Both written and unwritten rules of land warfare in modern times have long provided a demarcation between combatants and innocents. American troops have traditionally been more observant of that line than some of the forces aligned against us. For the most part though, that term, Women and Children, has long been the line in the sand for the warfighters of most nations. Exceptions abound, that's true, but for most modern, major militaries, the killing stops when there is no one left but the women and the children.

How then will that stark line continue to be honored when the United States unilaterally introduces armed female infantry into the battle lines? Our enemies, most certainly, will no longer have any moral proscription against killing fully-armed, professionally-trained and thoroughly-lethal American female troops. By putting women on the battlefield as infantry, the U.S. will have erased the line that has held throughout modern times. By placing them in firefights, we will have signaled the rest of the world that the United States now approves the killing of women in combat. Our foolish, politically correct government, with deliberate, liberal intent, will have introduced women into the realm of ground combat, where, by necessity, on the part of our mortal foes, they must be killed, wounded, or captured to render them no longer a threat.

Once the United States of America, under the liberal administration of Barack Obama, has removed the universal and historical proscription and stigma of killing women in war, women will become fair game in any conflict around the planet. And that doesn't just pertain to those few American women who manage to demonstrate the strength and prowess to qualify as infantry, but all women who have the misfortune to find themselves in an area of armed conflict. Who, in our own forces, will be able to know which women among those in the cities, the villages and the farm huts out there are not armed and dangerous? Will the default judgment not be that they are armed and dangerous? Facing the prospect of female American infantry, are not other nations of the world justified in training and arming their own women to fight the American forces?

As is so often true of liberals' social reforms, they haven't begun to consider the negative outcomes of this political success, such as the possibility that it will nullify the longstanding rule of warfare which has guided warriors of most nations for centuries. By putting American women into frontline combat on the ground, the Obama administration will put all women in the world into the crosshairs of ground combat. To satisfy liberal orthodoxy, the gender-neutral fools of the Democrat Party will have rendered uncountable millions of vulnerable sisters around the world as helpless targets. Not inconsequentially, their American sisters will go in harm's way as well; for what nation or radical cause cannot now justify an attack on anyAmerican woman or group of women as an attack on potential combatants?

A final thought: we already suffer a high incidence of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. How high will those rates climb when our male troops begin killing female hostiles as a predictable outgrowth of this policy decision by the Obama Administration? For that matter, how many female infantry, who are traditionally and congenitally supposed to be more sensitive than men, will succumb to PTSD after experiencing the blood and guts of engaging enemy combatants?

Panetta, you have become Pandora.