In 2006, as the war in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, a Pentagon employee working on special operations teamed up with a Czech technology entrepreneur who had dabbled in the porn business and devised what they considered an ingenious plan. Knowing that video games played on mobile phones were popular throughout the Middle East, the team wanted to build games that contained positive messages about the United States. But the games weren't just about propaganda. Every download would give the United States a window into the digital comings and goings of whomever was playing it it, a cyber foothold that could allow American spies to potentially track and collect information on thousands of people.
The propaganda/spy campaign was dubbed Native Echo, and it was conceived by Michael Furlong, a colorful civilian employee working for US Special Operations Command, and a company called U-Turn, which was headquartered in Prague and founded by a pro-American Czech national named Jan Obrman, whose parents had fled the Soviets in the 1960s. The idea was to target Middle Eastern teenagers in "high risk/unfriendly areas," and over time to integrate the US messages "into the lifestyle of the targets," ideally to make them more amenable to US armed forces, and to counter the rhetoric of Muslim fundamentalists.
The full account of this previously unreported intelligence operation is found in the new book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by New York Times national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti. The book explores the ways in which the CIA--which before 9/11 had long been out of the business of killing people--and the US military--which had not been the domain of spies--have often changed roles over the past decade. It is filled with characters, like Furlong, who move between the membranes of these two worlds, and find themselves at home in either one.
Mazzetti writes that the first mobile game developed for Native Echo was modeled on the popular Call of Duty series. This new "shooter" game, Iraqi Hero, "took the player on an odyssey through the streets of Baghdad, shooting up insurgents trying to kill civilians in a wave of terrorist attacks," Mazzetti writes. "The goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver the secret plans for an upcoming insurgent attack, plans that had been stolen from a militia group's headquarters."
Native Echo was timed to coincide with the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007. Its "main focus was on combatting the flood of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa," Mazzetti writes.
As an intelligence collection program, Native Echo was both broad and audacious:
"Thousands of people would be sending their mobile-phone numbers and other identifying information to U-Turn, and that information could be stored in military databases and used for complex data-mining operations carried out by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. The spies wouldn't have to go hunting for information; it would come to them."
In order to hide the US role in the scheme, "Furlong convinced [U-Turn's] executives to create an offshore company that could receive Pentagon contracts but not be tied directly to the United States," Mazzetti writes. Obrman set up JD Media Transmission Systems, LLC, incorporated in the Seychelles Islands, in order to receive money transfers from the US through a foreign bank account.
Furlong was a master at working the byzantine procurement bureaucracy to further his covert plans. "Taking advantage of a law that allows firms owned by Native Americas to get a leg up when bidding on government contracts, Furlong arranged for U-Turn to partner with Wyandotte Net Tel, a firm located on a tiny speck of tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma," Mazzetti writes.
U-Turn developed two more games for Native Echo--Oil Tycoon, which challenged players to protect vital pipelines and infrastructure, and City Mayor, in which players became urban planners and rebuilt a fictional city destroyed by terrorists. The team came up with various ways to distribute the games, including by hand via memory cards, which could be sold or given away in markets and bazaars, Mazzetti reports. "The way to get far wider distribution, however, was to post the games on Web sites and blogs frequented by gamers in the Middle East. This allowed [Special Operations Command] to monitor how many people were downloading the games and, more important, who was doing it."
Mazzetti concludes that it's hard to know how far Native Echo went, and even how many companies like U-Turn were hired to create propaganda for the military. Furlong came up with other wild ideas, some of which were never approved. But the relationship between the military and U-Turn blossomed, and it offers a concrete illustration of how the armed forces evolved into a network of spies.
The Way of the Knife is full of stories like this, of people living on the edge between two worlds, frequently not sure how to operate on turf that had long been forbidden. The book is a culmination of Mazzetti's years of reporting on the intersections of the military and the CIA, and it is a forceful, compelling articulation of a new way of war. Mazzetti's reporting has been among some of the most important, in that it has shed light on usually hidden practices, particularly the use of brutal interrogations on terrorist detainees. As the book unfolds, we see how the 9/11 attacks shake the CIA out of their Cold War culture of espionage, and turn the agency into a highly-efficient global killing force.
