---

Rabble Yell
 
Our armed forces have been slipping toward endangered species status for
quite a while now. The United States Army, which fell 6,290 bodies short
of its 1999 recruiting goal of 74,500 needed to guarantee the mandated
485,000 active-duty personnel strength, recently decided to switch
advertising agencies. Apparently, the shopworn challenge to "Be All That
You Can Be!" fails to ignite the career ambitions of today's Generation
Whatever. Worse, retention hovers as low as recruitment: for the last two
years, 35 percent of Army recruits did not complete their first tour of
duty.
 
On an emergency mission earlier this spring our Secretary of Defense and
Janet Langhart, his spouse, jetted to Hollywood to recruit a dozen movie
stars, directors, and producers to do public service announcements
promoting the military on radio and television. Among the celebrities
approached are Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise, Stephen Spielberg and Tom
Hanks. And Miss Julia Roberts, of course. Demi Moore, ideally suited
after her fling with the Navy SEALS in the he flick G.I. Jane three years
ago, was not available but "interested in helping out," SECDEF said
afterwards. It remains to be seen what impact his clueless Hollywood Blitz
will have on military readiness, combat effectiveness and unit cohesion.
If any.
 
All of our military services are experiencing critical shortages of skilled
personnel. Moreover, non-commissioned and mid-level officers - those
essential sergeants, captains, and majors - are hanging up their uniforms
at an alarming rate. Will catchy new slogans spread by glitzy
multimillionaires keep them in? Can mere advertising gags and public
relations gimmicks keep America's all-volunteer force afloat?
 
A major calamity besieging our Army is the gender-integrated basic training
mandatory for all recruits, the blatant double-standards applied, the
dumbed-down performance requirements, and the service's adamant denial of
anything being wrong with both program and process.
 
Defense Secretary William S. Cohen himself is in stubborn denial. Three
years ago he had announced the appointment of a Federal Advisory Committee
on Gender-Integrated Training, chaired by former Senator Nancy Kassebaum.
Their goal:
"To determine how best to train...to ensure that they are disciplined,
effective and ready." When the Kassebaum Committee reported - unanimously
- that discipline, effectiveness, and readiness were not achieved under the
mandated training regime, Cohen rejected the report - and asked for yet
another committee, this one not Federal but Congressional, whose more
up-beat report met with Cohen's approval. He gave the green light for the
gender-integrated calamity to continue.
 
Mister Cohen would render himself a great service by browsing through
Stephanie Gutmann's observations on gender-integrated training as conducted
at Army Base Fort Jackson, South Carolina and at Great Lakes Naval Training
Base, Illinois. He might conclude that the four-volume final report,
issued in July of 1999 by the Congressional Commission on Military Training
and Gender-Related Issues, costing the American taxpayer roughly $5
million, is the result of a time-wasting, useless activity. Based on the
illusion that interviews with active duty soldiers and officers could
produce reliable insights or even "the truth" about the gender-integrated
Army, the Commission had operated in the field, deliberated and voted on
faulty premises. One commissioner had even voted "undecided" on the
question if gender-neutral training was good or bad for the Army. And
Cohen had signed off on the farce.
 
Miss Gutmann's original version of her stay at Fort Jackson and Great Lakes
was published in The New Republic on February 24, 1997 under the title "Sex
and the Soldier," with the subtitle "What the Military forgot about men,
women, and the birds and the bees." The elegant piece told the public
everything it ever wanted to know about supercillious social
experimentation, applied to a vital institution charged with providing for
the common defense.
 
Yet another Pentagon-driven "survey," this one conducted under the cover of
the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies and released
recently, finds Army morale at a ten-year low - but cannot come up with a
single conclusive reason for the depression other than the military's
inescapable obligation to compete for quality manpower within a robust
civilian economy - and coming up short. The problem is identified as one
of the soldiers' long work hours and long tours overseas, relatively low
pay, low-quality housing, lack of day-care facilities and health-care
provisions.
 
