The Military Times’ long piece yesterday on the changing culture of the U.S. military got plenty of attention, which was principally devoted to the shocking poll numbers the article revealed about President Obama. The president’s approval rating among the troops has cratered to 15 percent this year, down from an unspectacular—but at least not historically low—35 percent in 2009.
But the article is much longer and more interesting than just a single presidential approval rating, and deserves a full read for what its thorough reporting and analysis suggest about the current condition of the military. The piece sets the president’s approval rating in the context of the social transformations that he and his appointees have committed to bringing about in the Department of Defense. The same poll that revealed the president's grim level of esteem among the troops was also used to question those serving in the military about the repeal of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell, integrating women into ground combat arms, and the military’s efforts to deal with sexual assault.
To sum up the results: troops have largely made their peace with accepting gays and lesbians serving in uniform (support went from 35 percent in 2009 to 60 percent today), they remain ambivalent about integrating women into combat jobs (support went from 34 percent in 2009 to 41 percent today) and are divided on the issue of sexual assault, with "only about half" of respondents saying that they believe sexual assault is a "serious or significant problem" in the military, and only 48 percent saying that the training they received on the matter was effective.
For those supportive of the campaign for greater social justice in the military, these numbers can be understood as follows. Just as the military’s leadership in the civil rights revolution during the last century met with stiff initial resistance from those who said that blacks and whites could never serve together, but succeeded in the end in achieving an integrated force that, today, has relatively little racial tension—so it has gone with the repeal of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell. And, despite current resistance, so it will go with the integration of women into ground combat arms units like the infantry.
But there is a problem with this argument, as the Military Times’ story clearly illustrates. Consider this interview with an Army infantry captain who expresses some reserve about the coming shift for integrating women:
An Army captain, an infantry officer who deployed to Iraq three times, said he saw morale and unit cohesion problems emerge on his last tour when female soldiers from the forward support company embedded in his infantry unit.
"They didn't realize you didn't need to protect" a female soldier, he said. "The chivalry factor is always there. There's always going to be, out of every 10 guys, five guys who will want to protect her because she's their little sister. There are three guys who are trying to hook up with her, and there are two guys who hate her and treat her like crap because she won't hook up with them."
For good or for bad, all-male units like the infantry and artillery and tankers, it's like a seventh-grade locker room," the captain said. "Some guys, the maturity isn't there yet."
He said introducing women into previously all-male units also can cause trouble at home.
"Another problem is the wives," he said. "Everybody's OK with an all-male unit until the wives see there's a fit, ambitious young lady, and you're going to go overseas with 15 dudes, and I'm supposed to trust that situation? That creates a lot of stress family-wise. No matter what the soldier may or may not be doing, his spouse might be convicting him either way."
Over time, he believes the military will adjust. But "until it all works itself out, which eventually it will, there's going to be growing pains," the captain said.
The editor in me would like to point out that the evidence the captain presents somewhat contradicts the conclusion at which he arrives: That things will work themselves out after some "growing pains." What sort of social change will cause those soldiers for whom "the maturity isn’t there yet" at the ages of 18 through 20 to suddenly start behaving in a mature fashion? What will suppress both their chivalrous and their sexual instincts? What will suppress the territorial (and, to be frank, entirely reasonable!) instincts of their wives?
For those who support sexual integration in combat arms, these concerns are not dismissed so much as they aren’t even raised. To raise them is distasteful, like objecting to racial integration or the inclusion of gays and lesbians. But there is an unstated premise here: that all of these transformations are the same.
They are not the same.
The civil rights revolution forced the military to stop discriminating on the basis of skin color—a literally superficial and entirely irrational grounds for discrimination. The repeal of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell was actually much less of a dramatic change than it was thought to be at the time, for the simple reason that there had always been gays and lesbians in the military, and there were always going to be gays and lesbians in the military. I was serving in an infantry battalion at the moment of the policy’s repeal, and I can report that the moment of transformation came and went without any noticeable turmoil.
But—to state what ought to be obvious—racial differences and "gender" differences are not equivalent. Racial differences are quite literally skin-deep. To the extent that there superficially appear to be differences at all, they are cultural. It was thus entirely reasonable to expect that whatever racial tension arose as a result of military integration in the ‘50s and ‘60s (and there was a lot of it) would eventually go away, as cultures transform. But the problems that come about from combining young—so young! People who haven’t served in the military often don’t realize that their heroes are basically highschoolers—men and women from diverse backgrounds in close, stressful quarters cannot be suppressed by the same process. Consider the following lamentable anecdote from the Military Times story:
VanArsdall said it's important to have strong, effective sexual assault and prevention training not only for young male troops, but also for young female troops. He said he has intervened in some situations where a female troop didn't recognize she was being harassed or assaulted.
He intervened in one encounter in 2013 during a joint training environment, where a young male Marine on a break began telling a young female sailor that he had a stain in the groin area of his uniform. The male Marine began essentially straddling the female sailor on a bench while she laughed, at which point VanArsdall intervened and told them that wasn't appropriate.
"Her reaction was, 'No big deal, he's just playing,' " VanArsdall said. "I was kind of shocked by her response, especially after the training we try to give them. But that was just the one time I saw it. How often does that go down when I'm not around? How often did he do this, and [a female troop] thought, 'He's just playing?' That's the culture we need to stamp out."
How many "effective sexual assault and prevention" training sessions—which is to say, how many PowerPoint presentations—will it take to make that young man stop acting like an animal, and to get that young woman to stand up for herself? Even accepting for purposes of argument that such behavior is purely cultural (of course it is not) these two young people have arrived in the military at 18 years of age, and their formative cultures are entirely out of the military’s hands. Meanwhile, infantry battalions have other work to do—defending the country, staying alive, etc.
The current debate about sexual assault and sexual integration in the military has many parallels with the debate about sexual assault on college campuses. Both capture the broad progressive instinct of American politics in a moment of crisis. The vast, churning wave of the sexual revolution has crashed up against the rocks of human nature.
On campuses, the sexual revolution has largely run its course, and revealed that among its big winners are aggressive and sexually predatory young men, who observe the 24/7 bacchanalia that university education has become and lick their chops in anticipation. In response, increasingly absurd policies and laws are being enacted in an effort to tame the genie of sexual license without putting him back in the bottle—including efforts by the state of California to script the appropriate conduct of a sexual encounter between college students behind closed doors. (Has California mandated PowerPoint training as well? That might do it.)
The same basic principle is at work in the military. An ideological and profoundly unscientific commitment to the notion that "gender" differences are social constructions threatens to do lasting damage to the effectiveness of the military as a fighting force. Unlike the reforms of the civil rights era, the disruptions within the ranks caused by these transformations will never go away.