Liberals are celebrating President Barack Obama’s lifting of the ban on women in combat as a “triumph for equality” (New York Times editorial, 1/25/13). But the reality is just the opposite. Obama’s move is actually aimed at strengthening U.S. imperialism, which depends for its existence on racist and sexist exploitation and Pentagon-planned mass murder. Putting women on the front lines expands the war-makers’ supply of working-class cannon fodder. And it builds nationalistic support for a war machine that now pretends — as the Times deceitfully claims — to honor “fairness and equal opportunity.”
The U.S. ruling class wants people to buy the illusion that capitalism can defeat sexism. In fact, capitalism is the root cause of sexism. The interconnection between the two can be seen on several levels:
Given the fact that 75 percent of the victims of U.S. imperialist wars are civilians, women in combat — soon to be full-fledged members of the war machine — will take a lead role in the mass killing and brutalization of other women. Exhibit A is ex-General Janis Karpinski, the first woman to lead U.S. troops in a combat zone. She was the commander of 17 Iraqi prisons, including the infamous Abu Ghraib, where both female and male prisoners were routinely tortured and abused by male and female soldiers.
The rulers are using Obama’s initiative to mask the historical truth that women are victimized by the special oppression of capitalism. Women are disproportionately among the most poverty-stricken workers. They generally get paid lower wages — or none at all in raising children as the next generation of future workers for the bosses to exploit. Bill Clinton’s vicious welfare reform threw hundreds of thousands of women and their children into poverty and homelessness.
Black, Latino and Asian women suffer from triple oppression: as workers, as women and as victims of racist discrimination. These workers are mercilessly exploited and even burnt alive in the garment factories of Bangladesh (see pag 8).
Capitalist culture degrades women as sexual objects and leads to violent physical attacks and sexual harassment in the streets, on the job and in the home. Masses of women in India are taking to the streets to fight capitalist culture and its justification of rape in what the U.S. media refers to as “the world’s largest democracy.”
But the U.S. military is no slouch itself when it comes to rape. Obama’s War Secretary, Leon Panetta, admitted that one in three women “will experience sexual assault” during their stint in the armed forces (British Guardian, 1/24). Given that 200,000 women are on active duty, the number of victims would exceed sixty thousand.
These attacks on women would be no isolated incidents. They are a symptom of the intrinstic sexism in the military, which stems from the sexist nature of capitalism — a system breeding the oppression of women and the gendered division of workers. Workers, women and men, must fight these assults with a vision to win all workers to communism. 
Equal Opportunity Genocide
Obama’s ploy supports the capitalist myth that integrating the power structure is progressive. Again, the opposite is true. Ending the combat exclusion will enable Annapolis- and West Point-trained female officers to rise higher in missions for mass killing. In the future, women will command more than fighter jets. They will run entire genocidal invasions on behalf of U.S. imperialism.
Obama’s apologists assert that putting more women in charge will somehow curb rampant sexual assaults within the ranks: “Allowing women to get the benefits of serving in combat positions…might make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues” (NYT, 1/24/13). But at its core, the military’s rape scandal stems from its own glorification of violence and the profit system’s exploitation and degradation of women in general.
Contrast Obama’s “triumph for equality” for women with his military surge in Afghanistan and his use of remote-control drone warfare, together responsible for the deaths of hundreds — if not thousands — of women and their children. Weigh it against Obama’s mass detention and record deportation of undocumented women, ripping them away from their children. This is fascism in action, and women are among its most vulnerable targets.
Pentagon Troop Shortage? Enter Women
The continuing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals that U.S. forces, however lethal, are not yet large enough to control even mid-sized countries. U.S. rulers hope that widening women’s combat roles will open the door to bringing back the draft — this time for both sexes. “The Pentagon’s decision…is expected to reopen a legal debate: Should women have to register with the government so it knows where to find them in the event of a new draft?” (Washington Post, 1/27/13).
Liberal Congressman Charles Rangel of Harlem is once again touting his Universal National Service Act, “known as the ‘draft’ bill, which requires all men and women between ages 18 and 25 to give two years of service in any capacity that promotes our national defense” (CNN, 1/ 26/13).
With respect to current and future foes, U.S. rulers have technologically superior arms but numerically insufficient armies. The administrations of Clinton, Obama and the two Bushes killed millions of Iraqis and Afghans with invasions and sanctions. But in the absence of a full-blown U.S. occupation, Iraq’s Iran-leaning Maliki regime is hindering what Exxon Mobil views as its right to dominate the country’s oil production. And as Taliban attacks mount in Afghanistan amid a dwindling U.S. presence, the U.S.-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas super-pipeline remains a pipedream.
Economic Draft Won’t Cut It
Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population — mostly unemployed youth unable to find jobs — now “volunteers”  for service. U.S. rulers know that confronting Iran and planning for a potential world war with China will require vastly greater numbers of recruits. Obama & Co. are not counting on legions of newly empowered GI Janes to willingly rush to imperialism’s rescue. What they’re really planning is a doubling of the draft pool, an item long on the bosses’ agenda.  General Willard Paul, the Army’s World War II manpower czar, foresaw a global postwar clash between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In 1947 he asked Congress to create a permanent women’s military corps in all service branches: “We must have the full use of the total personnel of the nation.”
Yes, working-class women do belong in combat — when the fight is against capitalism. Millions of heroic women, both communist-inspired Soviet soldiers and underground partisans across Europe, helped crush Hitler’s Nazis. Millions more women were essential to the Chinese communists’ fight against the Japanese fascists and the Vietnamese defeat of the U.S. invasion. Though the communist parties of these periods had weaknesses in both theory and practice that eventually led them to restore capitalism, these women’s titanic achievements still stand as a beacon for workers throughout the world.
A Mass Party for Working-Class Emancipation
Our struggle today is not against our class sisters and brothers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or China, whom Obama and the bosses behind him want us to slaughter. Instead, our fight must be waged against the profiteers and politicians who would lead us into killing and dying. Their goal is to maintain their profit system and dominate the world’s resources. The principal means to their end is the exploitation of the world’s workers, women and men both.
In working toward the inevitably violent overthrow of the war-for-profit ruling class, the Progressive Labor Party strives for the absolute equality of women and men. Once capitalism is destroyed and replaced by a communist society, run by and for the working class, we will be able to eliminate the sexism and racism that stem from the profit system. Production and distribution according to need — without bosses and their exploitation — will achieve a true “triumph of equality.”