The Weekly Standard News Article
The War On The Military Culture
January 20, 1997
During the summer of 1975, a debate of historic proportions
occurred on the floor of the House of Representatives. The debate
was significant not because of its rhetoric, which was rather
shopworn, or because the issue under discussion was dramatic -- a
bill mandating the admission of women to the service academies.
Rather, the parliamentary methods used by the bill's proponents and
their method of argument inaugurated a new era in civil military
relations and have dominated military personnel issues ever since.
The late Sam Stratton of New York, a senior member of the
House Armed Services Committee and a proponent of the Equal Rights
Amendment, introduced the measure directly on the House floor as a
rider to that year's defense appropriations bill. With the avid
assistance of several feminist legislators including Bella Abzug of
New York and Pat Schroeder of Colorado, Stratton argued essentially
that answering the question of whether women should be permitted to
attend the service academies had nothing to do with the manner in
which those institutions prepared young men for leadership in
combat. Noting that "only" 90 percent of the graduates of those
institutions had served in combat-designated billets (the others had
been designated "not physically qualified" before graduation),
Stratton argued that "the sole issue is a simple matter of equality.
. . All we need is to establish the basic legislative
policy that we wish to remove sex discrimination when it comes to
admissions to the service academies."
The debate added two new dimensions to the way the Congress
and other activists would address military issues, particularly
those affecting female assimilation. First, Congress took its vote
without detailed legislative hearings that would have allowed the
military leadership to express its view -- a decision that, in
effect, told America's military that its perspective was neither
respected nor trusted where matters of progressive social policy
were concerned.
Second, by focusing the debate on "simple equality" rather
than the effect of injecting females into the already complicated
and tension-enhancing environment of the operating military,
Stratton and company managed to leave a much larger, more
intangible, and far more complex issue on the table. And there it
has lain ever since.
As a result, no effort has ever really been made to examine
the issues raised by the ever-expanding sexual mixing inside the
military's unique culture and its requirement of absolute fairness
when it comes to administering punishments and rewards. The
military is, at its core, a coercive institution, fraught with
pressures and unwanted tasks. It relies on a code of conduct that
demands egalitarian treatment in every aspect of discipline,
recognition, and the subjection of its officers and its ranks to
life-threatening risk. When double standards are introduced in
matters of physical training and performance, they work against
these very criteria.
Furthermore, the sexual jealousies, courtship rituals, and
favoritism that are the hallmarks of romantic relationships are
inevitable when males and females are brought into close quarters in
isolated, intense environments. But these very phenomena inevitably
corrode all notions of fairness as the military defines them.
These are matters of the utmost seriousness. They are at
the center of most of the concerns regarding the assimilation of
females into the military. And other than a hapless patchwork of
unevenly enforced "fraternization" guidelines, they have never, not
once in the 21 years since Sam Stratton's post-Vietnam gambit, been
the subject of genuine scrutiny, much less a national debate.
Of course, many of those who voted with Stratton were not
only seeking to provide opportunities for women where appropriate to
the military's unique mission and operational circumstances, but
were actively interested in undoing its historic culture. For those
other than the quasi-revolutionaries who took delight in the chaos
into which our country had fallen, the summer of 1975 in Washington
was a bleak time. Following the embarrassment of our withdrawal
from Vietnam, respect for military leadership was at its historic
nadir. A year before, President Nixon had resigned in disgrace, and
his resignation helped elect the so-called Watergate Congress, 76
Democratic freshmen in the House and eight in the Senate, with a
surprising number of activists elected from formerly safe Republican
districts. A majority of them had run almost solely on
anti-military and antiwar themes. One of the first acts of the
Watergate Congress was to vote down a supplementary appropriation
for the beleaguered South Vietnamese military, virtually
guaranteeing the collapse that occurred three months later when a
refurbished North Vietnamese army launched a major offensive.
All things military had become targets gleefully fired on.
