Generally Speaking

by Claudia J. Kennedy

  But the dust that the “mutiny” had kicked up took a long time to settle. I received a hand-delivered official letter from Major General O'Shaughnessy in which he took me to task over the incident. He was “disappointed” with the events, which had received “such widespread (and negative) publicity.” The general added that “The seniors in the Pentagon and NSA are not used to seeing this type of emotional reaction to a disagreement or even a confrontation.” He was “mystified” by my “overreaction to what most of us deal with daily.” He suggested that “this cloud from Kunia will linger with you” as a sign of the time “when your emotions overshadowed good judgment.” He implied that I had irrevocably damaged my reputation with the NSA, the organization with which I would have to work in one capacity or another as a senior Army strategic intelligence officer.

  The general then proceeded to question my management ability and ended with the wish that I would “turn this unfortunate episode into a learning experience.”

  It was clear from General O'Shaughnessy's tone that he was engaging in damage control by disguising the Air Force responsibility for the crisis through dismissing my actions as those of an incompetent and emotional woman.

  I chose not to let this defensive maneuver go unanswered. In my reply (which I discussed with Major General Scanlon), I provided General O'Shaughnessy detail about the lack of cooperation and active obstruction that Lieutenant Colonel Strang had exhibited throughout the transition process. I also indicated that the Navy and the Army had worked well together in integrating the command, but both Colonel Cassidy and Lieutenant Colonel Strang had resisted this integration in various ways. “My relationship and reputation with NSA remain solid,” I concluded. “It is based on an association of eighteen years of mutual respect.”

  Several months later, following a meeting at NSA, an Air Force brigadier general tried to admonish me over the way I had handled the crisis at Kunia. The senior Navy admiral present was Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, Director of NSA. He interrupted the Air Force officer and addressed me. “General Kennedy,” the admiral said, “you did the right thing. When you're in command, you have to act accordingly. You cannot allow others to dispute your authority.”

  But even today, I hear occasional reports that Air Force officers are pleased that I was forced to take such drastic action with Strang and his NCOs. “That lets us treat Army people the same way” has become their refrain. This is absurd, a terrible and inappropriate interpretation of the events. Strang had always complied with security procedures until the endgame of the Air Force resistance to the change in operational structure. Then he had chosen to precipitate the crisis.

  I am still not sure what lay behind this incident. Very possibly, the local Air Force commanders were giving their headquarters a completely distorted version of the situation. Or the Air Force had used them as pawns in some larger power struggle invisible to people at our level.

  But none of that speculation really matters. The lesson I took from the crisis was not to ask questions about hidden agendas, but to only consider external behavior. Lieutenant Colonel Strang chose to act in a manner contrary to good order and discipline. In so doing, he forced me to react. I did so decisively, and the crisis was finally resolved. Contrary to General O'Shaughnessy's opinion, my professional reputation did not suffer.

  In August 1995, I was a major general, serving in the Pentagon as Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. The assignment was both demanding and fulfilling, and left little free time for watching television.

  One morning, the phone began to light up and people stopped me in the corridors to ask if I had seen CNN's latest coverage of the Shannon Faulkner story. I had not.

  “Last night she held a news conference at the Citadel,” a colleague said. “She's dropping out.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” I said, stunned.

  “I wish I were,” my acquaintance replied.

  Shannon Faulkner was a twenty-year-old South Carolina student who had fought an almost thirty-month legal battle for admission to the Citadel, the venerable state-funded, male-only military academy in Charleston. Her campaign began in March 1993 when she sued the school, charging that its all-male Corps of Cadets was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. She had earlier been accepted for admission based on her excellent high school academic transcript, but one on which no reference to gender had appeared. The Citadel rescinded its acceptance when it was revealed she was a woman.

  After months of litigation, which reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Faulkner was accepted as a day student in January 1994. That summer, the U.S. District Court ordered the Citadel to admit Shannon Faulkner into the Corps of Cadets, which was the heart and soul of the institution's student life. Although officially named the Military College of South Carolina, most of the Citadel's graduates did not enter military careers. And the school, founded in 1842, had a long tradition of offering its graduates access to a lifelong network of influential alumni contacts. The Citadel was a state-funded institution, however, and received considerable indirect financial and personnel support through the armed services' ROTC programs, which provided instructors and educational material. These were factors that heavily influenced Shannon Faulkner's lawsuit.

  After the July 1994 court order instructing the Citadel to admit her into the corps, the school appealed. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this appeal in April 1995. That summer dragged on in tense legal exchanges, during which Faulkner spent much of her time either in hearings, consulting with her attorneys, or trying to avoid the mounting level of acrimony directed toward her. Since 1993, when vandals had defaced her parents' small-town home with giant blood-red letters forming obscene epithets, Faulkner had been subjected to almost continual harassment. Morning rush-hour motorists in Charleston encountered a large transportable commercial sign reading “DIE SHANNON” that had allegedly been rented and wheeled out in the night by a group of Citadel cadets, following the U.S. District Court order that Faulkner be admitted to the corps.

