Roundup: Israel and Canada Provide Lessons on Women in Combat The Pentagon's decision to allow women into combat has set off new debate on whether women can perform the same dangerous and physically demanding tasks as ground combat units do, day in and day out. The armed forces in Canada resolved this issue in 1989, when women were allowed into combat roles. But they reached that point only after integration trials and restrictions. Speaking to Ian Austen of The Times, Capt. Jaime Phillips, a female artillery officer who commanded not only Canadian men but also male American and Afghan combat troops in Afghanistan, said the topic did not enter conversation anymore. "It's just so ingrained in my generation that it seems silly to hear the same old arguments again," she said. Mr. Austen wrote: Women make up about 12 percent of the total military force but Canada's Department of National Defense did not disclose how many of them are in combat roles. A study presented in late 2011 by Krystel Carrier-Sabourin, a doctoral student at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, found that 310 women filled combat roles in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011. Although on paper the Israeli military is one of the most gender-neutral in the world, the reality is more complicated, The Times's Jodi Rudoren reported. While more than 92 percent of jobs in the Israeli military are now open to women, just 3 percent serve in combat roles. Ms. Rudoren wrote: Women served alongside men in ground forces in the paramilitary groups that predated Israel's foundation as a state in 1948. For the next 25 years, they were mostly relegated to roles as administrators, medical assistants or trainers, but after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, they began serving as combat instructors and officers. Back in the United States, Jim Dao of The Times wrote about the experiences of Staff Sgt. Stacy Pearsall of the Air Force. While attached to an Army ground unit in Iraq in 2007, she came under fire, joined in the firefight and dragged a man, twice her size, to safety. Mr. Dao wrote: Since 1994, women have technically been barred from serving in combat, but women in Iraq and Afghanistan - working as medics, intelligence officers, photographers, military police officers and in a host of other jobs - have been routinely "attached" to all-male ground combat units, where they have come under fire, returned fire, been wounded and been killed.