FEMINISTS HAVE LATELY SUFFERED two tactical setbacks, but they are still winning their war on the military. A federal commission headed by former senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, despite the requisite presence of feminists and quota-meisters, has surprised everybody by unanimously recommending that all the services segregate the living quarters and much of the training undertaken by men and women joining the armed forces. More important, the report castigates the services for making basic training so soft that it is often indistinguishable from freshman orientation at our most politically correct universities. And the Kassebaum Baker report follows on the heels of the stormy resignation of assistant secretary of the Army Sara Lister, who had publicly assailed the Marine Corps as "extremists." The corps has stoutly resisted the feminist agenda pushed by Clinton appointees like Lister and is the only service that maintains a degree of separation between men and women in its boot camp. Somebody must have forgotten to tell them that, in the words of one Democratic activist, the president ran on the promise "to make the military equal for everybody."
Despite these setbacks, feminists are still very much in control of the debate. Ultimately, they maintain, the issue is one of group rights. Women-in- combat is merely a logical extension of women-out-of-the-home-and-into-the- workplace, right? Any effort to slow down this movement is an attempt to " turn back the clock." Feckless politicians, including experienced Republicans whose own investigations turned up the same evidence as the Kassebaum Baker commission, cringe at the accusation that they are against progress or, worse still, that they are widening the gender gap.
Even more depressing is the tacit acceptance of these terms of battle by most military leaders. What to think of the Army, Navy, and Air Force chiefs' passionate defense of the status quo only months before the 11 members of the Kassebaum Baker panel released their embarrassing findings? An absurdly small number of enlisted women -- single digit percentages in several different studies -- show any interest at all in joining combat units. Nonetheless, the Department of Defense has bent over backwards to show that the rights it is most concerned with are not those of the institution, with its grave and hazardous duties, but the rights of individuals and groups bringing a narcissistic and opportunistic culture of victimhood to the gates of boot camp and thence into the force.
The most notorious example is the politically correct wonderland that now passes for basic training. The new gender-integrated boot camp has become such a national joke that Time magazine's cover story on the softness of training was featured in its year-end Christmas commercial aiming for new subscribers. As a solemn voiceover describes the more outrageous features of the new basic training, a camera lingers over a young recruit being shorn in a military barber's chair, finally focusing on the lollipop in his hand. When the distinctively non-military-oriented masthead at Time figures it can cause outrage among the middle class over the softness of boot camp, a day of reckoning has arrived.
The American military, it should be clear by now, is suffering from something more severe than a belated battle of the sexes. It is, rather, undergoing an identity crisis. In the absence of a threat that would focus the strategic mind of the force, and under pressure from a counterculture all grown up and gone to work in Washington, the military is floundering about, trying to figure out to what extent it may need to change its culture to stay in sync with the society it serves. In Making the Corps, his recent book about the training of Marines, Tom Ricks worries that the Marine Corps and other elements of the military may become openly contemptuous of a society that turns up its nose at duty, honor, country, commitment, courage, and integrity. Ricks intimates that society may want to readopt some Marine Corps values. Sara Lister strongly suggested that the reverse take place.
For the most part, the Pentagon is with Lister. Not to put too fine a point on it, the military (with the once again conspicuous exception of the Marine Corps) is failing to defend its own culture and its own hierarchy of values. And, if recent history is any guide, we shouldn't be surprised. While courageous in battle, U.S. military leaders since World War II have generally been overly apologetic and eagerly compromising when it comes to issues of culture. When uniformed leaders do make a stand against some fashionable assault on military culture (such as Colin Powell vs. President Clinton over open homosexuality in the ranks) they are usually set upon by a coterie of academics screaming about a coup that is just around the corner. But such stands are the exception rather than the rule.
At the end of World War II, for the first time in American history, the military was faced with the need to maintain a large peacetime force through conscription. It convened a board headed by war hero Jimmy Doolittle and tasked it with figuring out how the military might change to make itself more amenable to peacetime draftees. As historian T. R. Fehrenbach wrote in his classic This Kind of War, "In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society." The result was a series of reforms that softened military discipline and training. The changes did not appear to have detrimental effects on the U.S. forces occupying Japan and Europe, and, as Fehrenbach noted, "the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile. What they lacked couldn't be seen, not until the guns sounded. "
The guns did sound in 1950, and the battlefield performance of many American troops during the first months of the Korean War was shameful. GIs running panicked from the field of battle were not only underequipped in tanks and ammunition, but underequipped in the martial spirit and ethos that sustain a military force through the unnatural stresses of war. Many blamed the Doolittle reforms. In the aftermath of the disaster, Fehrenbach angrily wrote that "liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiescence of the military toward the liberal view of life. But acquiescence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society's purpose is to live; the military's is to stand ready, if need be, to die." Trying to explain why men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall "rationalized," Fehrenbach concluded that they were overly taken with maintaining their own popularity and the military's change in status from long-serving and anonymous frontier servant to the premier heroic institution in the country.
