The man on the spot before Dan Coats and the Senate Armed Services Committee last week was Gen. Dennis Reimer, chief of staff of the army. Though he is dismayed and saddened by the Aberdeen scandal–“I’m always surprised when we have commanders who screw up that badly,” he said- Reimer worries that the congressional reaction to the scandal could do more harm than good. “I basically felt they were searching for an answer to the question, ‘Have we come too far, too fast?’ “he told NEWSWEEK.
Out in the barracks, the toughest question stemming from the Aberdeen affair is the safety of women recruits–and whether the army, which merged its basic-training programs only in 1994, should go back to segregation by gender. For now, Reimer thinks not, and he has two reasons. First, the army’s experience so far suggests that combined training raises the performance of both sexes: the women compete with the men, and vice versa. Reverting to gender-segregated training facilities would send the wrong message to everyone-that women cannot compete and that the army isn’t serious about integrating them. Equally compelling, from the Pentagon’s point of view, is the idea that reviving separate training programs would only push the gender-integration problem onto operational units–whose commanders, Reimer says, already have too much on their plates.
The right remedy, Reimer says, is to toughen up across the board–to improve the selection, training and supervision of drill sergeants and other instructors and to brief new recruits more clearly about how to respond to sexual harassment if it occurs. He also says the army should expand the number of post chaplains, who function as a “safety net” for trainee complaints, and crack down hard on fraternization in the billets for all army personnel. The army, he says, needs clearer guidelines on “visitation rights, that sort of thing. In some cases we may have relaxed the rules too much.” The goal is to “desexualize the whole environment just as far as we can,” Reimer says-but even he admits “there will always be some element… of male macho and female flirting.” And that means the battle of the sexes in the barracks may continue to be one of the army’s most difficult fights.