I spoke with Mazzetti yesterday as he was heading off to New York to begin a book tour. He said that he began working after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and that the first few months of writing were filled with some anxiety, since his journalism beat was now the hottest around. Lots of his competitors were writing books and long magazine articles about the raid. But Mazzetti said that he wanted to write something broader, to show how the long arc of the war on terror has fundamentally changed how the US fights.
"I covered the Pentagon for five years, and then I have been covering the intelligence world since 2006," Mazzetti said. "And really, I realized that I was kind of covering the same beat. The lines that existed before 9/11, where the military did this and the spies did that, really have blurred."
Mazzetti said he's glad to be back at the Times after a 15-month book leave. He had missed the collegiality of an office. Writing a book is solitary business. But in the midst of the project, Mazzetti and his wife, Lindsay, welcomed Max, their first child.
"I can't wait until he is old enough to read this book," Mazzetti writes in his acknowledgments. "I cherish the memories of the mornings we spent together during the first few months, and of the smiles he delivered when I came home at the end of particularly frustrating days of book writing. They put things in perspective."
Ken Anderson and Ben Wittes, two good friends of Dead Drop, are embarking on an intriguing and from my perspective quite welcome new project. They're writing a book that will pull together all the significant speeches Obama administration officials have given on national security law, and then "weave it all back together, creating a synthetic account of the administration’s views that is worth more collectively than the sum of its parts."
Called Speaking the Law, it will be "a kind of handbook on the framework for counterterrorism," using administration officials' own words as the foundation. "Consider it the White Paper the administration has never issued," say Ken and Ben.
I suspect Obama administration officials themselves will be among this book's most avid readers, given the authors' premise, and that journalists and scholars will find it useful as well:
"There is a myth that the administration has had little to say on the subject of its counterterrorism authorities, especially targeted killing and drones--largely because it has declined to release publicly its Office of Legal Counsel targeted killing memoranda. Part of the point of Speaking the Law is to show how wrong this myth really is. The administration has actually said a huge amount. It’s just that it has said a great deal of it orally, and has broken up its utterances among a number of different statements."
The authors are publishing the chapters serially online, and then the Hoover Institution will put out a hardcover version when all the work is finished. The introduction and first chapter are available now.
Ashton Carter (left), the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and his mentor Brent Scowcroft, who was honored at a dinner in Washington Tuesday. Photo by Carol Ross Joynt
When Ash Carter, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, was a 32-year-old associate professor at Harvard, he was asked to accompany a US arms control delegation to Moscow. The Reagan administration wanted to examine a new laser system that the Soviets claimed would be used to research the surface of Mars, but that might also be deployed as an space-based anti-missile system.
Carter had studied physics and had once worked as a missile-defense analyst. He was expected to give his analysis (the delegation later concluded the Soviet laser could violate a ballistic missile treaty that had been in place for 15 years), but he didn't expect his contribution to carry much weight.
"I was a nobody," Carter said at a dinner in Washington on Tuesday, honoring Brent Scowcroft, who was then a leading thinker on US-Soviet nuclear relations, and would, in a few years, be the national security adviser to George W. Bush. "Brent listened to me. He treated me as an equal." It was the beginning of a mentorship that, as Carter tells it, led to his advising a string of secretaries of defense, and now to his own position as the No. 2 at the Pentagon.
"The influence of Brent Scowcroft stands before you: Me."
When a protege talks about of his mentor, at the end of his career, the tone inevitably gets eulogistic. Scowcroft is 87. He has been out of government for two decades, though he remains an eminence grise in national security and business circles. And while Carter hardly gave a valediction, there was a certain wistfulness--how could there not be?--in saluting an aged Cold Warrior.
"We were closer to war with the Soviets than anyone, except Brent, might have realized," Carter said. "As you go to sleep tonight and reflect on this evening, remember it all could have been very different if not for [him]."
When it came time for Scowcroft to talk, he made no pretense of his utter bafflement at the complex state of global affairs today. In the Cold War, he said, "The threat of a thermonuclear war...was just over the horizon." But in the possibility of annihilation there was a certain clarity. "The world was given to us. Our strategy was containment. ...That made things a lot easier." He shook his head. "But not today. There is no overarching strategy." It was not a critique of any administration. Just an observation that, in his day, things were somehow simpler.
Scowcroft, smiling tenderly, turned to his pupil: "Ash Carter, thank you for taking time off tonight from problems I wouldn't wish on anyone."
