Such a blurring of traditional military echelons and branches is already underway. The pattern will continue as the American military modernizes. And it is essential that we see this modernization through to its completion. Now, and in the foreseeable future, we will not have the largest military establishment in the world, but it is critical that we continue to have the best. It is also vital that this force be fully ready for complex, demanding combat operations virtually anywhere in the world.
But there are still those who wish to turn back the clock, to jeopardize our future readiness in order to further their own political agendas.
For example, the false issue of allegedly “rampant” pregnancy among women service members has been waved like a firebrand to inflame public opinion against the role of women in the military. But the facts do not support such uninformed and inflammatory claims. When the Army studied the cause of the “nondeployable” status of the approximately 10 percent of the total force unable to join their units sent to new locations overseas, it found that pregnancy accounted for only 6.1 percent of this already small group. By far the largest number (49.6 percent) were soldiers undergoing scheduled training that could not be interrupted for deployment. Soldiers with either permanent or temporary disabilities, pending legal cases, or who were on leave comprised the rest of the nondeployables. Yet the myth persists that women “choose” to become pregnant only when their units are about to be deployed. Since women comprise approximately 15 percent of the Army, the numbers simply do not support this claim; it's just malicious slander against women.
After the Aberdeen sexual abuse scandal, the entire issue of gender-integrated military training was revisited.
For the past two decades, the Army doctrine of “Train As You Fight” has proven eminently successful. During Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama, 770 women deployed. Three women helicopter pilots flying paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division performed well under heavy enemy fire. During the Persian Gulf War, the 41,000 women deployed made up 16 percent of the ground force. Women flew aerial refueling missions in the war zone, flew helicopters on combat air assault missions into Iraq, and performed a number of critical jobs close to the fighting front. Five women were killed in action, two were taken prisoner of war and served honorably in captivity.
In October 1997, I met one of those former POWs, Colonel Rhonda Cornum, an Army flight surgeon. She is a wife, a mother, an accomplished military leader and public speaker. In early 2001, Colonel Cornum deployed to the Balkans to command an Army medical brigade.
Men and women who enlisted to serve in gender-integrated combat support, combat service support, and Special Branch MOSs trained together from their first day of Basic Training. Men who enlisted to serve in combat arms MOSs trained in gender-segregated One Station Unit Training posts.
There has been no “feminization” or softening of the Army as critics have charged. Instead, both young women and men enlistees have been toughened by increasing the length and rigor of Initial Entry Training (which includes Basic and Advanced Individual Training). Research has shown that the performance of women soldiers undergoing this training has improved, while the training of their male peers has maintained its high quality.
I spoke out on this issue when those critics of gender-integrated training used the Aberdeen sexual abuse scandal as a pretext to demand the renewed segregation of men and women trainees, a refrain that continues to this day. What had occurred at Aberdeen, I told a congressional commission in 1998, had been “falsely associated with gender-integrated training.” I reminded the members that the Aberdeen incidents were abuses of power that had been distorted to appear as fraternization in order to further the accused abusers' legal defenses. “The basic issue at Aberdeen is that established Army leadership standards were not upheld,” I told the commission. The goal of sexual harassment is power, control, and dominance, not affection and desire. I think I made some headway. But my frank views were not popular among the conservative members of Congress who hold the view that there is simply no place for women in the military (nor, I suppose, in law enforcement, fire departments, nor in medical school, nor on the bench) and who will seize any excuse to further their outmoded belief.
But it is essential to make policy based on current experiences in military training. It is also important for soldiers to train in integrated units when they will serve in integrated specialties because first impressions are lasting and strong. Basic Training provides soldiers' first impression of their place in the Army. It is their first experience of learning to be a soldier, a safe, intensely supervised experience, where they learn discipline, acquire a sense of duty, and develop mutual respect. It is vital that all soldiers who eventually will serve together start off learning how to work with each other, and to learn that they all have had the same preparation and meet the same standards. This training builds trust: trust in oneself, trust in one's buddies, and trust in the team. We cannot expect that young men and women who are trained separately by gender-segregated drill instructors can later serve well together as equal partners in gender-integrated units.
In thirty-two years of military service, I saw the Army undergo many changes. When I enlisted in the gender-segregated Women's Army Corps in 1968, the Army was made up mainly of draftees. WACs trained separately, were assigned separately, and we were promoted separately. But in the early 1970s, the Army made the transition to the All-Volunteer Force, women were integrated into the rest of the Army, and the WAC Branch was dissolved. At that time, there were those who predicted the downfall of the Army, just as there are those today who claim the Army is being softened and undercut by the incremental increase in the percentage of women, training side by side with men, within its ranks.
But I know better. I have been trained by women only. I have seen gender-segregated units trained by gender-integrated instructors, and I have seen integrated trainees trained by cadres of integrated instructors.
