Sex in the ranks is providing the press with a steady stream of scandal. The navy’s Tailhook humiliation was followed by the revelation that the army’s top sergeant had been accused of sexual harassment, while drill sergeants were preying on female recruits at training camp. (One of the DIs, Sgt. Delmar Simpson, was convicted last week on 18 counts of rape.) Fearful, perhaps, of becoming the next media target, the air force has, in classic military fashion, overreacted. It is court-martialing a B-52 pilot, Lt. Kelly Flinn, for sleeping with a married civilian. The man had deceived her into believing that he was legally separated from his wife.
The headlines have made some wonder whether the integration of women into the armed forces is a failed experiment. “It’s a disaster,” says GOP Rep. Robert Livingston. As conservatives are fond of pointing out, armies exist to fight and win wars, not to be laboratories for social engineering. But as a practical matter, there is no turning back. The military is nearly 15 percent female, and among new recruits, the percentage is higher–up to 25 percent in the air force. Without women, the armed services would not meet their recruiting quotas. But biology makes some problems unavoidable: men and women will always desire each other, and women will, on average, remain physically weaker. The real test will not come until America fights a long and bloody war.
The presence of women has already transformed the military. Warriors were once overwhelmingly single men. Today two out of three soldiers are married; the military is possibly the largest day-care provider in the world. In the 1980s, when women first started joining up in significant numbers, they were restricted to jobs far from the front line. The female enlistees were perfectly happy–most had joined the military to learn a skill or see the world. But the female officers bitterly complained that they were denied chances for promotion, since stars and bars usually go to those closest to the front. Though women served in the Persian Gulf, the Clinton administration really opened the way: female soldiers now routinely serve on warships and fly combat planes. Only front-line infantry, armor and artillery units remain all male. Except in the marine corps, men and women now train together at boot camp from the first day.
The military has gone to great lengths to accommodate women. An officer who doubts aloud in the media whether women can fight, risks damaging his career. The army has tried to ease some of the rigors of the field, developing, for example, something called a Freshette Complete System to allow women to urinate standing up in the field. But crowded below decks and in tents, men and women experience predictable tensions. In Pentagon surveys about three quarters of women report some kind of sexual harassment. Slightly less than a third say they have been fondled or pawed, and 6 percent claim to have been sexually assaulted. Roughly half say they fear recriminations if they report being abused.
By and large, the top brass blame the harassment on a failure of leadership: after all, it took strong leadership to racially integrate the ranks. Women can be brought on board, the thinking goes, by the same sort of stiff discipline–by ordering soldiers to change their attitudes and keep their hands to themselves. But differences between men and women run deeper than skin color. On average, women are five inches shorter than men and have half the upper-body strength. Female recruits are injured at twice the rate of male grunts. Because of their lighter skeletons, women are particularly plagued by stress fractures. As many as 30 percent of female army colonels have some kind of permanent orthopedic condition; only 7 percent of male colonels do.
The military prides itself on being a true meritocracy, but women are not required to meet the same physical-training standards as men. In the navy, the women’s obstacle course at boot camp was made easier and renamed the “confidence course.” The double standard rankles men. If women can’t keep up in training, how will they lead in combat? The resentment is particularly strong in elite units. At the service academies, women are often “silenced” by male cadets or mocked with crude jokes. Naval aviators have particularly resisted women in their ranks. Wing mates, they say, can hardly afford to worry about sexual jealousy.
The most amorphous rap against women in the service–and the hardest to disprove–is that they will weaken the warrior culture, the fighting spirit and tight bonding of buddies in the trenches. Such fears were not borne out by the gulf war, where 40,000 women served alongside 550,000 men. Integrated units seemed to perform as well as all-male units. There was plenty of sex–except in the 24th Mechanized Division, whose commander, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, decreed that “soldiers don’t dance with other soldiers.” Teamwork overcame physical differences. After-action surveys found that as units got closer to combat, they began to forget about male-female differences.
But the gulf war’s ground campaign lasted only 100 hours. Casualties were fairly light–142 men and 6 women died. It is necessary, then, to look to other armies in other conflicts to gauge women as warriors. Waging wars of national survival, both the Soviet Union and Israel sent women into combat in the 1940s. The most feared sniper in the siege of Stalingrad was a woman, and a top squadron of aviators was all-female (named, naturally, the Night Witches). But both the Soviets and the Israelis ultimately pulled women from their combat ranks. Their public recoiled at the idea of female casualties and POWs. And Americans? Shortly before he died in 1994, Defense Secretary Les Aspin, the Clinton-administration official who opened up combat units to women, remarked privately to a NEWSWEEK reporter that Americans won’t really focus “until they see the coffins coming back with their daughters inside. That,” he said, “is when they’ll make up their minds what they think.” By then, of course, it will be too late.
