Sex, War, and the Politics of Gender Integration

by Alan Ned Sabrosky*

The Marine Corps is at war, and it is not the usual type of war. This one is for the institutional soul of the Corps, and its continuing ability to do what it has always done best: win its battles without sacrificing Marines needlessly on the altar of political expediency. The official lifting of any restrictions on women in combat roles completes a process begun under the three previous administrations. We have gone from some women somewhere, to anywhere, to everyone everywhere. All of the services have been affected adversely by these changes: the Air Force least of all, and the Marine Corps potentially the most.

The working assumption throughout is that doing this will not have any adverse effects on the Marine Corps, and that in any case, the military should reflect the values of the society it serves, opening opportunities to qualified women and others. But no one has been able to enumerate publicly even a single military advantage to offset the certain costs in time and money alone of making these changes. And an effective military is always distinct from the values of the larger society, unless that society is something like Sparta, while the supposed virtues of equal opportunity and diversity are irrelevant in war.

Rocks and Shoals

The most evident and easily measurable rock upon which this fails is the rubric “qualified.” Given physical realities, one of four things could happen: (1) women in ground combat units will have to meet male standards, thus being few and objects of curiosity or distraction; (2) standards for men and women will remain unequal yet both will be combined in units as if only one standard existed; (3) all-female units in the ground combat arms will be created; or (4) the standards for men will be lowered to approximate those for women, to minimize female failure rates.

None of these is militarily sound, and knowing that only the last and least desirable is politically acceptable to the current administration simply makes a miserable situation even worse.

Both Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and more explicitly Navy Secretary Ray Mabus have vehemently denied that standards will be lowered in a gender-integrated force, or that special preference will be given to females. They lied, and we can already see how this is unfolding. Physical standards women cannot meet, or cannot meet in more than token numbers, are being  discarded as obsolete or made optional for both males and females – and if the females do not opt to try what they cannot do, that is their right. This will continue.

But the implications of mixed combat units are more unsettling. Intimacies within units will develop, no matter what the rules or orders set – we know that. So how does the sergeant discipline the private whose lover is the captain? The answer is the sergeant doesn’t – and the gender and sexual orientation of the three are irrelevant. Wondering how to billet females within small units, as Marine COL Anne Weinberg did in an appalling Marine Corps Times article (March 17, 2016), and placing female officers and SNCOs in battalions as informal “advisers” or consultants to junior enlisted female Marines – a de facto parallel chain-of-command marked “women only” – can only adversely affect discipline and cohesion. This would be obvious to the dumbest corporal in the history of the Marine Corps – although apparently not to a community organizer and his appointed cohorts.

Added to the complications posed by intimacies within a unit and preferential – perhaps “deferential” is a better word – treatment of female Marines within a unit, is the all-important question of the collective capabilities of mixed-gender units.

Here the extensive and compelling 9-month Marine Corps study simply reaffirmed the experience of other countries that tried them. In virtually every respect, the mixed-gender units did worse, and no amount of quibbling by Mabus (who simply did not like the study’s conclusions) can alter that reality – when he (or whoever wrote his rejection) criticized its use of averages rather than individual performance, I had the odd sense that he might think Marines chose individual champions to fight – sort of a modern Achilles and Hector on the plains of Troy. (Note: sorry, Mr. Secretary or whoever, it doesn’t happen that way.) But that differential in collective performance is a key reason why other mixed-gender units abroad took higher casualties than all-male units in combat – compounded by a pronounced tendency for males to defer to female casualties more than to male casualties. That may not matter when you are talking one or two casualties, but escalate that to dozens or even hundreds – which Fallujah demonstrated can happen – and the dynamics change dramatically.

So Why is This Happening-?

Proper reforms within the military are driven by military necessity and have discernible military benefits. Neither applies here. Taken together, these political decisions guarantee nothing but higher costs and turbulence in peacetime, less tactical effectiveness and higher casualties in war, and the visible end of the Marine Corps as an elite institution. Military realities, historical experience here and abroad, and a mountain of evidence reinforcing the conclusions of the Marine Corps evaluation ought to make that obvious.

It needs to be clearly understood that the driving force behind these changes is not a surge in demand from the American public, which is largely unaware of what is happening, or from the Congress, which is trying to ignore anything happening in an election year that does not directly benefit the members. Nor is there any indication that large numbers of women Marines are clamoring for a chance to be “grunts” or tankers and so forth. Forums can be deceptive, but I have followed them closely, and unless almost everyone who likes this idea is keeping quiet, I would estimate that opposition from self-identified male and female Marines is running about 100 – to – 1, especially if it means diluting standards to do it.

The real problem is that none of the civilian overseers of the services in general and the Marine Corps in particular, cares about any of these things. They are driven by political preferences originating in the left wing of the Democratic party, reinforced by ideology and fueled by their own personal ignorance. Nor is it the first time that this has happened. During the Vietnam War, for example, the predecessors of the Obama – Carter – Mabus triad came up with something called “Project 100,000,” which essentially took ghetto blacks who could not normally qualify for military service and put them in the Army, thereby getting them off the streets and hopefully teaching them skills. Perhaps some learned, but it was an organizational disaster for the Army; and what gender integration in the ground combat MOSs will do to the Marine Corps will make “Project 100,000” look good – which, by the way, is how its architects considered it then, not having to fight themselves.

And This Means…?

From my professional experience, one thing is certain: had (e.g.) the 1^st Marine Division in Korea in 1950 been composed of Marines assigned in accordance with this administration’s personnel preferences, it would have fought hard in the snow of the Chosin Reservoir – and died there. That precise situation may well not reappear. But who in their right mind would hazard the lives of even a battalion – which absolutely could happen – in the name of a militarily meaningless quest for “diversity” and “equal opportunity” in (e.g.) infantry or tank companies?

I’ll leave it to the JAG community to determine whether directives that have no positive military consequences for the Marine Corps, and many negative ones, constitute illegal orders under the UCMJ, but as a legal layman they certainly seem that way.

Illegal or not, what the Marine Corps does not need now is for its senior leadership to let something unfold which every single one must know portends an institutional disaster. Yet not a single general officer on active duty has had the moral courage and the professional integrity to stand up and say clearly what this politically-driven initiative means in reality – because nothing else has any chance of activating either public opinion or Congressional involvement to stave off that disaster.

Mutiny? No. But “obedience to authority” is not always a virtue: ask the shades of the German generals who let their obedience to their constitutionally elected leader take them into the abyss in WWII. An officer’s oath is to the Constitution, not to any elected or appointed official. The Marine leadership’s first and last loyalty must be to their Marines, those they led before, those they lead now, and those who may become Marines later. And their primary duty is to the Marine Corps as an institution.

If the senior leadership of the Marine Corps either cannot understand this, or will not act on it if they do understand it, then the Marine Corps I knew and still love is gone – and all that remains is to wonder how many additional body-bags will be needlessly filled.

* Alan Ned Sabrosky (PhD, University of Michigan) is a ten-year Marine Corps veteran. He served two tours in Vietnam with the 1^st Marine Division, and is a graduate (as a civilian) of the US Army War College. He can be reached at:  [email protected].