Spencer was born and raised in Washington, DC, and played high-school football in Prince George's County. Photo by Scott Ash
It's rare to find a military brat who spent his childhood years living in one place. It's rarer still that the place is Washington, DC.
Gen. Larry Spencer, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, was born at Walter Reed Hospital, in 1954. His father, Alfonzo, served in the Army and fought in the Korean War, and if not for a horrific accident, the Spencers might have lived the itinerant life of a typical military family.
Alfonzo was a heavy equipment operator, and while transporting a bulldozer from one town to another, he fell off the top and caught his left hand in the tracks. His mauled limb became infected with gangrene and the hand was amputated.
He came home and went for treatment in the hospital where his son was born. Doctors fashioned an innovative prosthetic device to give Alfonzo some dexterity. By today's standards, it was a primitive and grisly contraption.
"They cut a hole through his bicep," Spencer says. "As a kid, I could stick my finger right though it. They put a plastic sleeve on, and they had a metal hook on the end. Wires came up both sides of that sleeve. And there was a thing shaped like a hot dog that fit into the bicep. He would flex his muscle to move the hook."
Spencer says his dad was an expert marksman, and even with the new hand, he still was.
For Alfonzo, personal injury marked the beginning of a new career. He was assigned to the Forest Glenn Annex, nearby Walter Reed, where the Army was experimenting with new prosthetic technologies. "He was on the ground floor of that," Spencer says. Today, Walter Reed is still the site of the military's most advanced prosthetics research, and the technology has come a long way since the hole in Alfonozo's arm.
The Spencers lived in a quiet neighborhood in Southeast Washington. The city was different then, he says. "I never thought twice about going anywhere in DC. It wasn't considered dangerous."
Spencer joined the Boy Scouts. Before meetings, Alfonzo would inspect his son's uniform--shirt tucked, cap on straight, shoes shined. "It was not cool in Southeast to walk down the street in a uniform," Spencer says. Once he got far enough from the house, Spencer would remove his Boy Scout dress, change into street clothes, and stuff the uniform in his bag.
Spencer didn't seem destined for a military career. In high school, the family moved to Seat Pleasant, Maryland, in Prince George's County. Spencer was a standout football player at Central High School, and the team captain. "I played offense, defense, kickoff team, return team, punt team. We never came off the field. I loved football."
After graduation, Spencer played briefly in a semi-pro league in the area. "But I recognized at some point there wasn't a lot of future in it," he says. There was also no money it; the league's players were unpaid.
One day in 1971, with Vietnam War protests in high-gear across Washington, Spencer was walking through a shopping mall in Suitland, Maryland, off Branch Ave. "I don't know why," he says, "but I sort of of stumbled into the Air Force recruiter's office. And when I stumbled out of there, I was in the Air Force."
He didn't have a single semester hour of college credit. He went home to tell his parents that he'd joined up. "They couldn't believe it," he says. Spencer asked his dad to drop him off at the bus station early the next morning. Later, he took his first plane ride, down to Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, Texas, to begin basic training.
Spencer says he took to the regimented life immediately. Up early. Exercising all day. "It was like being at football practice." He worked his way through college at nights and eventually went to Officer Training School and was commissioned in 1980.
Unlike his father, Spencer did move around throughout his career, to various assignments in the US. But his roots stayed in Washington. His mother, Selma, lives 20 minutes from his office in the Pentagon. Spencer is a die-hard Redskins fan, and says one of the highlights of the past year was attending a game and meeting Robert Griffin III.
Spencer has been back at the Pentagon since 2006, working frequently on budget and personnel issues as the military braces for cuts and tries to reintegrate thousands of combat veterans into life stateside. It wasn't until recently that Spencer got the chance to talk with his father about his own experience in war.
Like a lot of veterans of his generation, Alfonzo never spoke about his service, his son says. "But we noticed little things. On the Fourth of July, the fireworks going off would bother him. But we didn't think much about it."
It was only eight years ago that Spencer found out what had happened to his father in Korea, including the details of his injury. Finally sharing his story, Alfonzo realized that he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Sixty years after he'd gone to war, Alfonzo joined a group counseling program for veterans that met in Baltimore.
"I tell people now coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, my father waited until he was 80 years old to go in for PTSD [treatment]," Spencer says. The message is clear: Don't wait. Times have changed. Alfonzo died in 2009.