Even with the restoration of American respect for the
military in the 1980s, the effort to destroy the military culture
from the out side has continued unabated, frequently through
the use of "wedge" issues involving women. Major changes in female
military roles often have been instituted either against the advice
of the senior military or without their substantive input. Events
such as the 1991 Tailhook debacle have been seized upon and used by
feminists to attack the military culture and bring about major
concessions.
Right now we are seeing this same drama being played out
with the recent revelations of sexual abuse in the Army's sexually
mixed training commands. The ink was not yet dry on the initial
reports of drill instructors' having engaged in consensual and
nonconsensual sex with female underlings before editorials and op-ed
articles were excoriating the Army's "cultural" failings with
respect to women. The Secretary of the Army has appointed a
commission to study the Army's cultural problems, a commission the
Wall Street journal recently reported is dominated by those who wish
to expand female roles still further.
After two decades of such pressures, the time has come to
examine the impetus and motivations behind these continuing attacks,
and what their overall impact has been on the military as an
institution prevents, and fights, wars. What is it about the
military that causes these persistent efforts to reach beyond a
justifiable condemnation of incidents of misconduct and impute
malice to the military culture and especially military men-every
time a problem comes up?
The roots of this assault on the military culture go
back thirty years, to an odd dovetailing of the feminist and antiwar
movements. A principal focus of the antiwar movement, symbolized by
its decision to march on the Pentagon rather than on Congress in
October 1967, was to demean the notion of military service, as the
surest way to discredit the conduct of the Vietnam war. At the same
time, a frequent feminist argument was that politicians who used
military service as a credential for election and advancement were
unfair to women, who had no opportunity to gain the recognition that
such service frequently provided.
Another important but rarely mentioned facet of this era is
what former Washington Post reporter Susan Jacoby has termed the
"mythic nonsense of the conscience-stricken young man who made the
agonizing choice to stay home in the classroom while his brothers
fought in the jungles of Southeast Asia." Such ethical gymnastics
led Jacoby to wonder whether the millions of men my age who avoided
the draft may feel 'unmanned in a way that no woman can truly
understand."
As an example of the far-reaching impact of Jacoby's
observation, consider Harvard. In World War II, 691 Harvard alumni
were killed in action, but of the 12,595 who graduated from Harvard
College in the years 1962 to 1972, only 12 died in Vietnam (and this
even though ROTC units were in place at Harvard for most of the
war). The so-called best and brightest from all the elite schools,
whose predecessors had led the way in other wars, stayed home and
went to graduate school as their peers marched off to suffer 58,000
dead. The dynamic of their collective but unspoken feeling of
guilt, and its transference into a persistent diminution of military
service, has never been fully aired in our national discussion,
since those high achievers who did not serve soon moved into
dominant positions in academia, publishing, film, and the media.
These important social forces came together with a
vengeance following the Vietnam War. In its drive for
ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the feminist movement
saw the military as its optimal "peripheral' battle. To win on the
issue of women in combat, the most quintessentially male obligation
in any society, would moot all other debates regarding female roles.
For many males who did not serve, particularly the high achievers
who wished no blemish on their reputations, the "demasculinization"
of the military was a natural deterrent to any attack on their
manhood as their youthful actions came to be viewed in retrospect.
Others who recognized the illogic of this social
experiment, including numerous conservative icons, remained silent,
for to speak out could be self-defeating. Given the nasty tenor of
any such debate, their lack of military service would certainly be
used against them-not by veterans and military officials, who would
have welcomed their support, but by those who wished to stifle
dissent.
As these political realities have developed, the military
has had to struggle under its own set of unkind realities. Military
leaders from their first days in training are steeped in a culture
that 9 accepts and believes in .0 civilian control. And they are
doers. A policy that was strongly opposed while under consideration
will be just as strongly implemented once it is decided upon.
