Another Assault on the Warrior Culture

Nearly 28 years ago, while commanding a guided-missile cruiser in the Indian Ocean, I wrote an essay entitled "Women in Warships: A Right to Serve." In it, I argued that qualified women should be allowed to serve in operational roles at sea, including command. The article, along with another challenging the efficacy of the Navy's system for evaluating and inspecting the readiness of its ships, was published in Proceedings and contributed to my being selected as the Naval Institute's Proceedings Author of the Year. It also earned me considerable criticism as these views were considered somewhat heretical.

Lost in the reaction to the novel notion of women actually operating warships and warplanes was my warning that integrating women into these platforms of war would pose a challenge to preserving the warrior culture of the military. Women, I cautioned, would have to fit in to that culture rather than expeeling the culture to accommodate to them. We should not, in other words, be moving toward "kinder, gentler" armed forces, a goal that is largely incompatible with an effective fighting force.

Women have long since successfully integrated into such operational roles. Despite expected challenges, the sky did not fall, and women for the most part proved effective warriors. The threat to the warrior culture was to come from other sources.

In the aftermath of the Tailhook scandal, congressional, campus, and media critics of the military, joined by some women's organizations, launched a concerted attack on the warrior culture. The firestorm over inappropriate behavior by some attendees (of both sexes) at an annual convention of the Tailhook Association caused the Navy to withdraw, for a time, its support of this important organization that provides a needed forum for the candid discussion of carrier aviation issues. Indeed, anyone who even attended the conference became suspect in the ensuing witch hunt, and hundreds of honorable careers were disrupted or destroyed while Congress sat on the promotion lists.

Reason eventually prevailed, but not before the naval leadership capitulated by effecting a number of presumably symbolic changes, including redefining its values—eliminating, for example, tradition as a value—and diluting or ending such traditions as crossing-the-line ceremonies and chief petty officer initiations. Symbolic as they may have seemed, researchers on the impact of organizational culture on the effectiveness of organizations recognized the changes were significant. The culture wars had moved to the military.

Another battle in this war was initiated by President Bill Clinton's attempt to integrate, by executive order, openly gay people into a military already attempting to cope with the immense cultural change brought about by the integration of women into formerly all-male crews. That battle was fought to a stalemate, resulting in a "don't ask/don't tell" compromise that pleased almost no one.

The battles continue today. The hugely overstated "atrocities" and allegations of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, fueled by the embedded press, the military's version of police ride-alongs, and review boards, are a manifestation of it. While there were abuses, some critics of the military took outrageous liberties with terms such as "torture" and "enemy combatant" and with the application of Geneva Convention rules to terrorists. "Torture" was thus expanded to include harsh and degrading treatment in addition to the infliction of intense pain and injury that the term was clearly meant to define.

Fast forward now to this year's AFCEA/U.S. Naval Institute West conference in San Diego. This annual professional development forum brings together leaders from government, industry, and the military to discuss issues of great importance to the sea services. Panel topics this year included the lessons of Iraq, interagency cooperation, allied and joint operations, defense acquisition, and the Navy's increasing mission shift to inshore operations. Important topics all. but they largely were ignored by the media in the furor they generated over the incidental remarks of one panelist, Marine lieutenant General James N. Mattis, who admitted to enjoying his job as a warrior by saying "it was a hoot" to shoot terrorists who abused women and killed innocents. An unfortunate choice of words when taken out of context, but the warriors in attendance knew exactly what he meant. Most military professionals love our jobs, especially the part that involves going into harm's way against our nation's enemies.

But the antidefense and antiwar crowd, nearly ecstatic over what they viewed as an admission of brutality and barbarism, had a field day. One critic said that generals and soldiers are not executioners; their job is to capture the enemy. Here's a jolt of reality for that critic. Wars are not won by generals or soldiers who believe their job is to capture the enemy. Their duty is to defeat the enemy, which often involves killing him.

As offensive as it may seem to those pundits, professors, and protestors with such tender sensibilities and compassion for the enemy, soldiers, to be effective in war, must be socialized to be warriors, not merely sentries and jailors. That means teaching them to kill the enemy before he can kill them. It is not a profession for the faint of heart, but let us be grateful there are warriors such as General Mattis and his Marines.