  Finally, in August 1995, the Citadel was running out of options to comply with the law. But resistance continued, with a school spokesman arguing that Shannon was too heavy and had an injured knee, and would thus be unable to meet the demanding physical requirements of a cadet life. Once more, the legal maneuvering reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia refused to bar Faulkner's admission as a member of the Corps of Cadets. The next day, she arrived guarded by federal marshals and reported to the campus with other “knobs,” as first-year cadets were called due to their extremely short haircuts.

  On August 13, she and the other knobs began Hell Week, seven days of purgatory that combined obsolete military academy harassment by upperclassmen with an exhausting regimen of physical training. The weather in Charleston was terrible, with high humidity and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees. After only one day of training, Shannon Faulkner and several male cadets became ill and were taken to the infirmary. Four days later, Faulkner announced her intention to leave the school. At a brief press conference, she told reporters the stress of the long legal battle “came crashing down,” making it impossible for her to continue as a cadet.

  When the news of Shannon Faulkner's decision spread across the campus, groups of cadets unleashed rebel yells and abusive chants, deriding her. A notorious, widely circulated press photograph of the cadets' reaction showed young men in a variety of uniforms, arms raised, stomping in joy. One of the most prominent figures was a cadet officer dressed in green trousers with a wide black stripe similar to an Army officer's uniform. He was twirling in gape-mouthed, delirious ecstasy at the news that one isolated woman had failed.

  I thought of the substantial Army ROTC program that we supported at the Citadel. Rejoicing in a young person's failure was absolutely counter to Army values. Although the Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute, the remaining all-male bastion among state-funded military academies, liked to com
pare themselves favorably to the armed services' academies, I knew that the cadets at West Point would never stoop to such a spectacle.

  Soon after Shannon Faulkner's departure from the Citadel, Ken Bode, moderator of Public Television's Washington Week in Review, asked me to watch the taping of the show and have dinner with him and journalists Cokie and Steve Roberts. At dinner, Cokie Roberts, who was rushing to prepare for that Sunday's This Week with David Brinkley show on ABC, asked my opinion on the Shannon Faulkner matter. I told her that I believed the young woman had fought a good fight, but in the end, events had overpowered her.

  Cokie Roberts did not agree. “Getting that far and washing out after one day simply isn't to Shannon Faulkner's credit,” she insisted.

  I raised the issue of the intense legal battle, the death threats, and the stress to which Faulkner had been subjected over the previous two years. “You can't put up with all that and prepare yourself physically for the challenge they were going to throw at her,” I said.

  Again, Cokie Roberts disagreed. Many people shared that viewpoint, feeling that Shannon Faulkner had set back the cause of women's rights by her “failure.”

  I saw things differently. One young woman, backed by a few able attorneys, had forced one of the most politically influential educational institutions in the South, where traditions of antebellum male gallantry still stubbornly persisted, to comply with the United States Constitution. Although she herself had not been able to continue at the school, the legal precedent had been set; other women soon enrolled at the Citadel.

  But the case of Shannon Faulkner remained troubling for many of my friends and professional associates. Since I was the Army's senior woman officer, they came to me to voice their opinion. Why was the Army continuing to support through the ROTC program an institution such as the Citadel that obviously did not accept basic Army values? Why didn't the Army leadership “stand up and be counted” on this important matter? If Shannon Faulkner's battle had concerned race, some argued, the country's political and military leaders would have stepped forward immediately to go on the record supporting her. But because she had been one isolated woman, her struggle seemed to have not registered with the Army's senior leadership.

  I found these questions compelling. After thinking about them, I went to see Sara Lister, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. One of her responsibilities was the Army ROTC program at the Citadel. We discussed the Shannon Faulkner case, and she agreed that the young woman had not been treated fairly. I told her I thought the matter ought to be brought to the attention of Secretary of the Army, Togo West. She told me to go see him.

  When I had reported to the Pentagon as ADCSINT, Secretary West had told me, “As senior woman in the Army, you should feel free to bring any gender issues to me.” Now I took up his offer and made an appointment for a meeting in his office on the Pentagon E-Ring.

  During our discussion, we could look out the window overlooking the Mall entrance toward the early autumn foliage.

  “Mr. Secretary, women are very distressed about the Shannon Faulkner matter,” I said. I listed the concerns that had been brought to me. “Sir, we want our Army leadership to speak out on this matter.”

  Secretary West was silent for a few moments. “This struggle is not being fought by the United States Army, General. Ms. Faulkner's case, and the other litigation involving VMI, is being dealt with in the federal court system.” Togo West was an experienced attorney who understood legal matters far better than I. “It would simply not be appropriate for me or any of the Army's uniformed leaders to take a public stand on matters under active litigation.”

  I understood his argument. The people who had come to me were justifiably angry. They correctly saw Shannon Faulkner as a trailblazer who had been treated badly. But we did not have the broader perspective on the issue that someone serving at the strategic level of leadership such as Secretary West enjoyed.

