Ahead of the January 2016 deadline decreed by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in 2013, on Thursday current Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that all military occupations and positions, without exception, will henceforth be open to women. Echoing President Obama’s 2013 comments that “valor knows no gender,” Secretary Carter justified the decision in part on the grounds that the military has a proud history of meritocracy, in which those who serve “are judged only on what they have to offer to help defend the country.” To satisfy contemporary social demands for fairness and equality across the sexes, the full integration of women into ground combat arms communities appears not only laudable, but also just.
Writing about the civic role that the military plays in the larger context of American national life for the AEI Program on American Citizenship, in “America’s Military Profession: Creating Hectors, not Achilles” combat veteran Aaron MacLean cautions against applying only the metric of fairness to the equation of women and military occupations. Changes within the military are often reflections of changes in society, and the changes brought about by the sexual revolution have had complicated legacies for American civil society whose effects within the military can’t simply be waved away by a decree:
Generally speaking, if a given change has been positive for society, as in the case of the civil rights revolution, then it has been positive for the military, too. But other societal shifts have the potential to damage the military’s necessary illiberal character and its ability to perform its primary function: defending the nation and its interests….
The first example of such a potentially devastating shift is the effort to integrate women into ground combat arms communities within the services. Women have served in the military—as of recently, in aviation and at sea—with distinction, but it has always been national policy to restrict them from the infantry, special operations, and related roles because of the average disparity between male and female physical capacity and the disciplinary problems involved with combining very young men and women in austere environments.
This changed in January 2013…. The policy of segregation according to sex had fallen victim to one of the most important arguments made by proponents of American feminism: that in principle, there should be no professional opportunities in America unavailable to women, and proportional differences between the number of men and women within any given profession is primarily a sign of unjust social inequality.
Therefore, insofar as a small number of women should, in proportion to the available pool of men, be able to meet the physical standards of these communities, women should be allowed to serve in them. There are at least two serious problems with the change. The first is that there is no way that those who have promoted this shift will allow standards to be maintained at their current levels, which would have the consequence of permitting only an extremely small number of women to serve in these units…
The second problem is that even assuming that standards can be maintained, there will be immense disciplinary problems involved in the shift. In particular, in the infantry—the largest community affected by this shift—the average age within operational units is extremely young. The consequences of integrating male and female 19-year-olds and sending them not only to war but also to the front lines—away from the relative order of the camps where the majority of deployed service members live and work abroad—will be devastating to the efficiency of the units in question. The resulting problems will amount to far more than a “leadership challenge.”
Proponents argue that similar points were made against the racial integration of the military and were proven false. Proponents can argue this because they are committed to the premise that gender is, like skin color, a superficial distinction and that the differences between men and women are, like race, social constructions rather than meaningful consequences of biology.
Women are no strangers to valor. By any honest assessment of the debate about women in combat roles, the contention is not whether women are devoid of qualities of resilience to physical hardship, courage, or leadership. The legitimate question is whether it is sound policy, given the military’s core function. To have a better sense of what is required to fulfill that role, read Maclean’s essay in its entirety here. As provocation to do so, consider his parting thought:
[A]s society grows increasingly uncomfortable with what the military has to believe and do to be successful on the battlefield—such as harsh training, strict discipline, and a preferential focus on battlefield excellence at the expense of other potential social goods—both the national defense and national character are likely to suffer.
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