And advocates of women in combat have argued that concerns about servicewomen being captured, tortured and raped are misplaced.
"You have to ask, is torture worse for women than men?" said Sheila Widnall, Air Force secretary in the Clinton administration, now an engineering professor at MIT.
Yet many believe that the American public, like McCain, wants greater protection for military women than men.
"We would not want to put women in these land combat positions where the job is to deliberately kill people," said Rep. Thelma Drake (R-Va.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee whose district has one of the heaviest concentrations of military personnel in the nation. The public is more offended, she said, by the prospect of women being tortured and sexually assaulted than of men being mistreated.
The experience of Jessica Lynch, the celebrated Army private who was taken prisoner early in the Iraq war, illustrates the risks. She eventually revealed in her book that she was brutally beaten and raped.
Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a Washington group that examines social issues in the military, said McCain's views were based on legitimate concerns about women's abilities to fight.
In an essay that also appeared in the Duke law school journal, Donnelly wrote that military women can't, on average, match the physical strength of military men. And the Pentagon is violating its own policies, she contended, by putting women in increasingly hazardous assignments that they do not want.
"Women do not have an equal opportunity to survive on the battlefield and to help their fellow soldiers," Donnelly said. "We as a civilized nation do not have to subject our women to these kinds of risks."
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ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com
