WASHINGTON — If or when the Pentagon lets women become infantry troops — the country’s front-line warfighters — how many women will want to?

The answer is probably not many.

Interviews with a dozen female soldiers and Marines showed little interest in the toughest fighting jobs. They believe they’d be unable to do them, even as the Defense Department inches toward changing its rules to allow women in direct ground combat jobs.

In fact, the Marines asked women last year to go through its tough infantry officer training to see how they would fare. Only two volunteered and both failed to complete the fall course. None has volunteered for the next course. The failure rate for men is roughly 25 percent.

For the record, plenty of men don’t want to be in the infantry either, though technically could be assigned there involuntarily, if needed. That’s rarely known to happen.

“The job I want to do in the military does not include combat arms,” Army Sgt. Cherry Sweat said of infantry, armor and artillery occupations. She installed communications equipment in 2008 in Iraq but doesn’t feel mentally or physically prepared for fighting missions.

“I enjoy supporting the soldiers,” said Sweat, stationed in South Carolina. “The choice to join combat arms should be a personal decision, not a required one.”

A West Point graduate working in the Pentagon estimates she’s known thousands of women over her 20-year army career and said there’s no groundswell of interest in combat jobs among female colleagues she knows.

She asked to remain anonymous because in the military’s warrior culture, it’s a sensitive issue to be seen as not wanting to fight, she said. But her observations echoed research of the 1990s, another time of big change in the military, when interviews with more than 900 Army women found that most didn’t want fighting jobs and many felt the issue was being pushed by “feminists” not representing the majority, said RAND Corporation sociologist Laura Miller.

Many believe women eventually could be in the infantry.

In April 1993, the Pentagon directed the opening of combat aviation occupations and warship assignments to females; the Navy and Air Force responded by opening thousands of jobs. Neither of those steps put women in the most lethal occupations such as infantry or tank units.

That arrangement came apart in Iraq and Afghanistan, where battle lines were jagged and insurgents could be anywhere. Some women in support jobs, including logistics officers bringing supply convoys to troops, found themselves in firefights or targeted by roadside bombs. Women were sent on patrol with men to search and get information from local women whose culture didn’t allow male soldiers to do so.

Developments over the past decade have been a main argument from those wanting more openings for women. So has the issue of equal opportunity and the fact that combat service gives troops an advantage for promotions, the lack of it leaving women disadvantaged in trying to move to the higher ranks.

More than 200,000 U.S. women have served in the wars, 12 percent of the Americans sent. Of some 6,600 Americans killed, 152 were women; 84 of them were killed by enemy action and 68 in nonhostile circumstances such as accidents, illness and suicide.