4-star: Women will excel in the military's toughest jobs

There’s not a military job that a qualified woman can’t do, the Pentagon's No. 2 general said.

The challenge will be in recruiting and retaining those women, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Paul Selva explained at the annual Officer Women’s Leadership Symposium outside Washington, D.C., and how the military carries out its integration of women into its newly opened specialties, from the Army Rangers to the Navy SEALs.

“I am absolutely convinced — we haven’t got a single job in the military that a woman can’t do as well as a man,” Selva told the audience of about 200 service academy, active-duty and veteran women.

He doesn’t expect, however, that opening the last combat jobs will create a flood of women into the services or to those specialties.

“The decision this year to open all career fields to both men and women means that in theory we could recruit 50 percent of our force as women,” he said. “It won’t happen. My prediction is the best we’ll get is 20 percent.”

Those are the Defense Department’s current average accession numbers for women, and they haven’t budged in years. Beyond that, Selva added, more than half of those women will leave the military before they hit 10 years of service.

The only way to shift that balance is to open opportunities for women and to address the reasons why women leave, he said. Chief among them is the desire to start a family, and in that vein, the Defense Department decided to extend paid maternity leave to 12 weeks this year.

They are also working, Selva added, to offer men three weeks of paternity leave.

Leaders also have to make changes from the top.

“Leadership does not discriminate. People do,” he said. “When we promote capable, motivated leaders, the concept of leadership doesn’t discriminate.”

If you walk into a senior leader’s office and you only see staff of the same gender, or the same service, or the same job community – that’s a problem, he said.

“We have to convince our leaders to take a little bit of risk,” he added. “And most of our leaders I know in our military are not only willing, they’re actually doing it.”

Leading from the front

The first priority for completely integrating the military is making sure that newly opened communities have some female leadership in place, Selva said, both for the prospective junior women joining the units and for the men to acclimate to taking orders from women.

“You’re going to put them in an environment where women were not allowed, and suddenly women are allowed, and in pretty close quarters, you need to have leaders,” he said.

In the Marine Corps, that means moving women who have qualified in a previously closed military occupational specialty to units like infantry and armor, so that all new reports can look to female role models.

“The harder leadership challenge is going to be having lady role models for the men in those organizations” said Selva, who is a career Air Force officer.

The Army and Navy are taking a similar approach, though no women have completed Army infantry school or Navy special warfare training to date. Instead, experienced female leaders will round out the support cadre in those units ahead of time.

Selva took audience questions, including one from a young woman who asked about the backlash of opening these specialties — particularly the suspicion that women are only succeeding in these new jobs because they’re being propped up.

“It could backfire in a New York minute. That’s why we all need to lead through this carefully,” he replied. “We have to be really careful that we don’t set up an environment where a young lieutenant from West Point is hired because she fills a quota. Even the perception of that is wrong.”

And the military has to be careful about even allowing that perception, he added, that qualified and talented women are being chosen because they fill a quota.

“And our leaders have to say that. And by the way, they have to believe it,” he said. “Which means the people they hire around them have to display that attitude.”