That final process has produced the Army of today, the Army that defeated Saddam Hussein's massed divisions in just one hundred hours of Operation Desert Storm. The soldiers of this Army have displayed incredible courage, maturity, and discipline during challenging peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, from Haiti, to the Balkans, to Africa and Central America. I am extremely proud to have served with them.
America is going to need its women soldiers in the future, particularly as soldiers' jobs evolve. In the coming decades, demographic pressures will add to that urgency. Our population is inexorably aging. By 2021, the first of the baby boom will turn seventy-five. The pool of young, able-bodied workers contributing to Social Security to support the great bulge of the elderly will shrink. There will be increased competition for skilled workers between the military and civilian marketplace. None of the armed forces will be able to preserve obsolete concepts of gender segregation and male dominance of the military.
Further, the Army will fill its traditional role of assimilating new waves of immigrants, for whom the attraction of a military career will be the transformation to full integration as citizens and the acquisition of technical and leadership skills. Again, I am proud that the Army has served that role so well in the past and will continue to do so.
Today, people often ask if I believe an Army woman will achieve the rank of four-star general and advance to the top leadership. “No question about it,” I always reply. Sometime in the next twenty years, a woman who is today a major or lieutenant colonel will stand proudly as her fourth star is pinned to her epaulets. But that inevitability evades a broader issue. How many company first sergeants, battalion and brigade command sergeants major will be women in 2020? Will the percentage of women commanding battalions and brigades be proportional to their numbers in the Army? Will the trend toward the advancement of women soldiers that I witnessed in my career continue or will the talent that women bring to the military be marginalized? These are crucial questions, not just for the women who wear Army green, but also for the nation
as a whole.
The future progress of military women will continue to reflect that of women in the broader society, just as it has in the past. Women soldiers have some reason for optimism.
In the 2000 election, women candidates from both parties made historic gains. Overall, women hold seventy-three seats in the House and Senate, more than doubling the thirty-two seats women held in 1990. Five of the nation's governors are now women, and women fill 22 percent of state legislative seats.
These are impressive gains. And the trend will no doubt continue as both Democrats and Republicans groom women candidates for the important 2002 election. Commenting on the significance of the 2000 election, political scientist Sherry Bebitch Jeffe noted, “The more women who serve in the Senate, the more women who serve as governors, the more women there are from which to choose presidential and vice presidential nominees.”
But I personally think it will be a few years before we see a woman at the top of either party's national slate. The resistance to women in high leadership positions is just too deeply seated in America for there to be a major shift in the next two decades. The results of a recent Gallup Poll conducted in five Latin American nations and the United States is revealing. When asked, “Do you believe your country will elect a female president in the next twenty years?” well over two thirds of those polled in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and El Salvador responded yes. Only 46 percent of Americans answered affirmatively (just behind 47 percent of Argentines). But 57 percent of Americans polled believed government would be better if more women held public office. Significantly, across all the nations polled, only 20 percent felt that women would do a better job than men at “directing the military.”
Despite such polls, I remain optimistic about the future of women in the U.S. Army. The transformation of the military currently will require greater participation of women in the defense of our country.
After years as an Army staff officer and commander, my observation about the synergistic contribution men and women soldiers make to the Army that I love so much can be summarized in an anecdote I tell about visiting an Army post in the late 1990s. I stopped at the gate during the morning rush hour to ask directions from the Military Police on duty. The young woman MP at the gate was courteous, her salute as crisp as the crease in her BDUs. But her instructions were rather vague because she did not focus her full attention on giving me precise directions. Instead, she continued her duties, waving the line of cars ahead, checking the drivers' and passengers' proffered ID cards all the while rattling off a chain of directions for me. During all this, she even pulled over a driver who could not produce his ID. Her actions were a prototypical example of multitasking, a talent at which I believe women are especially adept.
Another time, a man MP came around to my car window, turned his back on his assigned lane of incoming traffic, and proceeded to give me a precise set of directions, including all turns and elapsed mileage to my destination building. He was completely zeroed in, focusing on the sole requirement of guiding me. Saddam Hussein could have walked through the gate with a Stinger missile on his shoulder and that young soldier would not have noticed.
When I relate this story, I ask people, “Who would you rather have at the gate?” But before they answer, I always say, “You want them both.”
The Army needs soldiers who can be focused and direct and go straight for closure. But we also need soldiers with a broader view who can juggle multiple tasks and make a quick decision about what is important and what is not. Of course, these skills do not always divide along gender lines; the anecdote illustrates the importance of appreciating our differences.
An Army comprised of men and women serving their country side by side with mutual respect provides that optimum balance. I am proud of this Army and that it gave me the chance to live just such a life of service.