Furthermore, generals at the three-star level are selected with (at
a minimum) heavy participation from the civilian leadership, and
those at the four-star level are chosen at the complete discretion
of civilians, allowing politicians to shape the top levels of
military leadership. When, as in the present administration, views
on the expansion of female roles become a litmus test for
advancement, arguments questioning accepted political wisdom are not
conducive to the possibility of reaching the very highest levels.
With little support from the outside, and in a culture that
demands performance, those "in the ranks" have learned that pointing
out the difficulties inherent in an undertaking as politically
volatile as the assimilation of women will quickly end a career. At
the same time, enormous pressure is exerted on them to accentuate
the positive aspects of this social experiment and ignore or
diminish the negative. But male members of the military know that
things aren't that simple. As is always true when people are asked
to believe in and promote an image they know to be untrue, cynicism
soon explodes.
This cynicism feeds a backlash, which increases tensions
even in areas where women perform well and where their presence is
not counterproductive to the military's mission.
These hard realities have created the greatest potential
cultural change in our military's history, and if matters are left
in this state, we run the risk of destroying all notions of
leadership as we have known it. The fundamental disconnect is this:
In many areas where females have been introduced into the
military, leaders imbued with the imperative of ethical conduct are
constantly challenged to hold back on the truth or risk their
futures.
And so politicians and media commentators usually end up
arguing over only half the story. They are right to call for
investigations of commanders who have not dealt preemptively with
sexual harassment and unpermitted sex among members of their
command. Women forced into unwilling sexual conduct are put into an
inexcusable hell when their superior is the culprit, and there is no
one to whom they feel they can report the crime.
But politicians and the media are blaming the wrong social
forces for such problems. They have not been able to hear from
those who have firsthand knowledge of what the sexual integration of
the military has meant in matters of military conduct. Consider the
commander who knows that the culprit in such situations is not one
or a half-dozen individuals, but a system that throws healthy young
men and women together inside a volatile, isolated crucible of
emotions-a ship at sea or basic training, to take two notable
examples.
Whom does this commander tell if he believes that the
experiment itself has not worked, that the compressed and emotional
environment in which these young men and women have been thrust
together by unknowing or uncaring policymakers
actually encourages disruptive sexual activity?
The commander knows the political mantra for twenty years
has been that am" misconduct is simply one more cultural problem,
and that, like racial insensitivity, it can be overcome by a few
lectures and command supervision. He knows also that this is wrong.
But to speak his mind or force the issue would most likely be his
undoing.
A case in point is Commander John Carey, who took command
of the destroyer Curtis Wilbur after a fast-track start to his naval
career. Soon after, Carey observed two female crew members kissing
and spoke to the ship's command chief petty officer of his concern
about the disruption such behavior would cause. "Captain," the
master chief replied, according to the Washingtonian, "there's f%$#ing
going on on this ship 24 hours a day, and there's nothing you can do
about it.' Carey tried to do something about it and was soon
relieved of command for "physically and verbally abusing his crew."
This not-so-subtle pressure to look the other way unless
conduct is overt and decidedly nonconsensual permeates civilian
policy toward the military. In February 1988, shortly before I
resigned as secretary of the Navy, I returned from a trip to U.S.
military facilities on Iceland. During a staff meeting with
secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, I reported that I had been
informed that 51 percent of the single enlisted Air Force females
and 48 percent of the single enlisted Navy females stationed in
Iceland were pregnant.
Carlucci, who had announced in the first weeks of his
tenure that he wished to remove the Reagan administration's policy
of restricting women from combat, was unconcerned. "What else is
there to do on Iceland?" he replied, drawing titillated chuckles
from several sycophantic male military officers at the table.
Needless to say, there was no follow-up on this or any other
systemic failure, and the uniformed military was given the word
through the grapevine that passes from Pentagon aide to general's
aide and on down the line that, no matter what written policies
might have existed, the leadership was not concerned about sexual
fraternization.
