Back in August 1993, when Colin Powell was getting ready to retire as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lawrence Korb made a bold plea on the op-ed page of The New York Times: "Isn't it time to select a woman as chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Or at least to join the other five chiefs as a member of the club?"
Korb had been an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, and he acknowledged that—with a ban on women in ground combat and no four-star women in the U.S. military—his suggestion was a long shot. "Some people told me I was off my rocker," he recalled recently.
But he argued that the job of the chairman, as the principal military adviser to the President, was more about navigating the world of politics than commanding troops on the battlefield. "A woman would bring special experience to the military's top position," Korb argued. "An institution trying to grapple with such issues as sexual harassment and women in combat could profit from a leader who has walked through some of those minefields."
As we know, Korb didn't prevail. And 14 years later, as Admiral Mike Mullen took over from Marine Corps General Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, there still were no women with four-star rank, and the institution was still grappling with the same hot-button issues. But there are countless other signs that the military, despite its deep masculine tradition, is adjusting to a growing role for women.
Women now make up 14 percent of active-duty enlisted personnel and more than 16 percent of the officer corps. That presence is a sharp increase from less than 2 percent in 1973, when the draft ended and recruiters started to focus on women. There are even rumblings that the first four-star woman in U.S. history might be in the offing.
Non-Combat Combat Roles
More than 90 percent of military occupations are open to women, although they are still barred from jobs or units whose main mission is direct ground combat. But that framework, established when policymakers envisioned neat battlefields and combat limited to the front lines, is being tested in Iraq.
As Dymetra Bass, a first sergeant who enlisted in the Army in 1989, recalls, "Women didn't go into combat. We had the MOSs that kept us in the rear." That's not the case today, as she saw on a recent tour in Iraq. "Now with the same MOSs [military occupational specialties], we are in the fight. All of it is front line. When you go from Kuwait to Iraq, that's the line, right there."
That fact has also prompted concern from some quarters, including Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a 2008 GOP presidential hopeful, that the shape of the war in Iraq has led to a de facto redefinition of roles for women, without any public—or political—debate.
A new study by the RAND Corporation on the assignment policy for Army women, called for in a defense authorization bill enacted when Hunter was HASC chairman, finds that the policy is murky. After assessing the experience in Iraq, RAND reported inconsistencies in the definitions and understandings of key terms such as "direct combat" and "collocation." Taken together, the uncertainty and the changing shape of battle seem to guarantee that the Iraq war will eventually lead to a formal review of the policies that govern women in combat, just as the experience of the Gulf War prompted a review of women's roles and subsequent changes, including the opening of combat aviation and repeal of the combat ship exclusion.
But for now the RAND study makes clear that women in Iraq—working in support units, military police, and other positions that used to be expected to stay far from the frontlines—are often in the heat of the action, participating in self-defense missions, providing security, and searching homes where women and children are present and male strangers are not welcome.
Bronze Star
The commander of a support unit told RAND investigators about the situation one convoy faced:
There was a specialist who was about 20 years old. She was the driver of a 915 [tractor-trailer]. She was in a convoy and the truck in front of her gets destroyed. What we do is, when a convoy is hit, you get out of the hit area and form a box about two miles up the road. In this incident, there were IEDs, they blocked the road, there were snipers, RPGs, and all at one time. So the convoy commander goes up the road to the box. The specialist is in the kill zone and the truck in front of her is on its side. We ran these convoys by having one Army truck and then three trucks driven by foreign nationals. So the sergeant, the convoy commander, tells her that he's going to come back. She says, "No, I'll bring them out." She earned the Bronze Star from that.
Pat Foote, a retired Army brigadier general and an advocate for women in the military, says, "The women, by being in the units and by going on patrol, and running the convoys, and finding themselves in firefights that are deadly, they are earning their spurs." Their involvement has come at a price. The 3,840 U.S. service members who lost their lives in Operation Iraqi Freedom included 88 women, according to Pentagon statistics through 3 November.
The public reaction to those deaths, as well as to images of female soldiers held hostage and others returning home with serious injuries, seems to disprove old assertions that Americans would somehow have less tolerance for seeing women in battle than they do for men. Such widespread public acceptance couldn't have been imagined in World War II, when women were encouraged to join the military but largely performed "women's jobs" such as clerks and typists, in order to "free a man to fight," as the recruiting slogan put it.
