Stopping Gender-Integrated Training Should Be Only The Beginning of the End of Social Experimentation in the Military

(Washington, D.C.): The Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integration Training and
Related Issues has rocked the U.S. military with its unexpected — but utterly commonsensical —
conclusion: 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.”

Good Advice

Under its chairman, former U.S. Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker, the committee called for
practical steps to improve the quality of training — and that of the force that results from it. For
example:

• The Clinton Administration was encouraged to stop having trainees of different sexes
  housed in the same barracks — to say nothing of on the same floors in those barracks.
  Sen. Kassebaum Baker’s committee recommended this step not only for basic training but also
  for advanced school.

• The Administration was urged to 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.” The report notes that, “Because the
  trainers’ main focus is to maintain discipline and, consequently, to keep males and females
  from breaking the rules, the trainers have seized on the simplest alternatives — a ‘no talk, no
  touch’ doctrine which boils sexual harassment policy down to its lowest and most enforceable
  level.”

• The Committee recommended that the Pentagon toughen physical fitness requirements so
  as to address the “widespread belief among both males and females that the physical
  requirements for females are too low.” It went on to note that “the view that the
  requirements for women are ‘Mickey Mouse’ feeds the notion that women are not capable
  physically and therefore not capable of performing to standard in the field.”

The Bottom Line

The Kassebaum Baker Committee is to be commended for its courage in challenging training
policies and practices that have been adopted by three of the four branches of the armed forces
(i.e., the Army, Navy and Air Force) in the face of both common sense and hard experience. The
services — with the notable exception of the Marines (recently branded “extremists” by one of Mr.
Clinton’s feminist civilian appointees in the Department of the Army, a statement that occasioned
her resignation from office) — have determinedly tried to make gender-integrated basic training
work, and apologized for its failure rather than argue for its elimination when it does not.

Mrs. Baker’s committee refused, however, to take the thrust of its recommendations to the next
logical conclusion: The human dynamics that give rise to serious problems for unit
integrity, esprit de corps and war-fighting capability at the level of basic training do not
stop when the training is completed. Military men and women living and working in close
quarters gender-integrated tents, gender-integrated barracks and gender-integrated ships are
scarcely less susceptible to the serious morale, disciplinary and readiness difficulties associated
with these arrangements than are those just entering the ranks.

Just as the time has come to revisit the wisdom of the social experimentation to which most of the
uniformed services’ training programs are now being subjected, the findings of the Kassebaum
Baker committee oblige the military, the Congress and the American people to address
anew the unacceptable costs associated with trying to integrate women into all aspects of
the U.S. armed forces.

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