It is time to stop questioning whether women should be in combat roles

if women seemed to have assimilated into the military lifestyle, their stories demonstrate that not all men had fully accepted them

In the nearly three years since the Pentagon allowed women to join front-line combat units, questions about the policy have not gone away. Two former Marines — Owen West, now an assistant secretary of defense, and his father, the military writer Bing West — said women in the infantry would “swiftly reduce combat effectiveness.” In The American Conservative, Scott Beauchamp could see no benefit in bringing women into combat roles and suggested that the Pentagon was cynically trying to bolster recruiting during ill-conceived wars.

And even the man who is overseeing gender integration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, recently expressed a surprising