We discovered a number of troubling shortcomings and recommended a number of changes. But we also found a very-well-trained and combat-ready Army, the best that any of us had seen in over 200 years' collective experience in uniform. This Army was far better than the poorly led soldiers suggested by the scandalous revelations of Aberdeen.
But the Review Panel found that the Army lacked institutional commitment to the Equal Opportunity (EO) program designed to prevent sexual harassment and discrimination. Further, soldiers distrusted the EO complaint system and were often hesitant to use it.
We also discovered that sexual harassment existed throughout the Army, crossing gender, rank, and racial lines. But sex discrimination was more common than sexual harassment. It is important to note that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination.
The overwhelming majority of drill sergeants and instructors performed competently and well. But there was not enough emphasis on the Army core value of respect in the Initial Entry Training where the drill sergeant worked and through which all new soldiers spent varying degrees of time as trainees before joining their assigned units.
Not surprisingly, the Review Panel found that Army leaders were the critical factor in creating, maintaining, and enforcing an environment of respect and dignity. But too many leaders had failed to gain the trust of their soldiers.
A study conducted a year before the panel's investigation produced interesting and disturbing findings about the extent and impact of sexual harassment and sex discrimination. When asked the question, “Were you sexually harassed in the last twelve months?” 22 percent of women soldiers and 7 percent of men answered affirmatively. This means that in an Army of 470,000 active component soldiers in which 15 percent (70,000) are women and 85 percent (400,000) are men, three times as many men as women are being sexually harassed each year.
When broken down by rank and gender, it became obvious that junior enlisted women were the most likely targets for sexual harassment; 29 percent—almost one third of those surveyed—reported sexual harassment, while 17 percent of women NCOs and 6 percent of women officers said they had been sexually harassed. A much smaller percentage of men soldiers of all ranks said they'd been the targets of sexual harassment, but their complaints were significant in that this showed the problem was not limited to women.
The investigation of sexual harassment revealed that inappropriate behaviors were commonplace throughout the Army. They ran the gamut from crude and offensive behavior (unwanted sexual jokes, stories, whistling, and staring), sexist behavior (insulting, offensive, and condescending attitudes based on gender), unwanted sexual attention (including touching or fondling and pressing for dates even when rebuffed), sexual coercion (which included classic quid pro quo cases of job benefits or losses conditioned on sexual cooperation), and finally to sexual assault that included attempted and actual rape.
Crude or offensive behavior was the most common problem, experienced by 78 percent of the women and 76 percent of the men surveyed. Almost as many of each gender said they experienced sexist behavior. The gap widened in the unwanted sexual attention category: 47 percent of the women, 30 percent of the men. Nearly twice as many women than men (15 percent vs. 8 percent) had experienced sexual coercion. The gap closes on reported sexual assault: 7 percent of women vs. 6 percent of men.
Overall, the Review Panel found that 84 percent of these Army women and 80 percent of these Army men reported experiencing some type of inappropriate sexual behavior. But many, apparently, did not perceive these behaviors as sexual harassment because the number of soldiers who believed that sexual harassment was a problem in their unit was relatively small (10 percent of men and 17 percent of women). This was consistent with the personal perception of 22 percent of the women and 7 percent of the men who reported they had been sexually harassed in the previous twelve months.
In a focus group, a soldier commented that there was “lots of low-level sexual harassment,” but it was “just part of the environment.” Others described the least offensive behaviors as “noise,” “static,” or “clutter.” Many soldiers were uncomfortable with the situation, but found their exposure to these behaviors inevitable. What the Review Panel found striking was that Army men and women would tolerate such behavior and not state they had been sexually harassed, an indication that, for whatever reason, behavior that fell within the official definition of sexual harassment was accepted as the norm throughout the Army. One soldier noted that inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment was so pervasive, “I'd keep reporting it every day. But I handle it better than most.” Another said the official definition of sexual harassment was “too broad now,” adding that a newcomer to the unit might perceive sexual harassment, “when it is really only bantering back and forth.”
We learned that soldiers were likely to perceive they were being sexually harassed only when inappropriate behavior reached the level of sexual coercion or sexual assault. When this happened, 52 percent stated that they had been sexually harassed. “As long as no one is touching me,” a soldier said, capturing a common sentiment, “I don't care.”
During focus groups, many of those who had reported they had been sexually harassed described experiences that actually fell within the official Department of Defense definition of sex discrimination. Very often this discrimination involved soldiers being given certain duties solely because of their gender. All these cases involved units in which men and women were serving on an equal footing, with women qualified to perform their Military Occupational Specialty (MOS). The discrimination was often linked to assumptions about sex role stereotypes concerning abilities, competence, status, and roles of the particular gender (either man or woman), which resulted in the disparate treatment or a negative impact on those soldiers. For example, an officer or NCO might have made the arbitrary decision to assign women to “light” administrative-type duty, while men got the dirtier, heavy-lifting jobs. In a full field exercise, this might involve men digging trenches and foxholes, while women set up tents or light equipment.
