INTERNATIONAL: Bearing Babies and Bearing Arms is Always Incompatible

Like the right to box and the right to join the Garrick club, the right to be Gordon Brown's cannon fodder is not one for which I have ever felt inclined to agitate. The death toll in Afghanistan and its unchanging accompaniment – Brown's routine about assaults upon civilians which would otherwise proceed directly from Helmand to Bloomsbury – only confirm that life is too precious to be placed at the disposal of Labour's armchair generals. The pressing question, surely, is not how do we get women into futile combat, but how do we keep men out of it?

But long before Brown and Blair reminded us of how cheaply the life of an 18-year-old is valued when political reputations are at stake, generations of women cherished the idea, however deluded and essentialist, that their sex was too peace-loving to fight. A sex difference this flattering is obviously hard to relinquish, even where the logic of equal rights demands it. In 2000, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 formalised what the Greenham women had always said: that male militarism must yield, ultimately, to female peacemaking. The resolution stated that women and girls suffered disproportionately in war and urged member states to involve women "in all peacekeeping and peace-building measures". Its demand for equal rights in conflict resolution was not matched, however, by a request that similar opportunities be offered to women in the preceding armed hostilities.

We might have relied upon that temple of undying conflict, Trevor Phillips's Equality and Human Rights Commission, to underline the dismally stereotyping nature of the UN approach. In a recent memorandum on the armed forces, EHRC officers recalled the anxiety of their predecessor regiment, the Equal Opportunities Commission, that "'societal attitudes" should not preclude consideration of "women closing with and killing the enemy". If the world has yet to produce a woman with sufficient bloodlust to command the EHRC, this body is keen to disseminate a more thoroughly martial approach, urging the armed forces to confront "stereotypical views of the relative qualities of servicemen and servicewomen". After some centuries of prejudice in this respect the army has not done badly, you might think, in catching up. A few years ago, a pregnant soldier would have had to quit. Today, as we are reminded by the case of Miss, formerly corporal, Tilern DeBique, the army is happy to have single parents in its ranks as long as reliable childcare arrangements are combined with a willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice.

It was not Miss DeBique's status as a single parent that led to her successful case for compensation – indignant army message boards confirm that they are legion – but evidence that her superiors had not done enough to help her find childcare for Tahlia (now four), for reasons that were discriminatory. The army's excuse that it had exempted her from weekend duties and early starts and, following her complaint, offered Ms DeBique a five-year posting with childcare, featuring a guarantee that she would not have to go to war (hardly a conventional understanding of readiness for combat), did not convince the tribunal.

It only emphasised the difficulties of sending a four-year-old's mother to war, even for the occasional afternoon, that Miss DeBique was obliged to take her daughter to the tribunal, where the child reportedly occupied herself with colouring books while her mother explained why she deserved around £1m in compensation for her losses, which included "hurt feelings". Confirming that the army's requirement for soldiers to be available for duty "24/7, 365 days a year" was indirect sex discrimination (since women were more likely than men to be single parents with primary childcare responsibility), and that she should have been helped to recruit her sister from the Caribbean for help with childcare, the tribunal finally awarded DeBique a modest £17,016, including £2,016 for hurt feelings, a cause for much silent sorrow, no doubt, among employment lawyers who had earlier been crowing over a rich new seam of multiple discrimination.

Perhaps you have to be a lawyer to understand how an institutionally warlike organisation which requires from its employees a willingness to give their lives could ever conform with civilian expectations on fairness, let alone be expected to have their families' best interests at heart. What is the appropriate recruiting message: "Happy kids make happy corpses!" perhaps? If the army has been lamentably shortsighted in failing to anticipate the demands of single parents (particularly those recruited from abroad), then so, too, have equal rights campaigners who have agitated for an army that now requires a woman such as Ms DeBique to pledge her life in Britain's interests, when her death would leave a child effectively orphaned. The child of a military single mother must have some competing rights here that go beyond quality care while she is being sacrificed on behalf of President Karzai, who believes, inter alia, that women should have their husbands' permission to leave the house.

In practice, sex discrimination is already central to army life: because of it, women soldiers, single parents or not, are less likely than male combatants to be killed, captured or maimed. To the frustration of anti-essentialist campaigners, the MoD is still exempted from parts of the Sex Discrimination Act, allowing the army to keep women away – with many heroic exceptions – from close combat. Infuriating as this must be for female recruits who crave exactly this experience, there are probably many others who are quite satisfied with the exemption and, indeed, who envy DeBique her rejected no-war guarantee.

Among male soldiers as well as less fortunate female ones, one can conceive of a different response. When he was sentenced, in March, for going Awol rather than return to Afghanistan, Joe Glenton was rebuked, more than anything, for letting his fellow soldiers down. "Your absence," said the judge advocate, "meant that either your unit due to serve in Afghanistan was undermanned or someone else would have had to take your place." Glenton is still serving a nine-month sentence.

A less extreme, but like-minded stringency about letting fellow soldiers down, by not turning up on parade, appears to have contributed to the sequence of events that led to DeBique's tribunal, and subsequent pay-out.

The small award in her case, by a tribunal aware that any compensation would be compared to the sums paid for the missing limbs of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, still fails to clarify the extent to which life in the armed forces should conform to civilian regulations. In particular, it muddies the question of single parents' duties in the army. Should they be full participants, 24/7, in what an officer described to DeBique as a "war fighting machine"? Or are they special cases, whose commitments are justifiably deputed to more flexible, more killable soldiers? Over to you, President Karzai.