  At that level, a leader simply cannot speak freely on a controversial subject such as the Shannon Faulkner case, no matter what his personal feelings on the issue might be. Although people are often critical of leaders who seem to remain aloof on such matters, these leaders can lose authority if they overplay their hands.

  I did not achieve the results I had sought entering Secretary West's office for that meeting. But I left having learned a valuable lesson about the exercise of power.

  Secretary West was absolutely correct in trusting the legal system to resolve the acrimonious issue of gender integration at the Citadel and VMI.

  As of April 2001, the Citadel had eighty-one women in the Corps of Cadets. Many have suffered inexcusable hazing, but they have persisted. And their numbers are increasing. The school had resisted complying with the law of the land for as long as it could, but ultimately, one brave young woman who never wore a formal cadet uniform had forced the Citadel and all its influential alumni to obey the provisions of the Constitution.

  The struggle for gender integration at the Virginia Military Institute had been even longer. Begun in 1990 by Attorney General Richard Thornburgh in the administration of President George H. Bush, the suit against the school wound its way through the federal courts for six years. Finally, in July 1996, the Supreme Court ruled seven to one that VMI must accept women as cadets. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion that an all-male admissions policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. The school would either have to admit women or forgo state funding. VMI could not find financial support for conversion to a private institution, as some diehards had urged. As at the Citadel, women cadets were soon admitted.

  In February 2001, First Classman (senior) Erin Claunch was honored on the floor of the Virginia General Assembly for the academic, military, and athletic excellence she had shown during her four years at VMI. She was an academically distinguished physics major, commanded the 2nd Battalion in the VMI Corps of Cadets, and had won a letter in cross-country. As an Air Force ROTC scholarship cadet, she planned to become a career officer.

  It will be years, if not decades, before the most tradition-bound alumni of the Citadel and VMI accept the fact that defying the United States Constitution was futile and that the admission of women as cadets has not ruined their cherished schools. But eventually, they will see the wisdom of this new policy.

  I am confident of this because, eventually, rational people accept reality. Over a decade ago, the Commandant of Cadets at West Point was briefing elderly visiting alumni. He showed them data concerning the Physical Training performance of a group of cadets, comparing this data to the alumni's less impressive record from decades earlier. These contemporary cadets had done more push-ups and sit-ups in two minutes and run two miles faster than the alumni.

  “That's impressive, General,” an alumnus said to the commandant.

  “And those are just the women,” the general replied.

  One of the responsibilities I assumed in 1997 as Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence was oversight of policy affecting a widespread, complex network of relationships with foreign military and civilian defense delegations involved in procuring American weapons systems developed by the Army. Over 200 Foreign Liaison Officers (FLNOs) were assigned to every Training and Doctrine Command post in the U.S. Army where our advanced war-fighting doctrine was developed and technology was tested. This was a numerically lopsided relationship because the Army had only about thirty such officers at similar facilities overseas.

  The situation sometimes reached ludicrous proportions. For example, the French LNO at Fort Rucker, Alabama, managed to get more training time on the latest U.S. aircraft than the American aviators assigned there. The problem of the “Flying Frenchman” became well known to elements of the Army staff and was emblematic of the strange new post–Cold War world in which we operated.

  Arms sales drove this large foreign military presence at American installations. After the Cold War, U.S. defense contractors faced the prospect of either sellin
g more weapons, selling fewer weapons at higher prices to the United States, or being forced to shut down their research and development facilities and production lines. With the downsizing of the U.S. military in the 1990s, the defense contractors saw foreign military sales as a means of continuing to sell their weapons systems. From the Army's perspective, foreign military sales helped reduce the per-unit development cost of these weapons. Further, selling advanced weapons to friends and allies around the world became an increasingly important part of our overall foreign policy. These countries were a diverse group, ranging from our traditional NATO partners, to Middle Eastern countries with which we wished to establish or retain close relationships, to small, prosperous nations such as Singapore. The sales bound those countries to us through shared military technology and doctrine.

  This transfer of American military technology abroad involved billions of dollars each year. The process was closely observed and directed by senior officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Because successful defense contractors enjoyed considerable influence on Capitol Hill—components of large weapons systems were subcontracted to companies in as many congressional districts as practicable—the mantra from OSD was “Sell, sell, sell.” This inclination perfectly matched that of many foreign countries eager to obtain state-of-the-art American arms.

  In order to both scout the prospects for emerging technology and to monitor the progress of weapons systems already under contract but not yet delivered, these foreign governments maintained their growing presence of LNOs and Cooperative Program Personnel at Army posts and other military bases. There were several programs governing these arms sales, all of which were subject to review by the Pentagon. Prosperous countries such as the United Kingdom often chose to purchase weapons as direct commercial sales that involved corporation-to-corporation partnerships to share the technology on a multinational basis. Less prosperous or less technically advanced countries such as Egypt usually obtained their American weapons under Foreign Military Sales programs, which included provisions for spare parts, training, manuals and computer support, and maintenance. There were also hybrids of these two basic types in which a country would pay the lower commercial price and negotiate for military training and the other provisions. These hybrid methods of procurement were preferred because they combined lower prices and less U.S. government control.