(Via Milinet)

Wall Street Journal
May 9, 2000

Today's Army: Warriors Vs. Schoolmarms

By Stephanie Gutmann
Why can't the U.S. Army keep its ranks filled? Why are
officers, who usually
tend to be happier with their lot than enlisted men, leaving
midcareer in
droves? Army Secretary Louis Caldera and recently appointed Army
Chief of
Staff Eric Shineski want you to know they're on the case. On
April 24, they
announced they were forming two new blue-ribbon panels to study
the problem
and make recommendations in August.

But answers to the question bob to the surface nearly every day
in the most
ordinary places -- like the pages of daily newspapers. You just
have to be
able to look more deeply.

Service-Wide Discontent

On Jan. 10 the Center for Strategic and International Studies
published a
survey attempting to explain servicewide discontent. Why, it
asked, has the
rate of attrition for Army captains -- who are usually at the
peak of their
powers in their early 30s -- increased 58% from 10 years ago?
After surveying
12,000 officers, the think tank reported that jobs in the hot
civilian
economy were not, as the Pentagon insists, the primary lure.
Instead, "unmet
expectations for a challenging and satisfying military lifestyle
were
identified as a larger issue in virtually every focus group."

As a soldier writing in Voice of the Grunt, an online newsletter
that is one
of the primary conduits of military samizdat, put it, "It's not
pay, its not
retirement. . . . It's the command climate, stupid!"

Then in March, on the brink of retirement, Lt. Gen. Claudia
Kennedy,
America's first female three-star general, made headlines around
the world
when a newspaper reported that she had brought a formal charge
of sexual
harassment against another general. Details of what happened in
that Pentagon
office four years ago are shrouded in secrecy. The meager
information that
has trickled out says that they were alone, having some type of
work-related
discussion, when Maj. Gen. Larry Smith allegedly initiated what
officials are
calling "inappropriate physical contact."

Gen. Smith has told various reporters that he hugged her. Gen.
Kennedy said
"it went further than that." Yet Gen. Kennedy may be working
with a strange
definition of harassment. She has told interviewers that sexual
harassment
can occur if the hand of a higher-ranking officer "lingers on
your back. . .
. You can't tell if he's a touchy-feely person. All you know is
that he gives
you the creeps."

In 1997, Gen. Kennedy was part of a panel charged with
determining the
prevalence of sexual harassment in the Army. The panel's finding
-- that 47%
of Army women had experienced at least one incident of sexual
harassment --
came from questionnaires in which sexual harassment was
determined to have
occurred if one answered yes to the question: "[Has anyone]
touched you in a
way that made you feel uncomfortable (e.g. laid a hand on your
bare arm, put
an arm around your shoulders)?"

After what the news media have called "the groping," Gen.
Kennedy, then in
her late 40s, made an informal complaint. Gen. Smith was rapped
on the
knuckles, and Gen. Kennedy said in an interview later that she
had been "very
impressed with the way was handled." But Gen. Kennedy says her
satisfaction
had included an assurance that Gen. Smith would never be
promoted. By last
month, Gen. Smith was about to be promoted to a position --
deputy
investigator general -- that would have put him in charge of the
investigation of some sexual harassment cases. Gen. Smith's
promotion has now
been put on hold.

Attrition and recruiting problems arise for many reasons. A
force reduced by
half over the past 10 years is being asked to carry out ever
more foreign
missions. Pay isn't keeping pace with the civilian sector.
Civilian
headhunters hover outside the gates ready to sign up the many
servicemen with
technical skills. Just about everyone hates peacekeeping
operations. And
because of misallocated defense money, military housing crumbles
and planes
sit in hangars too damaged to fly.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary William Cohen decides that the
young men of
America might be beguiled into recruiting by pitches from movie
stars with no
military experience. In January, he booked a $2,500-a-night room
for himself
at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills so he could have meetings
with Julia
Roberts, Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise. All declined his offer.

Yet one soldier told me, "All of these things could be borne if
it was still
like it was." The military has always offered a tough life.
Indeed, many sign
up precisely for the tough life. It also offered 18-year-old men
something
most civilian jobs couldn't: a challenge, a coming of age and
the chance to
be away from the schoolmarms of the world.

But the Army of 2000 is a very different place. Officers and
enlisted men
from each service use words like "sterile," "sanitized,"
"babyish,"
"corporate," "totalitarian" and "micromanaged" to describe it.
It's "like a
politically correct fish bowl," complained one soldier, again in
the Voice of
the Grunt.

The schoolmarms have taken over. Rules attempt to dictate
correct sleepwear:
Sleeping nude is out; T-shirts and shorts only. In mixed-sex
boot camps,
recruits of one sex are not allowed to talk to the other sex, or
to a drill
sergeant, without a fellow recruit of the same sex standing
escort. The
barracks for new recruits in basic training are sexually
integrated, but
various Army camps have experimented with removing barrack-room
doors,
keeping lights on all night, and installing video surveillance
cameras to
discourage after hours "fraternizing."

The brass know they must integrate women into their units
whenever possible,
and ensure that the people in those units bond and achieve "unit
cohesion."
At the same time, as former Army Secretary Dennis Reimer put it,
the brass
must maintain "zero tolerance for sexual harassment" and achieve
that by
"desexualiz[ing] the environment so the conditions that
encourage sexual
harassment do not occur."

Obeying these dual commandments leaves the services walking a
very narrow
strip of safe ground with mines on either side. They know they
must encourage
cohesion in their mixed-sex units -- as an essential part of
unit survival --
while avoiding the wrong kind of cohesion -- the kind that would
stimulate
jealousies, lovers' spats, even pregnancies.

Vague Words

The desexualization of the environment is not yet complete, and
sexual
harassment continues to be defined with vague words like
"ogling," "leering"
and "touches that seem inappropriate." All of this means that
nearly 10 years
into its vision of a "gender-neutral," "gender-blind" force, the
U.S.
military is more preoccupied with sex than ever. It races around
like a
frazzled camp counselor, shushing, no-noing and generating
cascades of
intrusive new policy regulating ever subtler and more personal
behavior.

The services seem to be getting the message that people are
unhappy about
something more than money. Secretary Cohen has told commanders
to ease up on
the "zero-defect mentality" that permeated 1990s military
culture, and they
are offering "quality of life" improvements in order to make
military life
less hard and more fun. So they pile on new bonuses and put
masseuses in the
aircraft carrier sick bays, and they conduct studies trying to
determine
causes of the discontent. Meanwhile the 800-pound gorilla called
political
correctness just keeps sitting in the middle of the living room.

Gutmann is the author of "The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can It
Fight?,"
published in March by Scribner.

Seems the more I read about the Military, the more I am glad that I was in the Corps, 68-70. What are we doing, putting our young men thru all this BS. We are suppose to be ready to defend our Country, first and foremost. I have a son whose is a Capt., in the Corps. When he was at the Citadel as a Cadet/Knob, he had to sign papers stating that he was never at nor near Las Vegas when Tail Hook took place. He was a jr in high school at the time. When it's time to concentrate on doing your job as a Marine, you still have to worry about how you say things and attitude and I won't let that happen again. That is also why so many Police ofcrs leave the Dept because you can't count on anybody to CYA when it hits the fan. My heart goes out to all that are hanging in there for our Country and doing the best they can. SF Jose