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I do not believe in using women in combat because women are too fierce.
—Margaret Meade
Two events in my life describe my time on this planet. During the summer of 1992, I conducted a parachute jump with my oldest daughter, newly commissioned Lt. Maria Scales, at Fort Benning, Georgia. She’s a hoot: self-motivated, driven by success to a degree I still cannot comprehend, and tough. It was her fifth and last parachute jump. I had pulled strings and gotten permission from the commander of the Infantry School at Fort Benning to join her. She was a tiny thing, no more than maybe one hundred pounds. I was, to be honest, a bit heavier. She stood in the door of the shaking and rolling C-130 aircraft as we lifted off the airstrip. Very quickly, the aircraft swerved to the right to line up with Pryor Drop Zone just across the Chattahoochee River in Alabama.
I was her dad, of course, and an experienced paratrooper. I decided to take a brief moment while bouncing around the aircraft to offer a few bits of advice on the finer points of parachuting. From many years with the 82nd Airborne Division, I was used to an hour or more of approach flying during which the Air Force pilots devised any number of torturous means for making our flight as uncomfortable and terrifying as possible. I leaned over to her as she stood in the open door, started to shout . . . and suddenly she was gone . . . gone into the slipstream, disappeared into the ether, my little girl. I did not have much time to reflect on her disappearance before I was gone as well. I had failed to understand the geometry of airborne school. The distance from take off to first jump was about fifty seconds. It was a nineteen-“PAK” landing zone, meaning the aircraft was over the drop zone only long enough to disgorge about half its jumpers. No time for fatherly wisdom. The jumpmaster pushed me out. I had a terrible body position as I hit the airstream, “all asses and elbows,” to use the common term. I was twisted up to my ears in parachute risers and stunned by the utter violence of it all. And there was Maria, merrily drifting far above.
Again, I looked up to offer a few words of wisdom on how to land . . . and immediately slammed into the earth . . . hard, like a sack of potatoes, legs apart, elbows exposed, spine stiff, clearly unprepared for the compression. All I can remember once on the ground was collecting my chute in enormous pain. My beautiful daughter said to me, “Hey Dad, we’re all going over to the Black Angus to drink. Want to come along?” No, not this time. I had a very important meeting with the general officer commanding and had to leave immediately. Wrong, of course. All I was able to do was draw a bath and soak for an hour. I never jumped again.
Fast-forward six years to April 23, 1998. My youngest daughter, Monica, Notre Dame Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), made it through Airborne School without my wisdom. Soon she was a lieutenant in Bosnia, surrounded by very angry Serbs who wanted to attack her convoy. She was escorting a cardinal and a group of Croatian Catholics who had been displaced by Serb Soldiers from the town of Derventa. They were returning to Derventa to celebrate mass in their heavily damaged church. A large group of Serbs armed with automatic rifles, Molotov cocktails, and rocks started attacking the cardinal and several pilgrims as they tried to enter the church. Monica’s group—part of a United Nations contingent—drew their weapons and started pushing through the crowd. The crowd grew violent and turned on Monica’s Soldiers. Not able by the rules of engagement to open fire, she ordered a retreat and barely made it to a cluster of Norwegian armored vehicles before being overwhelmed. All this remained unknown to my wife and me until her division commander and dear friend, Gen. Larry Ellis, wrote Diana (not me) a letter telling her how close her daughter had come to being killed. So I have skin in the game when it comes to the subject of women in the military: two paratroopers, two commanders of their respective ROTC battalions, great Soldiers. I could not be more proud. Their sense of honor, patriotism, valor, and dedication to duty, all this they get from their mother.
Needless to say, in December 2015, my family watched closely as Secretary of Defense Ash Carter opened the gate to allow women into “direct ground combat”—specifically, units below brigade level. Much of the media hype was misplaced at the time, writing and speaking about “women being allowed in combat.” Actually, the issue is not about women in combat. They are already in combat and have been since the 1991 Gulf War. It is really about women in the infantry. A few experiments dictated by circumstances (and a laudable effort by the ground services to experiment) have put some carefully selected women in the Army’s elite Ranger School and a few in the equally demanding Marine Infantry Officer’s Course in Quantico, Virginia. So far, three incredibly fit and dedicated female officers, all graduates of West Point, have earned the Ranger tab. Well done.
