symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 20, 2001 | by Lory Manning, | Roscoe Bartlett

Q: Has the military's gender-integrated basic training been successful?

Yes: Dogma blinds the opponents of gender-integrated training to the actual facts.

Many Americans take it as an article of faith that, if some of our military services train some of their recruits in gender-integrated boot camps, it follows that career-obsessed military leaders have sold out to feminists by lowering standards and feminizing training.

This is dogma in some circles. The great thing about dogma is that those who believe it don't have to bother with facts because they are custodians of truth. For the rest of us, fact matters and most Americans think our national-security policy ought to be rooted in facts, not dogma. So what are the facts about gender-integrated basic training?

First, not all of it is gender-integrated. Let's take a service-by-service look. Basic training is gender-integrated in the Air Force and has been for 25 years. The Navy began gender-integrated basic training in 1993, not long before Congress repealed the provisions of the law that barred women from permanently serving aboard Navy combat vessels. The Army is a more interesting case; it conducts basic training at three different locations: One site trains recruits going into combat occupations, a second trains those going into combat-support fields and a third trains those who will serve in combat-service support.

The latter two basic-training sites are gender-integrated and have been since 1994. However, since American women do not serve in such ground-combat occupations as infantry and armor, basic training for Army combat troops is only for males. Marine Corps basic training is segregated by sex -- more about this later.

Each service develops its own version of basic training based upon missions and costs. The training provided to recruits varies from service to service in duration, intensity, caliber of staff, depth of staff training, career rewards garnered by successful staff members and the physical and mental requirements for graduation. This is the way it should be because the services have different missions, use different weapons systems and operate in different environments.

Each service trains its recruits as it deems best to prepare them to win wars, and each service must be held accountable by the civilian officials within the executive branch and those in Congress for meeting this responsibility. In late 1996, it became obvious to these two branches of government that something had gone terribly wrong at an Army training site.

That site was the Aberdeen Proving Ground in northeast Maryland, where charges of rape and sexual harassment brought the Army's initial-entry training practices under national scrutiny. It should be noted that no basic training was conducted at Aberdeen -- training there is advanced initial training (i.e., occupational-specialty training provided to new soldiers after they have completed basic training).

In the Army, this training has been gender-integrated since 1984. In the other services, it was gender-integrated even earlier, some of it as early as World War II. Despite the absence of basic training, the incidents at Aberdeen triggered probes of the services' basic-training practices by Congress, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the services themselves. Most pointedly probed was the gender-integrated aspect of the training. Some were convinced that the root -- and only -- cause of the problems was integration of the sexes during basic training; stop that practice and all would be well.

Two commissions convened, the General Accounting Office (GAO) investigated, the service secretaries and inspectors general (IGs) sprang into action and Congress held hearings. Two of the earliest reports from this series of investigations were the Secretary of the Army's Senior Review Panel on Sexual Harassment and the Report of the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training and Related Issues (often referred to as the "Kassebaum report" after its chairwoman, former senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker).

Both of these reports, delivered in 1997, found major problems with basic training in the Army and some of the other services. The Kassebaum report also made it clear that the Marines' basic training worked well.

There were two reactions to these reports: one from those who believe that all failures of military personnel and training are attributable to feminist pressures and a second from those whose views are not shaped by that sort of dogma. The first group saw that Marine Corps basic training was gender-segregated and immediately pronounced this fact as the reason for the Marines' success; they further pronounced that feminists, bent on turning the military into a laboratory for perverse social experiments, had destroyed the other services' basic training by forcing gender integration upon them.

With this truth brought to light, their solution was simple: Mandate a return to gender-segregated basic training for the other services, by law if necessary. Fortunately, most of those who prepared and reviewed the reports belonged to the second group. This group understood that using gender-integration/segregation as the litmus test for determining the effectiveness of basic training was dangerous to military readiness because the segregate-the-genders" proponents overlooked the otherwise obvious causes of the problems.