When defense secretary Leon Panetta announced Jan. 24 that women would be permitted to serve in combat, he was simply making official what has been the reality on the ground after a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The increasingly blurred boundary between frontline troops and the rear-echelon forces that support them had made a fiction of the Pentagon's long-standing ban on women in combat roles. But anyone who has been paying attention to the ways we fight probably knew that. Here are six things you may not have known:
Isn't there a law against women in combat?
Not anymore....