In 1981, the Air Force joined the Army in an attempt to limit the number of women in the
military while evaluating their effect on combat readiness. While the Army seems to have been
attempting to force a return to the draft, Holm, who had served as WAF Director, believes that
the Air Staff feared that if the Army held down female enlistments, the Secretary of Defense
might look to the Air Force to take up the slack and recruit additional women to leave more men
for the Army (Holm, 1992:391). While the Air Staff attempted to put limits on the recruiting
objectives for women, in 1985, Congress, faced with the pressure to allocate more recruiting
funds to the services to improve the quality of men recruited, told the Air Force that in 1987, 19
percent of new recruits should be women, and in 1988, the number should be 22 percent. After
1989, Congress mandated that the Air Force no longer set separate accession and strength
ceilings for women, even as the other services, more restricted by combat exclusion law, could
do so. The DOD’s 1988 “risk rule” on combat exclusions opened 2,700 more positions to
women in the Air Force, although the Air Force resisted actually assigning women to some of
the new jobs until 1990, when DACOWITS
made an issue of it. By the end of the 1980s, 97
percent of Air Force jobs were theoretically open to women, and 77,000 of them made up
fourteen percent of the service (ibid.:421).
The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1992-1993 removed legislative
restrictions on the assignment of women to combat aviation. In April 1993, the Clinton
administration, under Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, decided to allow women to compete for
assignment to combat aircraft. For the Air Force, this meant that virtually all jobs could be filled
by women, with the exception of combat control, special operations forces, and TAC Pararescue
positions. In 1998, female aviators flew operational combat mission for the first time, enforcing
the no-fly zone in Iraq. The next year, they participated in combat operations in the air war in
Kosovo (Women’s Research and Education Institute, 2003).
Although the Air Force had always had a relatively easy time recruiting and been able to
keep its standards high, like the Army and Navy, it faced recruiting problems in the late 1990s.
In 1999, for the first time ever, the Air Force paid for television advertising in an attempt to
boost its ranks. The TV commercials and a corresponding set of print ads provide the “flight
plans” of three recent high-school graduates who have joined the Air Force, and their reasons for
joining. The plans feature a Hispanic young man who hopes to someday become a doctor, and
8
DACOWITS, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, was a body created by Secretary of
Defense George Marshall, made up at the time of fifty prominent women, to advise the Pentagon on the recruitment
and use of women in the military.
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Convention