The Review Panel found examples of such discrimination throughout the Army. When we asked soldiers if they were treated differently because of their sex, 51 percent of the women said yes, and fewer than half that percentage of the men (22 percent) said gender played a role in their treatment. This perception that women were incapable of serving as “real” soldiers had a definite impact on the way they were treated within their units. A group of senior women NCOs heatedly told the Review Panel about having no voice in meetings with their male peers: “We speak, but it's as if we do not exist. They ignore us.” Participants in focus group discussions noted that while there was “zero tolerance” within the Army for racial discrimination, the same standard was not applied to sex discrimination. One woman soldier remarked, “You can't get away with saying blacks shouldn't be in the Army, but you can say women shouldn't be in the Army. How can men get away with that?”
Many of the women the Review Panel contacted said they felt devalued as soldiers just because they were women. A woman field-grade officer reported, “I always have to fight the male mind-set about what a woman can and cannot do.” When I read her bitter comment, I thought back twenty-five years to the Military Intelligence officer at Fort Huachuca who told me women had no future in the Army. Certainly there had been progress in the years since then; women now comprised 15 percent of the total Army force and higher percentages in critical MOSs. In short, the Army could not run without women, as the senior leadership had made abundantly clear. But down at the company level, where the rubber sole of the combat boot met the road, women soldiers were still fighting the battle to be accepted. One junior enlisted woman reported of her male peers when she joined a new unit, “The automatic perception they have of me is that I don't know my job. If you're a female, you're always tested.”
But women soldiers were not the only ones who perceived unfair treatment and inequality. There was a feeling among some of the men soldiers that the Army
held women to less demanding standards. One of the most emotional issues was the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT). In establishing the different standards that men and women soldiers had to achieve on the APFT, the Army considered gender as well as age. The test was designed to measure the fitness of the individual soldier, not to be a competitive exercise or race.
The different performance standards reflected physiological differences between men and women, and between younger and older soldiers. For example, a fit young man soldier could do more push-ups than his fit woman counterpart, and she could do more sit-ups. Equally, the average older man soldier would not be able to meet the Army standard set for a younger man. Some men soldiers, however, complained that the APFT standards for women were “too low,” and that the test was “biased in favor of female soldiers.” One soldier who apparently was firmly against serving with women commented that “The lower standards reflect a woman will never be in as good physical shape as a man.”
I knew this to be preposterous, having often done better than my men peers in cross-country runs and in performing sit-ups on the APFT. I also knew that a twenty-year-old corporal would probably never say that a command sergeant major—a man in his late forties who achieved a passing score on the APFT based on age-adjusted standards—should not be in the Army. But that was exactly the implication of different gender standards for many of the men soldiers the Review Panel interviewed.
Pregnancy was an even more contentious issue. Some Army men reported that serving with pregnant soldiers negatively and unfairly impacted the unit. This was because Department of Defense policy required a pregnant woman to modify her physical training and the type and duration of duty she performed. For example, men pilots in a focus group complained that one of their women peers had to be removed from flight status, rendering her nondeployable, when her pregnancy advanced. The remaining pilots, both men and women, had to fly her missions and “pick up the other slack” caused by her absence. These sentiments were echoed by fuel handlers in a battalion where a pregnant woman had to be temporarily excused from her duties because the hazardous chemicals in the fuel might harm her developing fetus.
There was pervasive indignation that pregnancy gave women an unfair advantage and allowed them to shirk their duty. This perception caused many women to risk their own and their developing fetus's health by continuing to work long hours and take part in unit physical training simply to avoid loss of professional status.
But no matter how hard women struggled to be treated fairly and equitably, almost one half of the men surveyed said the women in their units were treated more favorably. While 77 percent of the women said that they “pull their load” in the company, only 50 percent of the men agreed with this assessment. Again, however, some women soldiers complained that their units effectively precluded them from working within the MOS for which they were trained and assigned them instead to duties seen as “more appropriate work for a woman.”
In examining the effects of sexual harassment, the Review Panel found a troubling erosion of trust among the soldiers in units in which the problem was the most severe. None of the women soldiers wanted to come to work in one unit suffering significant levels of sexual harassment. A qualified woman junior NCO was leaving the Army after six years because men had “hit” on her throughout those six years. And even when she reported the incidents to her chain of command, no action was taken.
Some men said they were afraid of being falsely accused of sexual harassment so they avoided any interaction or contact with the women in their unit. Women soldiers confirmed this trend and said they were concerned about becoming isolated and shunned by men soldiers who would no longer even speak with them.