I asked my two experts their opinions on all this. As usual, they led me down an unexpected path of logic. They told me, “It’s not about which levels of command to assign women or which jobs they can perform in war. The real issue is one of acceptance,” they said. “Like it or not, the culture of the military is defined by the ethos of the warrior. Forget the fact that even in Iraq and Afghanistan, fewer than one in ten actually engaged the enemy in close combat. It’s all about perception. The more we are excluded from a presence on the battlefield, the more we are protected from any probability of participating in the acts of a warrior, the less chance we will ever have to be embraced by the warrior caste.”
Placed into the context of history, their argument makes sense. Prior to the Civil War the regular Army considered the Irish to be great revolutionaries but poor material for Soldiering. However, that opinion was reversed after Antietam and Gettysburg, when units like the Excelsior Brigade and the Irish Brigade fought and died valiantly. Irishmen earned with their blood the right to be accepted as fellow warriors and for nearly a century were disproportionately represented in the front ranks of the Army and Marine Corps.
Politicians are fond of recognizing Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order as the instrument that integrated the services, but in fact Truman did not integrate the services. The North Koreans did. The Army that landed at Pusan in 1950 was still segregated, thanks to resistance by Dixiecrats in Truman’s party. Most Army posts, then as now, were located in Dixiecrat states, and in 1948 there was no chance southern Democrats would allow black Soldiers to frequent white-only establishments or mingle with white boys in the same units.
I remember like it was yesterday when all this changed. It was 1954, and I was in the fourth grade at Barden School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and for the first time in my short life I went into the classroom surrounded by black kids. One picture in our family album shows Miss Palbicki’s class, with ten of the twenty-five kids in the picture African American. I remember telling Mom. I thought this wonderfully southern, aristocratic woman would have a heart attack. My dad intervened and (for the first time in my memory) shouted at Mom, “So what, Clyde [my mother was named Clyde, how southern was that?]? It’s right that black kids are in Bobby’s class. Their dads paid for the right for their children to go to school with my son. They shed their blood in Korea. Their kids can go to Barden.” This was not about the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision or Harry Truman’s signed order to integrate the services. My dad had served in the 2nd Infantry Division’s 2nd Engineer Battalion in Korea. By the time Dad arrived in Korea, thousands of white Soldiers in the division were dead, wounded, or captured. In order to fill foxholes and hold the line, the Army sent solders from all-black rear-area units to fight and die in previously all-white infantry units. The subtleties of segregation were forgotten when empty foxholes in Korea had to be filled. Black Soldiers died with great gallantry and earned with their blood the right to serve as equals. When I commanded a battery in Vietnam, there was no question that black Soldiers had the right to serve. Today, it is no different.
Fast-forward to 2013: the public hardly noticed that gays have been accepted into the military’s ranks with virtually no fanfare. This had to be the most significant nonevent in recent history. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” disappeared with hardly a whimper. Why? Because the professional officer corps had been serving with homosexual Soldiers for all of their careers. Until he died, my dad talked fondly about gay warrants and noncommissioned officers who had held his unit together during the dark days in Korea. During my thirty-five years of service, I worked for gay generals and commanded gay officers, enlisted men, and women—no big deal. We were glad the charade was over.
With women it is different. Just a few years ago, the officer in charge of preventing sexual harassment in the Air Force was himself charged with sexual harassment against women in his office. How, I asked, can a culture noted for advancing social change be so regressive when it came to gender equality? We are almost forty years into gender integration, and it seems as if we are going backward. So, again, I asked my two veteran daughters what they thought. Their answer was sobering. As with African Americans and gays, it was not about regulations, laws, or executive orders; it was about culture. For whatever reason, the rank and file in the services still have yet to accept women into their social brotherhood. Women have fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we have yet to witness a full acceptance of them or their contributions.