Jeanne Holm, one of the first women to join the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, signed up in 1942 with 13 other women she knew from a volunteer ambulance corps in Portland, Oregon. Women were very much a separate force in those days, and that made perfect sense to her. "There weren't many things available to women before World War II," she said at her home near Annapolis. What started as a job as a wartime truck driver turned into a long and decorated career. Holm transferred to the Air Force in 1949 and was promoted to major general in 1973, the first woman to achieve that rank.
'Goldfish Bowl Effect'
Holm's views about the work women could do changed with time and experience, and in the many personnel posts she held she worked hard on their behalf, pushing for access to more jobs, better housing, and equal treatment for dependents of military servicewomen, who had been denied benefits for their families because they were not considered primary breadwinners.
"I was out to tear down the artificial barriers," she said. "Every time you open a door, there are women who will walk through it and succeed. There will be a few who will try to walk through and fail. We have to be willing to accept that failure."
By the time Vice Admiral Ann Rondeau received her Navy commission in 1974, more and more doors were opening. But the playing field was far from level. In the beginning of her career, she had to contend with a dress code that said women officers could not wear slacks. "The feeling was that women officers did not do dirty work," she recalls.
The dress code changed in time (though it was only in 2004 that the Navy stopped requiring female sailors to keep a skirt in their sea bags). But other issues have proved more thorny. The integration of women into the service academies, starting in 1976, was emotionally charged, and still rankles some who lived through it. Today, although women make up about 20 percent of new students at the academies, the adjustment is far from complete, as the controversy surrounding the Lamar Owens sexual misconduct case at the Naval Academy makes clear (see "Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't," by Bradley Olson, September 2007 Proceedings).
Other occasional, but high-profile, sex scandals over the years have also shown the services struggling between appropriate, even-handed responses and awkward overreaction. One result, military men and women say, is a hesitancy among men to become mentors to women, out of fear that some interaction could be misconstrued and harm their careers.
Double Standard
Differing physical fitness requirements for men and women continue to provoke claims of a double standard, a tension well encapsulated in a 2000 academic article entitled "How Can She Claim Equal Rights When She Doesn't Have to Do as Many Push-Ups as I Do?"1 Some women say that dynamic propels them to "max" their physical training test in an attempt to erase any doubt about their ability. "If you aren't an athletic, strong female, you are going to get treated differently, regardless of your other abilities," one female Army major, Maria Emery, said.
Similarly, in many other aspects of their careers, enlisted women as well as officers say they often feel they need to prove themselves over and over again, responding to what one called the "goldfish bowl effect"—the feeling that they are being scrutinized, and that any failing will be used as evidence against all women.
But many successful women in the military say they appreciate the meritocratic nature of the institution, which they say increasingly gives them an equal opportunity for success, and equal respect for their rank and achievements—even if there is more progress to be made.
"What I would like to see is women being able to go into any job that they desire," says First Sergeant Bass. "If you asked me, do I want to be infantry, I would say no. . . . But I think if I wanted to do that, I should have the opportunity."
Bass says she thinks the situation is a bit better for enlisted women than officers. "You see more female sergeant majors, which is E-9, the highest you can go. . . . I don't think I see enough female brigade commanders and division commanders."
Concerns About Family Life
But she acknowledges that, even for enlisted women, there is a limit. A woman cannot now become sergeant major of the Army because that is a combat slot. "That's one thing that I don't like, but I know it's going to change."
Women, like men, say they join the military for many reasons, chief among them a desire to serve their country. Major Emery, a Hispanic, said her decision to join the Army was a simple one. "There were only two ways to leave my house—getting married or joining the military. I went in so I could leave my home town," she said, shortly after she had returned from nine months with a civil affairs unit in Iraq.
But as she progresses in her career, she worries that it may be difficult to combine family life with the Army. "I look at some of the female officers that I have served with in the past. The ones that are dedicated to their jobs . . . a lot of them were single, they didn't have families. You wonder if that is because they couldn't balance it."