Nothing then is wrong with recruitment and retention, in other words, that
more money would not cure. This includes relief from unwanted pregnancies
and mandatory sensitivity sessions for the unenlightened machos still in
uniform.
 
Actually, if the Pentagon really wanted to know why everybody has been
heading for the exits, Miss Stephanie Gutmann writes in her splendid book
The Kinder, Gentler Military, "the answer is everywhere," and she quotes
Army Captain Jeff Church from the internet: "It's not just about the money.
The U.S. military has never made anyone but flag officers wealthy. People
used to stay in because they felt like they were warriors, making a
difference, with commanders they respected, in units they were proud of.
Those feelings don't exist today."
 
"It's about the command climate, stupid," says one (unnamed, of course)
active-duty officer in conversation with Miss Gutmann. "It's becoming like
Mao's cultural revolution," adds ex-Army officer John Hillen, with no
government job at risk for speaking out, "everybody knows it's a system
built on a thousand little lies, but everybody's waiting for someone that's
high-ranking who's not a complete moral coward to come out and say so."
 
Catherine Aspy, ex-Army specialist and familiar with George Orwell's
prophesies, recalls "that 1984 feeling, the totalitarian feel, the
double-think, how one's leaders seemed able to tell you two contradictory
things and then, if they were called on it, deny the contradiction, like
when they represented women as weak and exploited victims, on the one hand,
and as an all-powerful mighty force on the other, and then say it's an
'insult to imply that women aren't identical to men.'"
 
Perhaps the slide into hypocrisy was triggered by the U.S. Navy's
rambunctious 1991 Tailhook Convention in Las Vegas, Miss Gutmann thought at
first. Misdeeds were blown way out of proportion, it would not amount to
much. Tailhook '91 had been an aberration the mighty Navy's immune system
would neutralize. But soon enough she discovered that the entire military
was in fact in a rictus of political correctness, that it was passing
through an anguished self-examination, particularly over the issue of
"gender," a word chosen because it sounds less treacherous then the
atavistic, mercurial code word "sex." Virtually overnight, the "warrior
culture," masculine by definition, therefore detested in the
radicalfeminist ranks, was out, and the "gender-neutral" New Age Army,
Navy, and Air Force were in by swift decree.
 
The American military was cast into a huge and risky social experiment: "It
is important to change military culture from a masculinist vision of
unalloyed aggressivity to an ungendered vision," law professor Madeline
Morris had pronounced from the ivory tower at Duke University, thus
qualifying for the position of consultant with Army Secretary Togo West.
 
Leashed to such learned counsel coming from whole schools of "social
scientists," encouraged from the White House, pushed by Pentagon top
bureaucrats like Sarah Lister of "We-are-about-to-topple-the-male, white
culture" fame, and abandoned to the wolves by a cowed congress, the
military's flag officers caved and became wedded to the deep insight that
sex differences are just a social construct.
 
The results are in and notorious worldwide under the rubric Mutual Gender
Harassment at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Mandatory sensitivity training for
all in uniform has become remedy and the accepted prophylactic. Besides,
the profession of arms "has always emphasized controlling emotions and
divisive conduct," reminds us Rosemary Mariner, Commander, USN (retired) in
Joint Force Quarterly. She and her fellow egalitarians ignore the timeless
wisdom espoused by Henry Burns in the 1989 movie When Harry met Sally: "Men
and women can't be friends - because the sex part always gets in the way."
 
Why did young males enter the all-volunteer military in the past?
Lieutenant Commander Thomas Strother stresses "that it was different from
'normal society.' It was a bastion of masculinity where young men were
encouraged to be a little wild if it contributed to combat readiness. It
was not a feminized culture like elementary school and high school were."
Strother remembers never having heard a senior officer openly suggest that
ending the exclusion of women from combat might hurt recruiting: "Yet,
since allowing women to serve in combat roles, recruiting has slid in the
tank."
 
Strother has retired from the Navy, and the sea-going service has countered the
fall-off in recruiting and retention with ideas on how to recruit more
females. They will have reached 25 percent Navy personnel strength within
five years.
 
