since they weren’t eligible for career-enhancing pilot and navigator jobs, but competed for
promotion against men who were (ibid.:123).
While there was no separate women’s corps, up until the 1970s, Air Force women were
called WAF, just as Army women were called WACs and Navy Women were WAVES. Women
were also placed in a separate category from men in that they could not be pilots. The 1948
legislation barred women from serving on “combat aircraft engaged in combat missions.” All of
the services took that prohibition farther than the law required, and as a matter of policy closed
all pilot jobs to women, on the grounds that any pilot should be available for any kind of mission
at any time. On the same basis, they did not allow women to serve in navigator or most flight
crew positions (ibid.:126). Flying is the Air Force’s core mission, and women were excluded
from that core, just as they were kept off Navy ships and out of the combat arms in the Army and
Marine Corps. Despite its reputation as the most forward-thinking and gender-integrated force,
the Air Force was as resolved as the other services to exclude women from its central military
function.
More than once during the Cold War, the existence of the women’s program was
threatened. In 1951, the Pentagon pushed to rapidly expand the number of women in each of the
services to keep down Korean War draft calls. As noted above, the recruiting drive was a failure,
especially for the Army and the Air Force, which had set unrealistically high goals. If the point
of a peacetime women’s service was to provide the basis for wartime mobilization, but the
expansion plan failed in the Korean War, then Air Force planners wondered why they needed a
women’s program. Developments in defense strategy further threatened the WAF. President
Eisenhower’s “New Look” defense policy of massive retaliation envisioned an air war decided
by forces in being. There would be no time in a future conflict to expand the forces, according to
this strategy, because early use of air power would be decisive, so, again, having a small group
of women as the nucleus for an expanded wartime program couldn’t be the rationale for the
program (ibid.:166).
In the late 1950s, overall manpower reductions led the Air Force to shrink the already-
small WAF program. (Of course, increases in Air Force end strength had never led to increases
in the number of WAF.) There had been about 7,200 women on active duty in a force of
734,000 in 1958, with a ceiling on women’s participation set at 8,000. The Air Force decided to
reduce that ceiling to 5,000 by 1960, and to remove women from nontraditional fields and only
place them in jobs that “women do better than men” (ibid.:172-173). In 1961, the office of the
26
Convention