The military appeared to take the lessons of Korea to heart until the end of the Vietnam War, when Richard Nixon ended the draft and started the all- volunteer force. The military was now faced with an even more imposing dilemma than that at the end of World War II: How to recruit volunteers from a society whose cultural icons were busy dedicating Academy Awards to the North Vietnamese? The answer was in the recruiting slogan of the new all- volunteer Army, "Today's Army Wants to Join YOU." The military, of its own volition, was going to make itself look enough like the drug-plagued, race- troubled, "question-authority!" society at large to attract volunteers. President Carter offered amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters, the American Federation of Government Employees pushed for the unionization of the military, and the services themselves relaxed the rigid social construct and military ethos that evolved over four thousand years of human history in response to the needs of men in battle. "Enlisted Councils" undermined the critical role of sergeants and, as one army publication wrote, "to many the all volunteer army meant beer in the barracks, long hair, loss of authority by non-commissioned officers, and drugs."
A few voices sounded the alarm -- Army General Walter "Dutch" Kerwin wrote that "the values necessary to defend the society are often at odds with the values of the society itself. To be an effective servant of the people, the Army must concentrate not on the values of our liberal society, but on the hard values of the battlefield." His advice went unheeded. Needless to say, the malaise of the Carter years not only penetrated the U.S. military, but many say defined it. As Colin Powell and many others later noted, the most corrosive element of the Carter years in the military was the hollowness of spirit, not the low budgets. The Reagan administration not only increased defense spending, but began a concerted effort to reintroduce the warrior culture into the armed forces. The Army dropped its slogan of accommodation and replaced it with one of challenge -- "Be All that You Can Be." In a few short years, and for the first time in history, the United States had the best military fighting force in the world.
Today we appear to have come full circle. The great majority of the military, facing recruiting and retention problems, is now trying to look less distinctive, more like civilian society. Clintonites are pressing the military to conform to the values of the baby boomers and their Generation X progeny rather than the other way around. The Army, for instance, is trying every desperate tactic to sell itself to an uninterested public. In an effort to stem its most serious recruiting problem since the end of the draft, the Army has tried to sell itself with what military sociologists call occupational attributes: money, training, job security -- high school with a salary and fresh air. An Army recruiter was recently quoted in USA Today as trying to guess "what the twentysomethings are going to go for." The approach appears to be backfiring -- recruiting is getting harder and the service is steadily lowing standards to accommodate recruits who would have been turned away only five years ago. The Wall Street Journal reports that Hispanic recruits are flocking to the Marine Corps because the Army no longer satisfies their standards of machismo.
The Marine Corps, as this anecdote attests, still sells itself not as a place to work, but as a place to be. Institutional, not occupational, attributes are its forte. It offers the immutable values of the Corps as its reward -- honor, courage, commitment -- values little taught or even respected in much of civilian society. Slackers and hackers of Generation X that make it through tough and uncompromising training tend to perform admirably in the force. I went into battle with many of them in Desert Storm (my tank gunner painted several grunge-rock symbols on the turret) and they were magnificent under fire.
The problem today is not some inherent weakness or lack of spine in America's teenagers (although the baggy pants have got to make you wonder). Every generation has thought the one following couldn't possibly undertake the military deeds that it had performed, and the idea that the Nintendo generation will not fight just doesn't hold water. As military writer Ralph Peters has put it, "I went to basic training in 1976 with a bunch of losers (me included): drug addicts, thugs, and drunks. I'll take Generation X any day."
The problem is that the military ethos that transforms a Bart Simpson into an Audie Murphy is under assault. Basic training has much less to do with making a technically proficient warrior than it does with effecting a transformation of the recruit's culture and values. An identity is earned in boot camp, not an occupational designation. If political and military leaders do not aggressively defend the need to have values and a culture different and separate from civilian society, then we will lose the ability to transform the citizen into the soldier.
One wonders whether the Marine Corps (and, to be fair, the ever-shrinking combat elements of the other services, whose training is also fair and tough) can hold out against the onslaught of the Listers. Proponents of traditional military culture certainly cannot look inside the Pentagon for allies. The majority of the military, along with the feminists and gender-gap panderers, are obsessed with defending the absurdities of current policy that were identified ad nauseam by the Kassebaum Baker commission. They will continue to bend the military to the values of contemporary society so long as no one puts up too much of a fight. The Pentagon appears trapped in a historical pattern of making sure that if American society is going to slouch towards Gomorrah, it will make sure it is marching right alongside.
If cozy relations between a professional military and its society are our ultimate goal, then we should go ahead and make Parris Island look like Ridgemont High. If, however, we intend to have a military that will provide for the common defense of the nation, then it must be able to fight and win wars. That means producing warriors. And a military that produces them should at least be capable of defending its own culture.
John Hillen is the Olin Fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.