Spencer's parents probably wouldn't have guessed he'd one day become the highest-ranking African American in the Air Force. But he comes from a family of path breakers. In 1951, Spencer's mother, along with 450 of her classmates, walked out the doors of the all-black R. R. Moton High School, in Farmville, Va., to demand better conditions at their tiny school, which was built to handle only 150 students. The one story-building had eight classrooms, no gym, and no cafeteria. Moton's teachers earned less than their white counterparts at other county schools.
The student protest led to a lawsuit, which was later joined with Brown V. Board of Education and heard before the Supreme Court. In 1954, the justices ruled unanimously that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
In January, during celebrations honoring Martin Luther King, Spencer spoke at his mom's old high school, which is now a museum. "I am reminded of Dr. King's words," he said. "'Courage is an inner resolution to go forth despite obstacles. Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.'"
"My mother, her classmates and countless others during the civil rights movement are a key reason why I wear this Air Force uniform today. Many people sacrificed a lot back then to change a country that now allows me and others to graciously and happily sacrifice for it."
In the wake of news that the New York Times' computer networks were infiltrated by Chinese cyber spies, three more news organizations have reportedly had their networks infiltrated as part of what is being described as a broad campaign of espionage targeting American media companies.
The Wall Street Journal reports that its networks were infiltrated, "apparently to monitor its China coverage." The Journal also quotes a spokeswoman for Thomson Reuters PLC saying the Reuters news service was hacked twice last year.
Today, security journalist Brian Krebs reports that the Washington Post was hit, as well. According to a former Post information technology employee, Krebs reports:
"[A]ttackers compromised at least three servers and a multitude of desktops, installing malicious software that allowed the perpetrators to maintain access to the machines and the network.
"They seemed to have the ability to do anything they wanted on the network. 'They transmitted all domain information (usernames and passwords),' the former Post employee said on condition of anonymity. 'We spent the better half of 2012 chasing down compromised PCs and servers. [It] all pointed to being hacked by the Chinese. They had the ability to get around to different servers and hide their tracks. They seemed to have the ability to do anything they wanted on the network.'"
Security companies and government investigators responded to the breach, Krebs reports. And in a move that is sure to raise eyebrows in the Post newsroom, particularly among reporters covering national security and cyber espionage, "experts from the National Security Agency and Defense Department took one of the Post's servers for forensic analysis."
Krebs doesn't say whether the FBI was involved with the Post investigation. Presumably the bureau would have the lead in a case such as this. The Defense Department has the biggest and arguably most sophisticated computer forensics agency in the government, but the FBI has that capability, as well. It's not immediately clear why DOD agencies would take the computer equipment. But the DOD could be assisting the FBI.
There's news out of the New York Times this morning--about the New York Times. A long article details how hackers, whom the paper's bosses believe are in China, stole the passwords of Times employees, accessed the e-mail accounts of some reporters, and rooted around the Times networks for four months. The intruders appeared to be looking for the names of people who might have given information to a Times reporter working on a major expose of a top Chinese government official.
From the paper:
"The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China's prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings."Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times's network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen's relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times's South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing."
As a journalist--that is, someone who goes to considerable lengths to protect the information I collect and the identities of people I talk to--this is a chilling revelation. Deeply unsettling. And sadly, not at all surprising.
Foreign intelligence services have been targeting US corporations, members of Congress and their staff, think tanks and law firms, and defense contractors for years. In every instance, the spies are after secret, proprietary information, with an eye towards getting strategic advantage over US companies and the government. News reporters, particularly those in regular contact with foreign and US sources in governments and the private sector, would be prime targets for any credible intelligence service. I reported in 2011 that spies may have tried to impersonate a well-known Washington journalist, Bruce Stokes, in order to spy on the State Department. We journalists are low-hanging fruit.
"Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times's newsroom."
Yikes.
Presumably, any reporter working in China is exercising some strong operational security. Hopefully, he's not keeping notes on a computer, not exchanging e-mails with sources, and limiting electronic communications. But it sounds like once the spies got into the network, via spear phishing, they had freedom to roam and gather information about many reporters.
"Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied," said Jill Abramson, the Times's executive editor. That's somewhat surprising, considering how long the intruders were inside the network.
Note, though, Abrams says no "sensitive" e-mails were accessed. That doesn't mean other, non-sensitive emails weren't read. And the Times article doesn't say--nor could experts know--whether the spies were able to glean any insights about a reporter's sources by examining the names of people sending e-mails, which one could see just by looking at the inbox, without having to open the e-mail or copy it.
