Their military function is to free the men to fight. According to a recent article by Cecile Landrum, a US Air Force manpower analyst, Israeli women conscripts train for three and a half weeks with only a minimal amount of that time dedicated to the handling of weapons. Israel has terminated flight training for women, reversing an earlier policy. When three Israeli women soldiers were killed during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, the nation went into shock. As Congressman Sonny Montgomery noted after a visit military units, "When they go into combat, the women move to the rear."
Why? Because men fight better. We can try to intellectualize that reality away, and layer it with debates on role conditioning versus natural traits, but it manifests itself in so many ways that it becomes foolish to deny it. When the layerings of centuries of societal development are stripped away, a basic human truth remains: Man must be more aggressive in order to perpetuate the human race. Women don't rape men, and it has nothing to do, obviously, with socially induced differences. As Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin observe in The Psychology of Sex of Differences, man's greater aggressiveness "is one of the best established, and most pervasive of all psychological sex differences."
Man is more naturally violent than woman. Four times as many men are involved in homicides as women. You might not pick this up in K Street law offices or in the halls of Congress, but once you enter the areas of this country where more typical Americans dwell, the areas that provide the men who make up our combat units, it becomes obvious. Inside the truck stops and in the honky-tonks, down on the street and in the coal towns, American men are tough and violent. When they are lured or drafted from their homes and put through the dehumanization of boot camp, then thrown into an operating combat unit, they don't get any nicer, either. And I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen I encountered during my recent semester as a professor at the Naval Academy, whom I would trust to provide those men with combat leadership.
Furthermore, men fight better without women around. Men treat women differently than they do men, and vice versa. Part of this is induced by society (for the tendency to want to help women who are, more often than not, physically weaker), and part is innate (the desire to pair off and have sexual relations). These tendencies can be controlled in an eight-hour workday, but cannot be suppressed in a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week combat situation. Introducing women into combat units would greatly confuse an already confusing environment and would lessen the aggressive tendencies of the units, as many aggressions would be directed inward, toward sex. rather than outward, toward violence. A close look at what has happened at the Naval Academy itself during the three years women have attended that institution is testimony to this.
What are the advantages to us, as a society, of having women in combat units? I don't know of any. Some say that coming manpower shortages might mandate it, but this country has never come close to full mobilization, and we are nowhere near that now. During World War II, 16 million men wore the uniform. Today, the active-duty strength of the US military is only 2 million people, out of a much larger group of eligible citizens. Furthermore, bringing women into the military does not mandate bringing them into combat.
Some say men and women have a duty to share our country's burdens equally, that it is sex discrimination to require only men to fight. But history has shown the wisdom of this distinction, and the Israelis, who must do more than merely intellectualize about such possibilities, demonstrate its currency. Equal does not mean the same. Any logical proposition— sexual equality— can be carried to a ridiculous extreme— women should fight alongside men.
If Congress had considered these realities when it debated whether to open the service academies to women, and approached this as a national defense rather a women's issue, it may have voted differently.
Two thirds of the House of Representatives voted for the measure, which appeared as a rider to the 1975 Defense Appropriations Bill. Those who argued favor of the proposal dismissed the notion of women in combat, and instead maintained that the issue was mere sexual equality. Congressman Samuel of New York, who proposed the amendment, downplayed the prospect of women in combat billets, claiming it was irrelevant: "It's just a simple matter of equality. . . . All we need is to establish the basic legislative policy that we wish to remove sex discrimination when it comes to admissions to the service academies." Stratton's key statistic in establishing that the academies did not "train officers exclusively for combat" was that "only" 90 percent of current Academy graduates had served in a combat assignment.
That is a fascinating statistic to have been used on Stratton's side of the debate. The key point is not that 90 percent of the Academy graduates to that time had served in a assignment, but that 100 percent had been equipped to do so, physically, mentally, and emotionally. By way of analogy, I would estimate that something less than 90 percent of my classmates in law school went out and practiced law, but that did not detract from the training they received, and I don't see many law schools deciding to add theology or journalism to their curriculum to accommodate the others.
So how do you teach combat leadership? You don't do it with a textbook; you do it by creating a stress environment. My academic education at the Naval Academy always took a backseat to my military education. During our first year, I and my classmates were regularly tested and abused inside Bancroft Hall, our living spaces. We were pushed deep inside ourselves for that entire year, punished physically and mentally, stressed to the point that virtually every one of us completely broke down at least once. And when we finished our first year, we carried out the same form of abuse on other entering classes. That was the plebe system. It was harsh and cruel. It was designed to produce a man who would be able to be an effective leader in combat, to endure prisoner-of-war camps, to fight this country's wars with skill and tenacity. And it is all but gone.
They still call it Plebe Year at the Naval Academy. Freshmen still have to memorize certain facts called "plebe rates"and still have to call the upperclass "sir." But there it ends. Now you cannot physically punish a plebe. You cannot unduly harass a plebe. God forbid that you should use abusive language to a plebe. Plebes do not "brace up" in the mess hall or in the corridors of Bancroft Hall. It is now a punishment, limited to fifteen minutes maximum, to require plebes to do what they once did as a basic activity for a year: stand at attention.
"I like women at the Academy,'' one of my classmates who is still on active duty told me recently. "They've brought a measure of . . . refinement to the place."
If there was one thing that was irrelevant to preparation for combat it was refinement, and if there was one thing that helped my combat preparation it was plebe year. I broke down plebe year. We all did. I went around to an upperclassman once with three M-1 rifles and held them in front of me all 33 pounds until it was physically impossible to do so. Then I held two, straight in front of me, straining until my arms hit my knees. Then one. Then seven books. Then six, five, four, three, two, one. Then a pencil. Then a toothpick, as the upperclassman gathered his friends and they surrounded me, talking about the irrelevance of pain as the toothpick hit my knees, demanding answers to questions, imploring me to resign and go home. The next night, after physically running me to exhaustion, he and three others took turns beating me with a cricket bat, telling me they would stop if I admitted it hurt. Finally they broke the bat on my ass. I returned to my room and stuck my head inside my laundry bag and cried for fifteen minutes, standing in the closet so my roommates wouldn't see me. I hated the upperclass and I hated the Academy. But I had reached a place deep inside myself, and when I got up at 5:30 the next morning and began preparing to enter that man's room yet another time, I knew something about myself that I could never have learned in any other way.
That may seem a sadistic and barbaric way to learn self-truths, and I would not suggest a reinstatement of plebe year to that extreme, but I will say this: When I watched 51 of my men become casualties over seven weeks in Vietnam, and when I sat down next to number 51and cried like a baby, I'd been there before. It was a lot easier to pick up and keep going, and by then I was not merely Jim Webb, plebe, trying to survive a morning of a malicious upperclassman; I was a Marine platoon commander.
I don't see anything at the Naval Academy anymore that can take a person deep inside himself.
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