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Women have played an increasingly important role in the western military establishment and this process has continued during the post-ColdWar era even while the size of the armed services has been reduced significantly. The role of women in the military illustrates how the state in contemporary liberal democracies has to respond to, on the one hand, the functional, strategic imperative of building military organizations that are “fit to fight” and, on the other, the societal imperative of conforming to wider civilian values such as social equality. While some analysts follow Huntington in conceptualising the relationship between these imperatives in a zero-sum fashion, this paper uses a pragmatic perspective, deriving from the work of Janowitz, which emphasises that the degree to which there will be a tension between these imperatives is very much an empirical question. It focuses on the British army and analyses the ways in which the nature of contemporary warfare, military technology and socio-legal change are transforming the ways in which women participate in military life. The paper discusses the extent to which parts of the military are likely to remain a “male preserve” even if current formal restrictions on the employment of women were to be abandoned.