Epilogue
A week after the June 2000 ceremony in the Pentagon central courtyard to celebrate the end of my Army service, I attended a retirement retreat at Fort Huachuca, the guest of Major General John Thomas, commanding general of the Intelligence Center and School. I had been expecting a very austere event, at which a small group would gather at the parade ground flagpole to salute the colors as they were lowered at the end of the day.
Instead, when my cousin Valerie Haygood Thompson, who had accompanied me to Arizona, and I arrived at Grierson Field, we found the post Army band and several hundred soldiers standing in formation before the podium. Among them was B Troop, a small ceremonial cavalry unit wearing the Army uniform of the frontier days. Their dark, broad-brimmed hats, wide suspenders, and riding boots silently evoked the Old West. For the rest of us, the uniform of the day was BDUs.
I was surprised and touched to have the opportunity to attend this final Army ritual with soldiers who represented every Army MOS with which I had been closely associated during thirty-two years of service. Although the World War II-era wooden classrooms in which I had attended the Advance Course as a young captain had been torn down, I drove past the old stucco bungalow where I had lived that year. Looking northwest, the high desert dropped away toward Tucson and the coppery Huachuca Mountains. Isolated columns of cloud drifted overhead, trailing skirts of rain so thin it felt like mist. Thunder echoed from the mountains.
The band played. General Thomas spoke briefly. Then I spoke. But I was so overcome with emotion that I cannot remember to this day the nature of the music or the words. But I will never forget when the band lowered their instruments and sang a cappella the words of that quintessential Army ballad, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.”
And I never forget the words of one of our most revered leaders, General George C. Marshall. In 1951, as the former Secretary of State, he spoke to the graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, several hundred young cadets, most of whom would be locked in bitter combat in the frozen mountains of Korea before the year was out:
I think it is too early to talk to you regarding some of the trials and tribulations that are bound to be yours during your service to come. You will often be misunderstood. You will frequently find the democratic processes of this country difficult to assimilate in a military pattern. But never forget that this is a democracy and you are the servants of the people, and whatever complications may arise, you have a duty to your country which involves not only the final sacrifice if necessary, but a generous understanding of the role of an officer in a great democracy.
General Marshall's words speak to all of us who have chosen the military calling.
U.S. Army Grades and Insignia
grade insignia if in command, which echelon
General Four silver stars Regional CINC
Lieutenant General Three silver stars Corps Commander
Major General Two silver stars Division Commander
Brigadier General One silver star Assistant Division Commander
Colonel Silver eagle Brigade Commander
Lieutenant Colonel Silver oak leaf Battalion Commander
Major Gold oak leaf
Captain Two silver bars Company Commander
First Lieutenant One silver bar
Second Lieutenant One gold bar Platoon Leader
warrant officers
Grade Five Silver bar with five enamel white squares
Grade Four Silver bar with four enamel black squares
Grade Three Silver bar with three enamel black squares
Grade Two Silver bar with two enamel black squares
Grade One Silver bar with one enamel black squares
noncommissioned officers
Sergeant Major of the Army (E-9). Same as Command Sergeant Major (below) but with two stars. Also wears distinctive red and white shield on lapel.
Command Sergeant Major (E-9). Three chevrons above three arcs with a five-pointed star with a wreath around the star between the chevrons and arcs.
Sergeant Major (E-9). Three chevrons above three arcs with a five-pointed star between the c
hevrons and arcs.
First Sergeant (E-8). Three chevrons above three arcs with a diamond between the chevrons and arcs.
Master Sergeant (E-8). Three chevrons above three arcs.
Sergeant First Class (E-7). Three chevrons above two arcs.
Staff Sergeant (E-6). Three chevrons above one arc.
Sergeant (E-5). Three chevrons.
Corporal (E-4). Two chevrons.
specialists
Specialist (E-4). Eagle device only.
other enlisted
Private First Class (E-3). One chevron above one arc.
Private (E-2). One chevron.
Private (E-1). None.
Glossary
ACRONYMS
AIT Advanced Individual Training
APC Armored Personnel Carrier
APFT Army Physical Fitness Test
ARNG Army National Guard
AWOL Absent Without Leave
BCT Basic Combat Training
BDU Battle Dress Uniform
BT Basic Training
C4ISR Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance
CGSC Command and General Staff College
CI Counterintelligence
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CID Criminal Investigation Division
CINC Commander-in-Chief
COO Consideration of Others
DCSINT Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence
DCSOPS Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans
DCSPER Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel
DEFCON Defense Condition
DIA Defense Intelligence Agency
DMZ Demilitarized Zone
DoD Department of Defense
DPCA Director of Personnel and Community Affairs
EO Equal Opportunity
EW Electronic Warfare
FGOD Field-Grade Officer of the Day
FLNO Foreign Liaison Officer
Generally Speaking Page 33