It could be that the paper's security consultant, Mandiant, was able to prevent any massive exfiltration of sensitive information. Or maybe the spies just managed to find what they were looking for and didn't need to siphon off files. The Times article gives a pretty broad description of the cat and mouse game between the spies and the security experts.
"To get rid of the hackers, The Times blocked the compromised outside computers, removed every back door into its network, changed every employee password and wrapped additional security around its systems."
It seems that reporters weren't alerted to the ongoing investigation, which makes sense if Mandiant didn't want to tip anyone off to the investigation. (These are reporters, after all.) One Times scribe I know only found out about the past months events after reading the paper this morning.
Reporters' passwords were reset, apparently to the frustration of some.
"I would like to apologize to the NYT computer support folks I snapped at after they reset my password without warning," national reporter John Schwartz wrote in a tweet.
In reply, national security reporter Charlie Savage, tweeted, "Explains a lot of bustling yet somewhat inexplicably furtive activity by the IT support staff in recent months."
"[Y]es, and a lot of yelling by writers on deadline!" wrote Schwartz.
It would seem, based on the Times account, that the intruders were only interested in reporting about the Wen family. Mandiant found "no evidence" that those stolen passwords were used to seek any other kind of information. That suggests that this intrusion was targeted and disciplined.
However, the Times called the intrusion "part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations."
"Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees' computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company's internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China's vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that 'no computer systems or computers were compromised.'"
No customer data was stolen from the Times, security experts said.
If the Times's reporting is accurate, we should presume that the attacks on it and Bloomberg are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I'd imagine news rooms across town and across the country today are going to search their networks for any suspicious activity. For its part, the Times became suspicious after learning of warnings from Chinese government officials that the investigation of Wen would "have consequences." On October 24, 2012, executives at the paper asked AT&T, which monitors the Times's networks, "to watch for unusual activity."
At least one security expert is sounding a skeptical note on all this, saying the Times has no basis for pointing the finger at China. Jeffrey Carr wrote on his blog:
"This article appears to be nothing more than an acknowledgment by the New York Times that they found hackers in their network (that's not really news); that China was to blame (that's Mandiant's go-to culprit), and that no customer data was lost (i.e., the Times isn't liable for a lawsuit)."I think that Mandiant does good incident response work . . . however their China-centric view of the hacker world isn't always justified in my opinion."
Carr goes on to dissect the article and explain why he thinks other countries would have a motive to spy on the Times.
In his confirmation hearing this morning, Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel was asked about cyber threats against the United States, although the question tended towards threats to physical infrastructure rather than espionage.
"Cyber, I believe represents as big a threat to this country as any one specific threat," Hagel said, promising that he'd put "high priority" on the issue if confirmed. "It's an insidious, quiet kind of a threat threat we've never quite seen before. It can paralyze a nation a second."
Hagel said that the current Congress has to pick up cyber legislation that failed to pass last year. "You must, and you know that."
In rescinding an order today that prevented women from serving in ground combat roles, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who in 2011 presided over the repeal of a ban on openly gay service members, solidified a legacy as one of the most significant reformers of the U.S. military. Taken together, those two policies mark perhaps the broadest and most significant change in the social structure of the military since the advent of the all-volunteer force, in 1973, and prior to that the deactivation of the last all black unit in the Army, in 1954, which completed racial integration of the military.
American women have been serving for more than a century in war zones, frequently in support positions such as nursing or transportation. (Nearly half a million served during World War II.) And women have been allowed to fly in combat since the 1990s. But a 1994 rule prohibited women from assignment to units engaged in direct ground combat.
Panetta rescinded that order today. Now, more than 200,000 women, approximately 15 percent of the overall force, will be eligible for frontline battle positions, including serving in the infantry, in tanks, and special operations forces, or any position in which they are likely to encounter an enemy on the ground and take fire. The military services must begin to open positions that were previously closed to women or provide a reason why they should continue to be restricted only to men.
