ABSTRACT
Women have played a significant role in the planning, execution, and evaluation of foreign-policy making related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the female Army Private to the Secretary of State. In an interesting parallel to the feminist slogan that the personal is political, it was widely reported that the decision to lift the ban was rooted in the personal experiences of Defence Secretary Panetta and General Dempsey. The debates, however, within various literatures on women and the military, militarism, and gendered organizations are often focused upon dense theoretical arguments. The guiding endeavor of this research has been to bring these women to the center of empirical analysis vis--vis undertaking a scholarly assessment of autobiographical narratives, conducting interviews with the families of US female fatalities, and synthesizing secondary literatures on a number of related topics. In fact, the 113Th Congress sworn into office in January 2013 contains the smallest number of war veterans since World War II.
