National Review/
December 27, 2004
GI Janes, By Stealth
The
Army tries to pull a fast one
MACKUBIN
THOMAS OWFNS*
The U.S. Array is quietly making a radical
change in its personnel policy that may well see the 3rd Infantry Division
redeploy to Iraq early next year with mixed-sex support companies collocated
with combat units. The move violates not only Defense Department regulations,
but also the requirement to notify Congress when such a change goes into
effect.
In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, the military opened a number of specialties to
women, permitting them to serve on the Navy's fighting ships and to fly Navy
and Air Force combat aircraft. There were several reasons for this. First, some
military women—mostly officers and pilots—and their civilian supporters argued
that women could never attain the highest levels of command unless they had the
opportunity to serve in combat. Second, there was widespread acceptance of the
view that technological advances had completely "changed the nature of
war": Emerging technologies and "information dominance" would
reduce the risks inherent in warfighting. If this were the case, why did we
need these old restrictions that hampered the progress of women? As former
con-gresswoman Pat Sehroeder famously remarked, a woman can push a button just
as easily as a man.
Even
so, women continued to be excluded from units that engaged in direct ground combat.
This prohibition extended to the support units that were collocated with these forces as well.
The
indefatigable Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness has
discovered that the Army has surreptitiously begun to violate these regulations
without advising Congress, which requires notification of any changes to policy
within 30 legislative days, and when both houses are in session. Unfortunately,
Ms. Donnelly's longtime commitment to the combat effectiveness of the military
is often not matched by that of the very leaders who are responsible for
ensuring it. As she has illustrated time and again, no branch of the military
is completely free of political correctness.
Right
now, for example, the Army is beginning to implement an innovative structural
reorganization designed to make its new "units of action" (UAs) more
rapidly deployable while maintaining a high degree of lethality. One of the
factors enhancing the effectiveness of the original UA concept was that support
troops would be collocated with maneuver battalions 100 percent of the time –
essentially becoming an organic part of the direct ground-combat units. But if
such a forward-support company (FSC) is part of a maneuver battalion, current
Defense Department policy says that it cannot include women.
So Army
commanders have simply transferred FSCs from the maneuver battalions into
"gender-integrated" brigade-support battalions, thereby avoiding the
requirement to report the policy change to Congress. Of course, no matter where
the FSCs appear on a table of organization, the fact is, they will live and
work with the maneuver battalions all the time.
In a letter to Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee, Ms. Donnelly argues that such an incremental alteration constitutes
a slippery slope that will lead to radical changes for all land-combat units,
starting with the reconnaissance, surveillance, and target-acquisition (RSTA)
squadrons of the Army's Stryker combat teams, and ending with Special
Operations forces, and maybe even the Marine Corps.
The
Army's defense of its actions has been disingenuous. On one hand, the Army
claimed in May that there were "insufficient male soldiers in the Army to fill forward support companies," and therefore it
"cannot support elimination of female soldiers from all units designated
to be UA elements." But if the Army knew about this back in May, why
didn't it ask Congress for more recruits at the time? One cannot escape the
conclusion that the Army's position appears to be that we don't have enough
young men to fight our wars, so women must be integrated into fighting units by
subterfuge and sleight-of-hand.
But
then, on the other hand, an Army spokesman recently told Rowan Scarborough of
the Washington Times that the policy of prohibiting women from serving
in units supporting ground-combat formations is outdated. Today, said the
spokesman, the threat is "asymmetrical… There is no front-line threat
right now" since all soldiers, support or combat, face rocket, mortar, and
roadside-bomb attacks, as well as ambushes.
This is
arrant nonsense. I'm sure the soldiers and Marines who just took Fallujah would
beg to differ with those who claim there is "no front line" in Iraq.
The threat they and the support troops collocated with them faced as they
carried out their mission of "closing with and destroying the enemy"
was qualitatively different from that of support troops not so collocated.
Putting women into the vortex of combat so vividly illustrated by the savage
fighting in Fallujah would undermine the effectiveness of our ground-combat
units by undercutting the unit cohesion critical to achieving victory in war.
Despite
recent attempts to redefine it, unit cohesion in combat is far more than mere
teamwork. Cohesion arises from the bond among disparate individuals who have
nothing in common but facing death and misery. This bond is akin to what the
Greeks called philia – friendship, comradeship, or brotherly love.
Despite claims to the contrary, there is substantial evidence that the
presence of women in a combat environment fragments unit cohesion. The first
reason is traceable to the fact that men and women have radically different
bodies. For instance, the female soldier is, on average, about five inches
shorter than the male soldier, has half the upper-body strength, lower aerobic
capacity, and 37 percent less muscle mass. She has a lighter skeleton, which
leads to a higher incidence of structural injuries than for men. She also
tends, particularly if she is under the age of 30 (as are 60 percent of
military personnel), to get pregnant.
These
differences have had an adverse impact on U.S. military effectiveness. Women
are four times more likely to report ill, and the percentage of women being
medically non-available at any time is twice that of men. If a woman can't do
her job, someone else must do it for her. Only 10 percent of women can meet all
of the minimum physical requirements for 75 percent of the jobs in the Army.
Women may be able to drive five-ton trucks, but need a man's help if they must
change the tires. Women can be assigned to a field artillery unit, but often
can't handle the ammunition.
The
second reason that the presence of women in a combat environment increases
friction is that the mixing of the sexes leads to the introduction of eras into
an environment based on philia. Unlike philia, eros is
individual and exclusive, manifesting itself as sexual competition, male
protectiveness, and favoritism.
Those who deny the impact of eros on unit cohesion are kidding
themselves. As the eminent military sociologist Charles Moskos has commented,
"When you put men and women together in a confined environment and shake
vigorously, don't be surprised if sex occurs." Mixing the sexes and
thereby introducing eros creates the most dangerous form of friction in
the military, corroding the very source of military excellence itself: the male
bonding necessary to unit cohesion.
Feminists, of course, contend that these
manifestations of eros are the result only of a lack of education and
inscnsitivily to women, and can be eradicated by means of education and
indoctrination. But all the social engineering in the world cannot change the
real differences between men and women, or the natural tendency of men to treat
women differently than they do other men. Unfortunately, far too many senior
U.S. military leaders have bought into the idea that men and women are
interchangeable and that future war will be neat and tidy. Fallujah suggests
otherwise. What is the Army leadership thinking by tempting nature in the midst
of war?
* Mr. Owens is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and a Marine infantry veteran of Vietnam. In 1998, he testified before the Congressional Commission on Training and Gender-Related Issues.