join the military know what the risks are and are prepared for the same tasks that the men consider when joining the military. It is not as if a woman makes the decision lightly.

As a matter of fact, the women who join are more likely to have had a choice, seeing as men have historically been drafted in a times of war, whereas women have not.

Therefore, it almost makes more sense to worry about the men who were drafted than about the people who decided for themselves. And in thousands of years of recorded history, women have rarely been required to serve in the military.

General Peter Chiarelli, who was the nation’s second-highest–ranking army general before he retired, has said that keeping women from the front lines does not necessarily protect them because there are no safe jobs on a nonlinear battlefield.

In fact, 145 women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan lost their lives to gunfire and roadside bombs despite not being on the front lines. 145 women dead, out of the 255,000 who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan overall, may seem like a small number, but it is enough to show that people die no matter where they are on the field.

The people serving on the front lines also have a higher chance of taking actions that warrant promotions. To deny women the chance to serve on the front lines is to deny them the chance to rise to higher positions within the military.

That being said, is Rick Santorum correct in taking the liability of women on the front lines into account? Not necessarily.

Even if male soldiers feel the need to protect female soldiers, these are not men and women who are taken straight off of the streets and thrown onto the front lines. They are people who have been in the military for enough time to know what consequences there are to their actions.

For someone who has not been in the military (Rick Santorum has no record of military service), it is hard to know what the thought process is of the people in the military. It is possible that one may think that a male soldier would compromise a mission by trying to protect a female soldier.

However, men finding themselves in a situation where a female soldier is in danger may not necessarily react in the same way an ordinary civilian would think they would.

Soldiers likely see their friends and comrades on the front lines get into dangerous situations anyway, and the possibility of one of these comrades being a woman would not necessarily make a difference.

There are many advantages to the decision to allow women to serve on the front lines, in any case. New personnel will be brought to the front lines, relieving a lot of people. More personnel means less stress placed upon the soldiers who are already there.

If the military needs people, which it always does, what difference should one’s gender make? The fact that the addition of women to the front lines will clearly do more good than harm far outweighs the possibility that Santorum talked about, of the mission being compromised due to the women evoking emotions in the men that could get in the way of the mission.

Just last year, Australia made the decision to allow women to serve on the front lines, and the women in a number of other countries serve on the front lines as well. If that had, at any point, turned out to be a dangerous and compromising decision, these countries would likely have taken that decision back.

Maybe it’s time to send the women out first.