May 18, 2025:
Over the last twenty years more American women have been showing up in military jobs. Currently women make up 18 percent of the army and navy, while 24 percent of air force personnel are female. Currently women qualify for nearly 90 percent of all armed forces jobs. That includes service with army combat units. Not the Special Operations Forces, but often with the support troops to get the SEALS and Delta Force where they need t0 go and keep them informed and supplied. At the same time many female non-combat troops are still exposed to combat and manage to do their jobs without any problems.
Experience in earlier wars demonstrated that non-combat troops often get exposed to the fighting anyway and this was more common in the last twenty years. By being kept out of the direct combat jobs women were much less likely to be killed in combat. Noting that many jobs women were barred from still had about the same casualty rates as those women were already in, the army expanded the number of MOSs women could serve in. The most visible result of the change was women serving in support efforts for infantry, tank, artillery, and engineer battalions. As a practical matter, this is nothing new. Women have been serving in brigade level support units for several decades, and troops from those units often worked for extended periods with the combat battalions in a brigade. The women in combat battalions perform jobs like communications, supply, intelligence, health care, and various staff efforts.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, attitudes towards Ukrainian women in the military quickly changed. Women wanted to serve and sometimes had to find backdoors they could slip through. While the government encouraged women taking military assignments, some women got involved by answering internet requests from Ukrainian combat units for people with critical skills. If a woman had the skills and applied, she was usually accepted. While men were conscripted, women had to volunteer and a growing number did. By late 2023 the number of female volunteers was way up and by late 2024 there were 68,000 women in the military. That’s how many are currently serving.
Six percent of snipers are women, as are 23 percent of drone unit personnel. Military medical personnel are 22 percent female and a quarter of military staff personnel are women. This includes the GUR Intelligence Directorate and SBU Security Service.
Russia is also recruiting more women, to take care of non-combat jobs. In Western forces, only 10-15 percent of troops are in combat units. In Russia only half the uniformed forces are support troops, the rest are for combat. Recruiting more women means more men available for combat. While women are willing to join, men are still reluctant because of the high risk of getting killed.