Democracy Now! ran the following segment about the challenges women in the military are facing. It’s a horrifying and extremely important segment, I hope you listen to the whole thing.

One of the things that a lot of people don’t realize is women make up 15 percent of today’s military, so about one in seven soldiers are female. And the face of war has completely changed because of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Women are being used on the so-called front lines every single day. And commanders—and by that, I mean infantry commanders themselves—are violating DOD policy every single day by actually degrading women at the lowest levels of combat. So you have non-infantry support soldiers who are women, and male, serving with the infantry, attached to infantry units, doing combat patrols, kicking down doors.

And because of this need to sort of win hearts and minds on the ground, and because Afghan and Iraqi women are so critical in our relations on the ground with local villages, women are being used to sort of form those relationships on the ground. Women have access to local villages, to homes, that male soldiers don’t. And so, women are often taking off their helmets and going in with headscarves into local homes, doing the searches.

And it’s completely unprecedented. The DOD did not expect this, going into these wars, that women would be virtually fully integrated into the military on the ground. And so, congressional policy hasn’t yet caught up with what’s playing out in these conflicts.