The Policy Said One Thing. War Said Another.

The Department of Defense maintained a formal combat exclusion policy for decades. Since 1994, it prohibited assigning women to ground combat units below brigade level where the primary mission is direct ground combat.

But DOD spokesperson Eileen Lainez told ABC News back in 2011 that the policy did NOT "preclude women from being involved in ground combat."

The rule said women couldn't be assigned to combat. It said nothing about combat coming to them.

The Numbers Don't Lie

By Memorial Day 2011, according to ABC News, nearly 150 U.S. female troops had been killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Over 700 were wounded.

They didn't start with Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Airman to Mom historical record, the first two women killed in U.S. military service died on May 20, 1917 — Army nurses Edith Ayres and Helen Wood, killed aboard the USS Mongolia when a deck gun exploded during a practice drill en route to France.

Over 350,000 women served in WWII. 38 Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) died in service to the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Fallujah, 2005: The Reality of "Non-Combat" Roles

Marine Lance Corporal Angelica Jimenez, 26, was part of an all-female unit near Fallujah tasked with searching Iraqi women at security checkpoints — a mission only women could perform because of cultural restrictions on male soldiers searching females.

Because the women weren't permitted to sleep at the checkpoints like male Marines, they made the same dangerous convoy run every single day. Same road. Same schedule. Same target.

On June 25, 2005, a car packed with explosives drove straight into their truck. All 14 women were engulfed in the explosion. Two died immediately. A third died later that night. It was the deadliest attack on U.S. servicewomen since 1991, according to ABC News.

Jimenez survived. She woke up in the line of insurgent fire, covered in blood, her weapon gone.

"We were doing the same thing," she told ABC News. "Women are just as capable."

The enemy didn't care about Pentagon assignment policies.

What Mainstream Coverage Gets Wrong

Left-leaning outlets like the Washington Post frame this story primarily through the lens of evolving gender policy — women breaking barriers, the military finally catching up. That framing isn't wrong, but it's incomplete.

For decades, the Pentagon told the public — and Congress — that women were protected from combat. They weren't. The military put women in harm's way constantly, often because mission requirements demanded it, then hid behind a policy that was largely cosmetic.

The women who died near Fallujah were doing checkpoint security in a war zone. That IS combat. Calling it something else is bureaucratic fiction.

Right-leaning media, meanwhile, has often focused the debate on whether women should be in combat roles at all — a legitimate policy question — but in doing so has sometimes glossed over the plain fact that the exclusion policy was already broken in practice for years before it was officially ended in 2015.

Both sides are arguing about the policy. Neither is fully reckoning with the gap between what the policy said and what actually happened.

The Meritocracy Question

There's a real debate worth having about physical standards in combat roles — and it should be had honestly.

If standards are lowered to increase female representation, that raises questions about combat effectiveness and actual capability rather than checkbox metrics.

The answer is simple: one standard, applied equally. Meet it, you're in. Don't meet it, you're out. Man or woman.

Jimenez didn't ask for a lower bar. She ran the same checkpoints, took the same convoy routes, and survived the same firefight as the male Marines around her.

That's the standard worth defending.

What This Means

American women have been dying in America's wars since 1917. The debate over whether they belong in combat has always been, to some degree, a debate that history already settled — because war kept finding them regardless.

The women are already there. They always have been. Honor them accordingly.