Women serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere in harm’s way are well aware of these precedents. They have earned the right to become full members of the warrior caste. During fourteen years of war, women have fought in very close proximity to infantrymen and have been exposed to violent death to a degree unprecedented in American wars. Thousands of women have died or been severely maimed. Fourteen years of war have taught the lesson that it is impossible to protect women from harm, and we must accept the fact that the unique circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan also make that difficult. To sustain the impulse to do so would perpetuate the cultural barrier that unfortunately still exists between male and female Soldiers. Every general officer I have spoken to in the field agrees that women Soldiers should continue to serve as they do now, in conditions that will put them in harm’s way.
Even now that they are accepted by Defense Department decree to be infantrymen, for the most part they are not pressing to join the close-combat branches. So the debate today is no longer about women in combat. However, if history is a window on the future, then neither feminist pressures nor presidential fiat can guarantee the acceptance of women in the warrior band. Membership is a privilege. In the past, the dues were paid in blood. Please do not misunderstand. I am not in favor of sending young women out to die. I wish that none of our young Soldiers had to suffer. But this is war. It just so happens that the unique circumstances of this war give women the unparalleled opportunity to earn the right to be accepted as full members of the warrior band. In our recent wars women have been willing, like their predecessors, to earn the right to full membership. We should honor their service, mourn those who die, and encourage our women Soldiers to continue to demonstrate valor and courage under fire. And we must never go back. Let them fight and earn their red badges of courage.
To be sure, part of this is about sex. The chest-bumping manly culture rejects the presence of females in their ranks. Sad to say, but Soldiers still view their domain as a male preserve. I remember asking my oldest daughter about what she worried about most in her first command. She said she feared falling out of a run. When men fell out, it was due to a hard night of carousing. When women fell out, it was due to their physical shortcomings. After a few years of service they shrugged off occasional unwanted advances. They laughed about boorish colleagues who, fueled by alcohol, made fools of themselves in the presence of female officers. They look back at commanders who neglected to include them in golf outings or nights at the bar. They always sought to be more pure than Caesar’s wife, in the hopes that their professionalism would overcome the innate prejudice of their peers. After four years of dedicated service, my daughters resigned their commissions.
Protestations by the president and secretary of defense against this boy’s-club atmosphere can only do so much. If the culture of the rank and file rejects the presence of females as their professional intimates, nothing will change. The presence of African Americans is now transparent. Gays have been part of the military culture as far as I can remember. Women are different. It breaks my heart that this is so, but I do not know what anyone can do to make it better.
We must wait to see if the new policy allowing women in the infantry will succeed. The outcome is not guaranteed. Women are now allowed to participate in the horrible privilege of intimate killing. Killing close is done in small units, normally squads and teams. In these engagements, Soldiers fight and often die not for country or mission but for each other. We borrow a phrase from Shakespeare’s Henry V and term this phenomenon the “band of brothers” effect. This is the essential glue in military culture that causes a young man to sacrifice his life willingly so that his buddies might survive. Contemporary history suggests that U.S. infantry units fight equally well when made up of Soldiers of different ethnicities, cultures, intelligence levels, and social backgrounds. The evidence is also solid that gays make just as good infantrymen as do straight men.
I have been studying the band-of-brothers effect for almost forty years and have written extensively on the subject. We know that time together allows effective pairings—or “battle buddies,” to use the common Army term. We know that four solid buddy pairings led by a sergeant compose a nine-man, battle-ready squad. The Marine squad is slightly larger. We know from watching Ranger and Special Forces training that buddy groups often form spontaneously. Yet the human formula that ensures successful buddy pairings is still a mystery, and that is the key stumbling block in the debate. Veteran SEALs, Special Forces, Rangers, tankers, and line infantrymen will swear that the deliberate, premeditated, and brutal act of intimate killing is a male-only occupation. No one can prove it with data from empirical tests, because no such data exist from the United States. They just know intuitively from battlefield experience that it is true. I am not convinced.