The question becomes: Does it matter? And the answer is:
In the military, it does.
It is difficult to explain to those who have not served in
the operational military, and even to many military females who do
not comprehend the ethos of units in which women do not serve, why
the military is, and must remain, different from the civilian world
when it comes to these issues. Next to the clergy, the military is
the most values-driven culture in our society. I am not speaking of
individual morals; many superb soldiers have been known as "liberty
risks" when they are not on duty. Rather, it relates to an
impeccable group ethos. Those who serve together must behave toward
one another according to a set of unassailable and equally enforced
standards-honesty, accountability, sacrifice, and absolute fairness
in risk, promotions, and rewards.
The military is, in this sense, a socialist meritocracy. It
functions not on money but on nonmaterial recognition. Do something
good and you receive a good fitness report, an award, a meritorious
mast, promotion to higher rank. Do something bad and you are
reprimanded, court-martialed, jailed, demoted. You cannot quit your
duties if you don't like your job or your boss or the place they're
sending you. Even more astounding, you might be asked to die on
behalf of a person or a policy you don't even like. In this
environment, fairness is not only crucial, it is the coin of the
realm. Fairness is the guarantee that puts credibility into rank,
awards, and recognition. And such recognition determines a person's
future.
The military was the first federal institution to create a
truly level playing field for minorities. I grew up as the son of a
career military officer in the newly integrated military, and I saw
it work even through the difficult period of the late I960s and
early 1970s when I was a serving officer of Marines.
Now, to the extent that it is workable, the military has an
obligation to provide the same gateways for females, and we should
not lose sight either of the talent that many females bring to our
armed forces or the wide array of federal benefits that are accorded
them for their service in appropriate roles.
But neither should we delude ourselves into thinking that
assimilation of females into military occupational specialties is
the same as breaching racial and ethnic barriers. Eliminating
cultural bias requires intellectual conditioning to break down old
attitudes. But eliminating or neutralizing an attraction to the
opposite sex requires much sterner and more imaginative therapy, and
is probably impossible.
But that is exactly what will have to happen if the
military is to work without disruption in the operating units where
"group cohesion" is the key to performance, not to mention in the
isolated environments of long-term deployments or basic training.
In these circumstances, it is essential that favoritism of
all types be minimized and eliminated. But we all know there is no
greater or more natural bias than that of an individual toward a
beloved. And few emotions are more powerful, or more distracting,
than those surrounding the pursuit of, competition for, or the
breaking off of amorous relations. In the administration of
discipline, benefits, and life-threatening risk, it takes an
unusually strong personality to set aside passionate feelings in
order to deny a spouse or lover a much-desired benefit or to expose
that person to great risk. Nor is it possible to decide an issue in
favor of a spouse or lover without at least appearing to be judging
matters unfairly
And there is another problem. Consider a ship on a long
sea deployment of perhaps 100 days without a port call, a common
enough event in our Navy's recent history. Assume, as is likely,
that some members of a mixed crew begin sexual relationships while
at sea. What of the rest? They will not have the opportunity to
find a partner for months. The inescapable feelings of resentment,
competition, or anger that follow create a powder keg of emotions
that cannot help but affect morale, discipline, and attention to
duty.
No edict from above will ever eliminate sexual activity
when men and women are thrust together at close quarters. Watching
civilian and military leaders struggle mightily not to see this
verity, I am often reminded of Douglas MacArthur's observation,
shortly after arriving in postwar Japan, upon being told that a
large number of soldiers had taken up with Japanese women. Asked if
such conduct should be curtailed, MacArthur demurred. "I would
never give an order that I know I can't enforce," he said.
MacArthur knew that soldiers are usually young, physical,
and aggressive, and that from time to time they will find ways to
relieve their sexual frustrations with consenting females. But at
night MacArthur's soldiers returned to their barracks. And when
their units were called upon to perform their missions, the objects
of their antics and desires were not right there beside them,
confusing their notions of duty, discipline, and sacrifice.