Men are more likely than women to say they plan to stay in the military until retirement age, and work-life balance is a factor in that decision. For example, a 2005 Army survey found that 45 percent of enlisted men said they planned to stay in the active-duty Army until retirement, compared with 34 percent for enlisted women.2
When those planning to depart before retirement age were asked their most important reason for leaving, enlisted women cited the amount of time they were separated from their families (26.3 percent), followed by their advancement potential (14.5 percent) and amount of basic pay (7.1 percent). For men, time away from family was also the top reason (16.6 percent), followed by amount of pay (15.6 percent) and overall quality of Army life (12.7 percent).
Similarly, while retention is a problem across the military, a Government Accountability Office study published in early 2007 indicates that the departure of female officers poses a particular problem, with many citing work-life balance as a reason for leaving. The difference between male and female officers was greatest in the Navy, where continuation rates among female officers with four or five years of service averaged nine percentage points lower than those of male officers.
And, despite the steady rise of women to the highest ranks (Vice Admiral Rondeau is one of five three-star women, and there are 12 two-stars across the active duty branches), the military retains its very masculine roots and traditions, a fact that most successful women in uniform come to terms with, one way or another.
"The military is a masculine institution and it is going to remain a masculine institution," says Darlene Iskra, a retired commander who in 1990 became the first woman to command a Navy ship. But Iskra and others do see changes that have accompanied the rise of women and are altering the face of the military—even if they are attributable to more general societal shifts.
Changes in Leadership Styles
Among them, says Iskra, who runs a leadership-training program for young Navy and Marine Corps officers at the University of Maryland, is a change in leadership style. Military leaders "are no longer so autocratic, and in fact people who are autocratic are actually denigrated now, whereas that used to be the primary leadership style," she says.
Such a shift is evident in the Army's 2007 posture statement, which sets forth the following attributes for the service's leaders: "sets the standard for integrity and character; confident and competent decision-maker in uncertain situations; empathetic and always positive; professionally educated and dedicated to life-long learning; effective communicator."
While a more inclusive leadership may be more suited to women, many analysts reject the suggestion that it emerged because more women are in the military, and in more senior roles. Instead, they say, it is a natural consequence of the move to an all-volunteer force. So, too, is the increased attention to family-friendly programs such as childcare, a valuable benefit for military women and men. "It's not like the old draftees where you could treat them like pieces of dirt," says Iskra. "They are volunteers, they are professionals, and you have to treat them with respect."
Many people think there is more the military could do to become more family friendly and compete with the private sector, like making it easier to leave for a few years—to raise young children, care for elderly parents, or go to school—and return again.
Other changes are harder to measure, but nonetheless important. The rise of women up and down the chain of command has provided a new set of role models for younger women. And Carol Mutter, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general who was deputy chief of staff for manpower and reserve affairs, recalls a conversation with a male admiral. "He told me he liked having women aboard ship and in his organization because the presence of women raised the performance level of the entire group," Mutter says. "Men weren't going to let the women outperform them."
With all that, Lawrence Korb, now an analyst at the Center for American Progress, admits he is a bit surprised that the debate about women in the military persists. "You would think it would be kind of over by now."
But it's not, and the adjustment is far from complete. That was evident on the warm autumn morning when Admiral Mullen was sworn in to succeed General Pace at a Fort Myer ceremony. The crowd of several hundred was braced for the cannon fire in honor of the two officers. But what wasn't expected was the command voice of Ensign Kristin Bagby, the officer in charge of the male-dominated Coast Guard honor guard that day. As she directed the platoon, several heads turned and a few eyebrows went up. "I think that's a woman," one observer said, finding it hard to believe.
That might count as slow progress, but for some, that's the right way to go.
"It's been an evolutionary process and there is still more to be done, more doors to open," says Lieutenant General Mutter. "I think it's better done in an evolutionary way. If it can be done quickly, it can be undone quickly."
1. Carol Cohn, "'How Can She Claim Equal Rights When She Doesn't Have to Do as Many Push-Ups as I Do?': The Framing of Men's Opposition to Women's Equality in the Military," Men and Masculinities, 10 2000, vol. 3, pp. 131-151.
2. "Women in the Army: Career Plans, Reasons for Leaving, and Trends in Attitudes," U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, May 2005.