The feminization of the American military

In a tender love song from the late 1970’s, Bob Dylan asked, “Can you cook and sew and make flowers grow, do you understand my pain?” To the ensuing barrage of feminist criticism, the somewhat shaken but unrepentant song writer replied: yes, women should be free to do whatever they liked, but “when a man says he’s looking for a good woman, he isn’t looking for an airline pilot.”

Two decades later, all manner of media are laboring to purge Americans of such benighted attitudes, and all manner of American institutions are breathlessly acquiescing. The title of one of my daughter’s favorite bedtime books is Maybe You Should Fly a Jet, and the cover shows a woman— a blonde, glamorous woman— at the controls. Children’s television programs inevitably depict female doctors, police, and mechanics; presidents of women’s colleges deplore the fact that one in eight teenage girls still hopes for a career in modeling; and the United States Army encourages women to “be all that you can be” by trading cosmetics and cars for camouflage and helicopters.

Indeed, one of the central goals of the feminist movement is to establish a fully sexually integrated military, trained, fit, and ready to engage in combat. To the advocates of this cause, it is an outrage that the United States is not moving at a rapid enough pace in their direction; but the truth is that it has moved very swiftly indeed. The United States today is the only serious military power in history to contemplate thorough sexual integration of its armed forces. And thanks to an adamant feminist lobby, a conspiracy of silence in the officer corps, and the anodynestate of debate over the issue, the brave new world of female infantry, bomber pilots, submariners, and drill sergeants may lie just around the corner.

How ought Americans of both sexes to think about their co-educational military and the prospects for women in combat? No doubt many unreconstructed male chauvinists would agree with Nietzsche that “Man shall be framed for War, Woman for the entertainment of the Warrior, and all else is folly.” But one need not be a caveman to argue that objections may be made against women in combat on some basis other than bias, for instance: common sense; the empirical evidence of the past twenty years; and the universal experience of the human race. As former Secretary of the Navy James Webb attests, military institutions must be coercive, hierarchical, and self-sacrificial, and as such they depend on a rigid code of fairness with regard to conduct, performance, and deportment, promotion on merit, and egalitarian treatment that by its nature cannot be gender- neutral. For as soon as the sexes are mixed in close quarters, especially for prolonged and tense intervals, the jealousies, courtships, and favoritism that are bound to erupt must corrode fairness and discipline.

Imagine, writes Webb, a ship at sea for a hundred days during which numerous crew members pair off for sex. That in itself spawns favoritism, duplicity, and pregnancies. But what of the crewmen who don’t “score” with shipmates and must stifle their libido for months? “The inescapable feelings of resentment, competition, and anger that follow create a powder keg of emotions that cannot help but affect morale, discipline, and attention to duty.” To military expert Edward Luttwak, the belief that mixing the sexes need not affect order and discipline is “a grotesque, puritanical hypocrisy. The Army can’t do something that eluded the Franciscans. It can’t run a mixed monastery.”

Everyone knows this—and yet nobody talks, which is what allows the feminists to frame the debate entirely in terms of equal opportunity. Senior male officers habitually prove Napoleon’s dictum to the effect that “He who is full of courage and sang-froid before an enemy battery sometimes trembles before a skirt.” They keep silent because they know that to express caveats about sexual integration is a “ca