To be sure, women Soldiers may be fit, they may be skilled, and they may be able to “hang.” Many have proved with their lives that they are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. However, many of our senior ground-force leaders, as well as generations of former close-combat veterans from all of our previous wars, are virtually united on one point: that the precious and indefinable band of brothers so essential to winning in close combat would be irreparably compromised in mixed-gender infantry squads. Again, I am not so sure. The military has only about six thousand squads . . . and the number is getting smaller by the day. This thin red line is already fragile from overuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let us get the data, study the band-of-brothers effect to make absolutely sure women will fit in before we take the plunge. We must not let political expediency hurry this effort. We have to make sure that women allowed into the infantry are able to meet all the standards of fitness and endurance. In fact, in the infancy of the new policy, women grunts will probably have to exceed the standard, because just one female dropping out due to fatigue or injury in the heat of the close fight will prejudice the entire effort to change the culture.
Until the data proves that women can fit into male-dominated buddy groups, there are numerous things the Army can do to make the situation for women Soldiers better. As my daughters will tell you, the military has never been a family-friendly organization. The retention statistics are horrendous. Many more female than male cadets and officers leave the ranks prematurely. So at a time in service when young female officers and Soldiers really need female mentors, too few women are present. The reasons women leave are complex. But the most common denominator is the lack of a family-friendly ethos in the ranks. Amazingly few two-soldier families prosper. Those females who stay have to make heart-wrenching compromises about family and personal relationships, choices that their male colleagues rarely face. Those few females who are well adjusted and content often do things like teach at West Point or in ROTC or serve on higher-level staffs in Washington.
The Army and Marines are not like corporate America. In fact, these services are far more demanding on females than the more sedentary and physically less demanding air and sea services. Hours are long. Separations commonly last years, because the ground services have many fewer opportunities for shared assignments. More often than not, either the male or the female member of a serving husband-and-wife team has to give up competitively selective and professionally rewarding assignments. Disproportionately, the loser is the wife. The arrival of children too often means the mother resigns her commission.
Yet there are many things that the Army and Marine Corps could do better. One common thread among women who leave the service is a sense of isolation from other females. I certainly know that was true for my daughters. Perhaps the ground services could exploit social media to do better at connecting women who share the same jobs. I believe that women who serve in isolated units should be given periodic “time outs”—a few weeks off to spend with other women. Think of a social sabbatical, sort of a single-female version of “R and R” that their male colleagues enjoyed in previous wars.
Both married and single women consistently say that their careers became too hard after the birth of their children. The situation often becomes career ending when an overseas deployment looms. Today, the services have excellent day-care facilities, certainly as good or in some cases better than their civilian counterparts. Most women Soldiers cannot afford home care, and an argument can be made that mothers and their children thrive better when care is in the home. The Army should consider a home-care program, one that capitalizes on the large number of young married women who populate many of our larger military installations.
Female long-service professionals tell me that the hardest moments for such women occur when reaching the midcareer point, when the biological clock starts to tick loudly and they have had no time to start families. The Army should consider two-to-four-year absences for these women to get their personal lives back in balance. Such a program would allow a long-service midgrade officer or NCO to revert to the reserves. They would perhaps lose a year’s seniority for two years of regular service. While away, they would be required to stay professionally current, perhaps completing Staff College or intermediate NCO professional schooling by distance learning, something the Army now accepts as normal career credit for all officers and NCOs.
Some would argue that these allowances are unfair to male Soldiers. Perhaps so. However, one thing is clear: after forty years, women are not well accepted in today’s Army. That is terribly unfortunate, because women make great Soldiers, and our Army needs them. So I believe the Army must make extraordinary accommodations to keep them. I fear that Secretary Carter’s decision to allow women into the infantry was made for political expediency and not to improve the fighting power of our Army. I still believe that all the data about a woman’s physical suitability for close combat has yet to be collected or fully assessed. Nothing could be worse for our young women than to have an administration force the ground services to take in women close-combat Soldiers and then watch them fail.