It Is Broke — So Fix the Gender-Integrated Military

(Washington, D.C.): The House National Security Committee’s Military Personnel
Subcommittee will take testimony today concerning Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s
decision to perpetuate a patently failed system of gender-integrated basic training. The
Committee should, as a first order of business, reject this decision. But it should not stop there,
because the problem posed by gender-integration for the future combat capability and
good
order and discipline of the armed services does not stop with basic training. As the
Center
for Security Policy noted on 16 December 1997: “The military, the Congress and the
American people [must] address anew the unacceptable costs associated with trying to
integrate women into all aspects of the U.S. armed forces.” href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾

Kassebaum Baker Had It Right

Secretary Cohen’s decision to make cosmetic, rather than systemic, changes to the approach
followed by the Army, Navy and Air Force in training males and females together flies in the face
of a courageous recommendation issued last December by a blue-ribbon commission chaired by
former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker. The commission urged that the
Pentagon
dispense with the “present organizational structure in integrated basic training [which] is resulting
in less discipline, less unit cohesion and more distraction from the training programs.”

As the Kassebaum Baker commission noted, putting young males and females together in
basic
training is “distracting from their training objectives, which must be accomplished in a short
period of time….” Specifically, the Committee warned that “an inordinate amount of time” has to
be spent in the investigation and disciplining of individuals involved in “male/female misconduct.”

Instead of taking this step, Secretary Cohen has directed the military to improve the degree of
separation between housing afforded male and female trainees so as to provide, as the
Washington Post reported today, “24-hour supervision and barriers ‘that cannot be
easily
transgressed’ such as one-way doors with alarms.” Such steps cannot alter the reality that is
seriously eroding the readiness and morale of today’s armed forces: Asking men and
women to
work, eat and sleep in close proximity — whether in training or in subsequent duty —
ensures that there will be sexual tensions at best and, at worst, incapacitating problems
with pregnancies, undeployability and degradation of unit readiness in other ways.

The Bottom Line

The attached op.ed. article by a retired Marine Corps officer,
Adam Mersereau, which appears
in today’s Wall Street Journal should be required reading for every Member of
Congress who
bears a responsibility to provide for the common defense. The Center for Security Policy strongly
concurs with Mr. Mersereau’s conclusion that the training problems demand a more fundamental
and urgent re-evaluation of the role of women in the U.S. military.

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1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Stopping Gender-Integrated Training Should Be
Only the Beginning of the End of Social Experimentation in the Military ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_195″>No. 97-D 195, 16
December 1997).