Present-day generals and admirals, constantly under
political pressure, sometimes unsure of where to draw the line
between military and civilian control, often constrained by legal
edicts, and wishing to be fair to those females who do perform well,
have issued unenforceable orders rather than confront the
politicians who dreamed them up. They have muddled about for years
from incident to incident while many junior leaders have been forced
to deal directly with impossible, ethically compromising positions.
And in one of the supreme ironies of the current debate,
the same feminists who have long castigated military men, and even
the military culture itself, for recreational antics with foreign
women while on liberty, now defend or explain away such conduct if
it occurs on post or aboard ship between consenting soldiers or
sailors.
Who really wants to expand this continued sexual
assimilation? A recent study of soldiers by Harvard researcher
Laura Miller suggests that Army women do not. Only 3 percent of the
enlisted women surveyed believed they "should be treated exactly
like men and serve in the combat arms just like men." Sixty-one
percent indicated a belief that sexual harassment would increase if
combat billets were opened up to females. An equal percentage
believed that women should not be drafted, or should be drafted for
service other than close combat. Only 11 percent of enlisted women
and 14 percent of the female officers surveyed indicated that they
would volunteer for a combat role if one were offered.
These are the realists who have lived in the powder keg
atmosphere. They know precisely what they want out of their
military service. They also know precisely those circumstances
under which unwanted difficulties arise. Many of them have rightly
grown weary of being pawns in the grand schemes of sociologists,
agenda feminists, and a small core of political-activist military
officers, and of having to live with the often sexually abrasive
results of such activism.
The time has finally come to cease examining these issues
solely from the perspective of how the military culture should
adjust itself to women. While women make valuable contributions on
a variety of levels, the military is and always has been a
predominantly male profession. Its leaders should demand that any
adjustments in sexual roles meet the historically appropriate
criterion of improving performance, and should stop salving the egos
of a group of never-satisfied social engineers.
A return to normalcy might cause a retrenchment in arm where women
serve. The United States might want to learn from other countries
with their own experience of women at arms. After World War II, the
Soviet army completely abandoned the use of women in the operating
military (they had been brought in owing to the loss of some 7
million male soldiers in combat). The Israelis at several points
during their recent history have adjusted the roles of females.
Contrary to popular mythology, it is against Israeli law for a
woman to serve in combat-and "combat" is a term interpreted far more
broadly there than it is here.
A logical first, immediate step for the U.S. military to
take is that basic training should be sexually separated, as it has
been throughout history until just the past few years. Beyond that,
each service chief should order, on his own initiative, a full and
honest review of the extent to which current sexual practices are
damaging traditional standards of command, discipline, fairness, and
cohesion. Where damage is being done, policies should be changed.
Where sexual mixing does work, policies should be enhanced. Such a
review should not be within the power of civilian service
secretaries or members of Congress to obstruct, since "good order
and discipline" is the ultimate responsibility of each service
chief-a responsibility that many would argue has been abandoned in
recent decades when it comes to this issue.
If these senior leaders prove too hamstrung, too
compromised, or too politicized to take such action, then the
present Congress should take steps similar to those of its
Watergate-era predecessor and begin the process of dramatic change
itself. Except that this time, the change would be for the purpose
of preserving military traditions, values, and leadership rather
than subjugating them to external political agendas.
Political and military leaders must have the courage to ask
clearly in what areas our current policies toward women in the
military are hurting, rather than helping, the task of defending the
United States. We have now endured two decades of experimentation,
and data on the experiment's results would be voluminous if they
were allowed to be examined. It has been a long time since a
military leader of virtually any rank was free to speak openly about
this without fear of retribution. And the difficulties surrounding
the good order and discipline of our armed forces will not abate
until the leaders themselves are encouraged not only to point to
areas in which the new policy is working, but to speak honestly and
straightforwardly about where they are not.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS