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Letter to Editor regarding: USNI Proceedings "Gender and the Civil-Military
Gap," S. Lister, pp 50-53, January 2000.

Author: Captain Herman T. Voelkner, U.S. Army (Retired)

"When Sara Lister was forced to resign her Pentagon position after labeling
the Marine Corps as "extremists," there were those among the fair-minded who
wondered whether she had been treated too harshly. Perhaps she was quoted
out of context, we thought, or was making a sophisticated rhetorical point,
inelegantly phrased. It was not necessarily the case that she was yet
another social engineer determined to bring the military to heel and force
it to conform to fashionable societal trends.

Alas, we need wonder no longer. In this article, she shows herself lacking
even a basic understanding of the military ethos. She seems as determined as
ever to reshape the military along the lines of some fuzzy notions of
"fairness." Ms. Lister thus joins a depressingly long list of political
appointees who believe that storied notions of "warrior spirit" and so on
are merely antiquated "constructs" to be swept into an ignominious corner.
She is similar to Duke University professor Madeline Morris, hired by then
Secretary Of The Army Togo West to be his special assistant on gender
relations. Ms. Morris was chosen on the basis of her law review article
suggesting the Army give up its "construct of masculinity" and emphasize
instead "compassion and understanding" and the adoption of an "ungendered
vision."

No wonder there is a "gap" in civil-military relations. Naturally, Ms.
Lister does not attribute this to the fact that the services have been
commandeered by agenda-driven dilettantes, whose military experience can be
more or less summarized by their belief that every fighting unit should look
pretty much like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. It is not enough for
her that the traditional view of the military as the consummate meritocracy
has been expunged, and that an officer's career is not determined as much by
gender and minority status as by heroism and leadership ability.

I submit that Americans would do better to worry about whether their sons
and daughters will be arriving at Dover Air Force Base wrapped in plastic
because their leader was judged by standards other than those of competence.


It is an absurd reproach, and a red herring, to say that anyone in uniform
questions the constitutional mandate of civilian control. What does worry
them is whether decisions about the necessary integration of women into the
fighting force will be made by experienced military leaders or by unabashed
proponents of a feminist agenda. Lister and her like-minded colleagues make
no secret of the fact that they want to break down all barriers to women,
including combat exclusion. They are determined to discount any military
opinion on this matter. They do so by mastering the first weapon of the
politically correct: anathematize the opposition. Warriors who resist her
notions are clinging to an outdated "construct" of masculinity.

Women do play a vital role in our national defense. We could not and should
not do without their participation. But that is not the same as saying that
every barrier to women in the military should be removed. Frequently, there
are considerable trade-offs, which military leaders are entitled to take
into account. When the Army integrated women into the ranks of its medics,
for example, it found that two women, unlike two men, do not possess the
upper body strength needed to carry a fully-laden stretcher. Faced with the
mandate to assimilate women into these positions, the Army neatly redefined
carrying a stretcher as a task that requires four soldiers. Thus, the
social engineers win another battle, and a new niche is opened for women.
Few seemed to notice that, in the process, readiness has just declined by
50%. Extrapolate from that one example, across the length and breadth of
the military, and one can see the cost such ill-considered policies can have
in terms of our ability to fight.

Lister and her colleagues obfuscate the question of "feminizing" the
military, when not actively ridiculing it. But then what are we to make of
Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy? The senior intelligence officer in the
Army has designed a "Consideration of Others" (COO) program, naturally to be
made mandatory. An internal Army memo summarizing this sensitivity offensive
cites that every military and civilian member of the Army will undergo
training, under the tutelage of the usual legion of "facilitators," to
instill in our soldiers "common courtesy, decency, and sensitivity to the
feelings of others." One suspects that most women in the ranks, their jobs
difficult enough, must cringe when they see policies such as COO being
promulgated by their presumed role models. One also wonders how the Army
leadership, with its shrinking resources and multiplying imperial burdens,
feels it can expend those resources on counselors and "increasing
sensitivity" instead of ammunition and combat training.

Meanwhile, training standards have continually been lowered to accommodate
women. Men who experience the Army's initial-entry training now wonder what
happened in the tough, disciplined basic training of their fathers' and
grandfathers' stories. When I commanded a "mixed" (male and female) basic
training company, the men did not feel challenged the way they had expected
to be. Road marches had to be slowed down so that women could keep up the
pace, and physical activity was "gender-normed" into irrelevance. Nowadays,
basic training resembles summer camp. The Navy no longer drills its trainees
with rifles, and issues them a "blue card" to hand to their trainer if they
feel discouraged.

This softness of training has its effects in the areas of recruitment and
retention, with every service but one below its minimum personnel
requirements. I suspect this has less to do with the vigor of the private
sector than with the loss of any feeling of "specialness" which attracts and
retains soldiers in the first place. Napoleon's maxim that "the morale is to
the physical as three to one" reminds us that there are intangibles more
important than material inducements. A military no more special in its ethos
than the trendiest high-tech firm will find that its soldiers will see
through the sham and desert it for that high-tech firm.

Finally, I mentioned that only one service is successfully meeting its
recruitment goals. Instructively, that service is the United States Marine
Corps, home of Lister's "extremists." It alone resists the feminist's
demands to integrate basic training; it alone cultivates unabashedly a
reputation for breeding warriors who don't need to call for a "time out"
when things get tough.

Let us hope we never have need to discover, as we did with Task Force Smith
in Korea, how dissipated has become that unique chemistry which causes
soldiers to cohere when confronted with the sheer wanton brutality and chaos
of combat. History, however, teaches us otherwise. It teaches us that it is
only a matter of time before somewhere American hostages are taken, or
somewhere an American embassy is surrounded by armed fanatics, or somewhere
an invader runs rampant over a civilian populace. And when such an event
happens, the hopeless and besieged won't be looking anxiously over the
horizon for a group of American troops liberated from their masculine
constructs, polite and courteous, attentive to the sensitivities of others.

They'll be looking for the Marines."
_________________
"If he believes his 1971 indictment of his country and his fellow veterans was true, then he couldn't possibly be proud of his Vietnam service."