Anyone in uniform asking openly whether America's new gender-neutral
fighting force can still win wars (as Stephanie Gutmann does after
countless chats with young and older soldiers and sailors across the
continent and aboard the carrier John C. Stennis in the Arabian Gulf)
becomes an instant target, susceptible to corrective measures on grounds of
having violated the paramount gag rule so pervasive throughout our
post-modern Army, Navy, Air Force, and now infiltrating even the Proud and
Few:
 
The Marine Corps, resistant by custom to all radical chic designs intent on
first modifying, then exorcising the all-male warrior culture, will come
under unprecedented pressure once the Pentagon's newest blue-water
experimental laboratory is completed and dispatched to foreign shores. The
USS San Antonio, an ultramodern troop carrier, will accommodate not only
700 Marines plus their helicopters but also a female crew component
numbering 250. Consequently, the ship is built "with women in mind, from
the keel up," reports Time magazine's Pulitzer laureate Mark Thompson
proudly: "the heads won't have urinals."
 
Naval architects and designers have thought of everything ladylike:
bathrooms with increased ventilation "due to hairspray," along with extra
outlets and mirrors for hair and makeup.
 
To all skeptics on women in combat roles and outright opponents alike,
Lieutenant Colonel Jeanne Botright, USMC, gave short shrift in the letter
page of the Naval Institute's journal Proceedings: "The time has come to
face it, gentlemen. We are here to stay." So after all the debates and
arguments, it's "Shut up, Buster."
 
Gag rules govern all aspects of past and present "gender integration," the
Pentagon policy engineered in the nineties, when the Brass "handed over
their soldiers to social planners in love with an unworkable (and in many
senses undesirable) vision of a politically correct utopia, one in which
men and women toil side by side, equally good at the same tasks,
interchangeable, and, of course, utterly undistracted by sexual interest."
 
Miss Gutmann refrains from stating: There are no women players on any team
of the National Football or National Hockey League. Not a single woman
graces the ranks of Formula One Racing. None race motorbikes in
competition (due to insufficient upper-body strength and superior
intelligence). Throughout competitive sports, males and females are kept
apart. Common sense helps explain the obvious: Men are stronger than
women, they run faster, they throw farther, they jump higher, and they get
pregnant less often. That is why armed forces the world over have been
reluctant to allow women into their ranks. It was only the
bureaucratization of modern armed forces and radical egalitarianism that
made them equal opportunity employers - like the Postal Service.- rather
than institutions that stress the primacy of combat effectiveness. Like
American Football and Ice Hockey. Or the U.S. Marine Corps.
 
Combat is brute strength and endurance spread through days and weeks and
months of war. Combat is killing and being killed. That is why women are
not wanted there. The Israeli army officer who said that any nation which
uses women in combat is not worth defending had it right: Men are
expendable, and women are not. This point is drawn, of course, from
biology and culture, therefore despised by utopians and hypocrites. But
how did our four-star admirals and generals justify their cowardice under
small-arms fire when Congressperson Patricia Schroeder and her troopers
demanded surrender?
 
Miss Gutmann shows that it is impossible for the military to analyze, much
less solve, its "gender integration" and recruitment/retention problem from
within. The military's senior leadership demonstrates day after day that
it lacks the capacity to acknowledge that such problems exist. To them,
Stephanie Gutmann extends an observation of universal and eternal validity
left by the daring aviatrice, Amelia Earhart: "Men would rather vacate the
arena than share it with women."
 
And then, surprise!, Miss Gutmann concludes her fine book with the
recommendation to leave the needed reform of our misguided Revolution in
Military Personnel Affairs to - the numbercrunchers. "We should let the
scientists have a go," she muses, "trust the scientists. They live in an
unforgiving world where if you are wrong the stuff blows up in your face."
 
Thank goodness, Miss Gutmann does not seem to mean the social "scientists"
who have been so instrumental in creating the mess now strangling our
military. Nothing ever blows up in their tenured face.

H Joachim Maitre
 
 
copyright: American Spectator and Defense Media Review 2000

Go Back to Previous Page

---

cdj@bu.edu