For Panetta, who is preparing to step down as the nation's 23rd Defense Secretary, lifting the ban caps a storied Washington career. He has served both as an elected member of Congress and also in a variety of appointed, senior positions in the executive branch. He has been known as a shrewd manager, an expert navigator of Washington politics and bureaucracy. In his prior position as director of the CIA, he succeeded largely by being a staunch defender of his agency to the public and on Capitol Hill, even amid the widening controversy over clandestine use of lethal force. (Today, the United Nations announced an investigation into the use of drone strikes, which has been the CIA's primary means of attacking terrorist groups overseas.)
In lifting the 1994 order, Panetta was joined by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1974, two years before it admitted its first female cadets.
Both Panetta and Dempsey left little doubt that they believe they're on the right side of an historically contentious issue, one that each weighed in light of the sacrifice and service of women during 10 years of war.
"The fact is [women] have become an integral part of our ability to perform our mission," Panetta said, noting that 152 women have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The next greatest generation will be one of men and women who fight and die to protect this nation."
Dempsey remarked that he'd seen a TV news ticker announce that women were about to be allowed to serve in combat. "We're way beyond that," he said. "Women are serving in combat and have been."
But both men acknowledged that the full integration of women won't be accomplisedh with the stroke of a pen. The process will occur "expeditiously," Panetta said. But it will likely take years. Each branch of service will have until 2016 to put the new policy in place and argue for any exemptions to the new rule.
The services must assign women to positions on a gender-neutral basis. There can be no lower set of requirements for women compared to men, including physical requirements. Panetta insisted that the military would not lower its standards. "Let me be clear; we're not talking about reducing the qualifications for the job," he said. "Not everyone is going to be able to be a combat solider. But everyone is entitled to a chance."
Dempsey explained, "The burden used to be that we said why should a woman serve in a particular specialty. Now it's why shouldn't a woman be allowed to serve in a particular speciality."
Lifting the ban was perhaps inevitable in light of women's combat service over the past decade. While they have been restricted from frontline ground positions, the nature of insurgent warfare has blurred the definition of combat. In asymmetrical wars with few constant battle lines, servicewomen who technically aren't supposed to engage the enemy have nevertheless found themselves in harm's way.
According to figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service, in 10 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan more than 800 women have been wounded. As of last February, more than 20,000 women have served in the two countries. And on several occasions, women have been recognized for heroism. Two have earned the Silver Star.
But since the services have the option of carving out certain exceptions in particular jobs, the policy "will likely not be a completely open door," according to an analysis from private security firm Stratfor. Even if women are allowed to serve in combat units, they might be restricted to duties at headquarters, the analysis noted. It also raised concerns about how the inclusion of women will be accomplished in light of recent cases of sexual harassment in mixed gender units. "This policy will likely exacerbate the problem," the analysis concludes.
But Dempsey said that lifting the ban might alleviate the problem, arguing that professional inequality between men and women makes harassment more likely. "I believe it's because we've had separate classes of personnel, at some level," he said. The disparity "establishes a psychology that in some cases led to that environment. I happen to believe that the more we can treat people equally the more likely they are to treat each other equally."
Dempsey also rejected the idea that a need for personal privacy would make it difficult for men and women to live and work together. In the first Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) he said forces were "essentially nomadic," moving around and camping in the desert. Panetta added that women also serve alongside men in the close quarters of Navy submarines.
Those who oppose Panetta's decision said the wholesale dismantling of the 1994 ban is too broad and too swift. "Because that policy has worked so well for so long, I am concerned about the potential impacts of completely ending [it]," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. As the committee engages in oversight, "I suspect there will be cases where legislation becomes necessary," he added.
One retired flag officer echoed concerns that the Defense Department is bowing to cultural pressures, and reiterated that the military is already struggling with instances of harassment among mixed-gender units. "I don't think we should use our military for social engineering," said retired Admiral John Poindexter, a 1958 graduate of the Naval Academy who served in several command positions and became the National Security Adviser to Ronald Reagan. "Commanders have enough problems as it is."
In a statement, Poindexter's Annapolis classmate, Sen. John McCain, said he supported Panetta's decision, adding that it is "critical that we maintain the same high standards that have made the American military the most feared and admired fighting force in the world--particularly the rigorous physical standards for our elite special forces units."
The proportion of women in military service has risen over the decades. By 1998, 20 percent of enlisted recruits were female. "It was time to make this decision based on the performance and the record of women in combat," said Tanya Biank, the author of the forthcoming book, Undaunted: The Real Story of America's Servicewomen in Today's Military. "You can't erase the impact that servicewomen have had in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade."