Despite these widespread and troubling revelations, however, both men and women soldiers assured the panel that “the mission is still being accomplished.” There were, however, clear signs that all-important cohesion—the bond of trust and loyalty—among soldiers was affected by problems in the Army's human relations environment. The panel concluded that sexual harassment and sex discrimination did have a negative impact on the Army's effectiveness. We found a degree of tension and uneasiness grounded in the perception of many soldiers that the Army's leaders had overreacted to the media fallout from the highly publicized incidents of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct at Aberdeen and in the McKinney case.
That view might have had some validity, but the fact remained that the Review Panel did unearth pervasive sexual harassment and sex discrimination, which erodes Army effectiveness.
I don't mean to imply, however, that there hasn't been considerable progress on the issue of Army men's behavior toward women soldiers since World War II. Most men soldiers never engage in improper behavior. But any degree of impropriety had less of an impact on Army readiness when women made up a much less significant percentage of the force. For example, when I entered the Army, less than 2 percent of the Army were women. Today the percentage is 15 percent and women fill a wide variety of jobs critical to operational success in combat. The readiness of the Army, therefore, will improve as the distraction of sexual harassment is eliminated from the lives of both men and women soldiers.
Secretary Togo West had ordered all of us on the Review Panel to examine “how Army leaders throughout the chain of command view and exercise their responsibility to address sexual harassment.” We had all held positions of leadership. We knew that an organization's leader was responsible for every aspect of its mission performance and human environment. But in carrying out the Secretary's mandate, we discovered some aspects of leadership and human relations we had not anticipated.
First, we found strong confirmation for the basic tenet that good leadership is crucial to the creation and maintenance of positive human relations in an organization. The data we collected revealed a direct correlation between strong, concerned leadership (NCOs, junior officers, and commanders) and a reduction in inappropriate sexual behaviors. This was just common sense. An effective Army leader knew his or her soldiers and the conditions in which they lived and worked. The leader knew what was on their minds, what they felt good about, and what was bothering them. These powers of perception were not innate mystical abilities; they came with experience and with making the conscious effort to know soldiers on a human level. We found that mutual respect among soldiers and their leaders, as well as increased acceptance of soldiers of diverse backgrounds—different races, ethnicity, and gender—as equally valuable team members was also connected with successful leadership.
The worst thing a leader could do was to ignore subordinates, to consider them just so many human cogs in the machine. Soldiers immediately detected their leaders' indifference and the lines of communication necessary for a healthy human environment broke down.
Second, we observed that the Army was not just a nine-to-five job, but a demanding profession that required shared values, beliefs, and assumptions that the Army held true—all based on the core values of honor, integrity, selfless service, courage, loyalty, duty, and respect. It was Army leaders who defined and reinforced those values for their soldiers. When they did so effectively, the units had relatively few sexual harassment or sex discrimination problems. However, when leaders were less directly connected to their soldiers and not committed to fostering a successful human relations environment every day of the year, the situation often deteriorated.
Yet we found good leaders could build positive human relations among their soldiers even in the most challenging situations. In one unit deployed in Kuwait, the chain of command refused to allow the harsh pace of operations and the unpleasant physical environment to detract from either the mission or from its commitment to take care of soldiers and ensure that the soldiers took care of each other. The leaders repeatedly emphasized that each soldier, man and woman, was important, both as a member of the unit team and as an individual. The leaders also encouraged soldiers to voice complaints and suggest solutions, without fear of retaliation. Although the unit was perfor
ming a difficult mission under great physical stress and isolation, the soldiers showed both personal discipline and a positive attitude.
From this and other effective units the panel visited, four characteristics necessary for the exercise of good leadership emerged:
• Good leaders set standards for the members of their organizations.
• Good leaders exemplified through their personal conduct adherence to those standards.
• Good leaders enforced and maintained those standards for the other members of the organization.
• Good leaders demonstrated genuine care and concern for their soldiers, no matter their rank, race, or gender.
Although these leadership characteristics could be applied beyond the human relations environment to building and sustaining military skills, we became convinced that, should a leader lack any one of these characteristics, both the unit's military readiness and human relations environment would be adversely affected.
For example, when asked whether their units' leaders set and enforced standards, significantly fewer women than men agreed. The proportion of women reporting this paralleled the perceived levels of sexual harassment and sex discrimination.
When it came to exemplifying standards, the adage that “actions speak louder than words” obviously applied. Official policies, Army regulations, or decrees alone did not create or enforce a positive human relations environment. One soldier in a focus group stated, “The more you hear leaders speak it, and then watch them maintain standards, you know that it is important.” As with all the Army values, when it came to respect and consideration among soldiers, the chain of command had to lead by example, maintaining high standards of personal conduct.
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