A New Horror of War: What kind of country sends its girls and mothers into combat?

From the comfortable safety of editorial offices, the capture of Specialist Shoshana Johnson by Iraqi irregulars is heralded as a welcome opportunity for someone else's daughter to face violent abuse or a horrific death on "equal footing" with the men in her company. In its editorial, "The Pinking of the Armed Forces," the New York Times laments that even more military women don't face a lethal threat, because the United States "is simply a laggard on the topic of women in combat." In a Washington Post op-ed, the normally sensible Anne Applebaum declares that "the argument about women in combat is over," since two female sailors were killed in the bombing of the USS Cole, women are engaging the enemy in Iraq, and "American civilization has not collapsed as a result."

So women soldiers are just like men soldiers, right? Wrong. Some are now arguing that the military -- just like law firms and newsrooms -- should get with the program and accommodate young mothers by offering generous leaves and sparing them deployments.

Just as war plans typically don't survive contact with the enemy, the ill-informed, ideologically driven case for women in combat, calling simultaneously for equal rights and special treatment, can't survive the facts on the ground. The indisputable fact is that military women are facing unprecedented danger in Iraq in the absence of a serious national debate about their appropriate wartime role. Soldiers' families are clearly unaware of the Clinton-era policy changes that have conferred feminist-icon status on their threatened loved ones: Spec. Johnson's younger sister explains that Shoshana, who joined the Army to train as a chef, never expected to be in such jeopardy, and her aunt, an Air Force veteran, expressed shock that her niece was accompanying front-line troops. "She shouldn't be facing this. She was supposed to cook for the troops. This is so awful," Margaret Thorne Henderson told the Miami Herald. "Too bad" sums up the reaction of Carolyn Becraft, an assistant secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who points out that women like Shoshana Johnson -- the mother of a two-year-old daughter -- have volunteered for service. In an interview with Anne Applebaum for the Washington Post, Becraft concludes: "This is their job. These are the conditions of their employment."

While Becraft boldly asserts that young women exposed to the brutality of the enemy are merely getting what they are underpaid for, the argument that a civilized nation doesn't send teenage girls and mothers to engage in hostilities to advance an equal-opportunity agenda is made sotto voce. "Very far off the record, one high-ranking Pentagon official" sheepishly admits to Applebaum that he is troubled by images of mothers hugging their babies before heading to the Gulf. "We're the United States of America. How can we ask a young woman to leave her infant?" the official anonymously asks.

Not so long ago, military leaders reflected American values by openly expressing their opposition to placing women in mortal danger on the battlefield. In early 1992, the heads of each service argued against integrating their combat forces. Former Air Force chief of staff Merrill McPeak told the "Women in Combat" Presidential Commission (on which I served) that he believed "old men shouldn't send young women to war." But -- illogically -- their sex scandals and -- ironically -- their battlefield successes soon combined to cause the services to raise a white flag in the Pentagon's gender wars and acquiesce in assigning women to the bulk of combat specialties.

At the end of the ...