In 2006, as the war in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, a Pentagon employee working on special operations teamed up with a Czech technology entrepreneur who had dabbled in the porn business and devised what they considered an ingenious plan. Knowing that video games played on mobile phones were popular throughout the Middle East, the team wanted to build games that contained positive messages about the United States. But the games weren't just about propaganda. Every download would give the United States a window into the digital comings and goings of whomever was playing it it, a cyber foothold that could allow American spies to potentially track and collect information on thousands of people.
The propaganda/spy campaign was dubbed Native Echo, and it was conceived by Michael Furlong, a colorful civilian employee working for US Special Operations Command, and a company called U-Turn, which was headquartered in Prague and founded by a pro-American Czech national named Jan Obrman, whose parents had fled the Soviets in the 1960s. The idea was to target Middle Eastern teenagers in "high risk/unfriendly areas," and over time to integrate the US messages "into the lifestyle of the targets," ideally to make them more amenable to US armed forces, and to counter the rhetoric of Muslim fundamentalists.
The full account of this previously unreported intelligence operation is found in the new book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth, by New York Times national security correspondent Mark Mazzetti. The book explores the ways in which the CIA--which before 9/11 had long been out of the business of killing people--and the US military--which had not been the domain of spies--have often changed roles over the past decade. It is filled with characters, like Furlong, who move between the membranes of these two worlds, and find themselves at home in either one.
Mazzetti writes that the first mobile game developed for Native Echo was modeled on the popular Call of Duty series. This new "shooter" game, Iraqi Hero, "took the player on an odyssey through the streets of Baghdad, shooting up insurgents trying to kill civilians in a wave of terrorist attacks," Mazzetti writes. "The goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver the secret plans for an upcoming insurgent attack, plans that had been stolen from a militia group's headquarters."
Native Echo was timed to coincide with the US troop surge in Iraq in 2007. Its "main focus was on combatting the flood of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa," Mazzetti writes.
As an intelligence collection program, Native Echo was both broad and audacious:
"Thousands of people would be sending their mobile-phone numbers and other identifying information to U-Turn, and that information could be stored in military databases and used for complex data-mining operations carried out by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. The spies wouldn't have to go hunting for information; it would come to them."
In order to hide the US role in the scheme, "Furlong convinced [U-Turn's] executives to create an offshore company that could receive Pentagon contracts but not be tied directly to the United States," Mazzetti writes. Obrman set up JD Media Transmission Systems, LLC, incorporated in the Seychelles Islands, in order to receive money transfers from the US through a foreign bank account.
Furlong was a master at working the byzantine procurement bureaucracy to further his covert plans. "Taking advantage of a law that allows firms owned by Native Americas to get a leg up when bidding on government contracts, Furlong arranged for U-Turn to partner with Wyandotte Net Tel, a firm located on a tiny speck of tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma," Mazzetti writes.
U-Turn developed two more games for Native Echo--Oil Tycoon, which challenged players to protect vital pipelines and infrastructure, and City Mayor, in which players became urban planners and rebuilt a fictional city destroyed by terrorists. The team came up with various ways to distribute the games, including by hand via memory cards, which could be sold or given away in markets and bazaars, Mazzetti reports. "The way to get far wider distribution, however, was to post the games on Web sites and blogs frequented by gamers in the Middle East. This allowed [Special Operations Command] to monitor how many people were downloading the games and, more important, who was doing it."
Mazzetti concludes that it's hard to know how far Native Echo went, and even how many companies like U-Turn were hired to create propaganda for the military. Furlong came up with other wild ideas, some of which were never approved. But the relationship between the military and U-Turn blossomed, and it offers a concrete illustration of how the armed forces evolved into a network of spies.
The Way of the Knife is full of stories like this, of people living on the edge between two worlds, frequently not sure how to operate on turf that had long been forbidden. The book is a culmination of Mazzetti's years of reporting on the intersections of the military and the CIA, and it is a forceful, compelling articulation of a new way of war. Mazzetti's reporting has been among some of the most important, in that it has shed light on usually hidden practices, particularly the use of brutal interrogations on terrorist detainees. As the book unfolds, we see how the 9/11 attacks shake the CIA out of their Cold War culture of espionage, and turn the agency into a highly-efficient global killing force.
I spoke with Mazzetti yesterday as he was heading off to New York to begin a book tour. He said that he began working after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and that the first few months of writing were filled with some anxiety, since his journalism beat was now the hottest around. Lots of his competitors were writing books and long magazine articles about the raid. But Mazzetti said that he wanted to write something broader, to show how the long arc of the war on terror has fundamentally changed how the US fights.
"I covered the Pentagon for five years, and then I have been covering the intelligence world since 2006," Mazzetti said. "And really, I realized that I was kind of covering the same beat. The lines that existed before 9/11, where the military did this and the spies did that, really have blurred."
Mazzetti said he's glad to be back at the Times after a 15-month book leave. He had missed the collegiality of an office. Writing a book is solitary business. But in the midst of the project, Mazzetti and his wife, Lindsay, welcomed Max, their first child.
"I can't wait until he is old enough to read this book," Mazzetti writes in his acknowledgments. "I cherish the memories of the mornings we spent together during the first few months, and of the smiles he delivered when I came home at the end of particularly frustrating days of book writing. They put things in perspective."
Margaret M Stewart/shutterstock.com
“Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition.” --Monty Python
When the ships were sunk and the dead counted, this much was clear: The most expensive war game in history had not gone according to plan.
In July 2002, the U.S. armed forces staged a quarter-billion-dollar simulation of a war with a rogue Middle Eastern country in the Persian Gulf. Coming so close to a real war with Iraq, military planners hoped the exercise would be especially instructive. The game was played using some real people and equipment, but it was made more convincing through the application of Hollywood-style computer animation. Commanders watched on screens as huge numbers of troops prepared for battle, and as aircraft and ships deployed in the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. side, or Blue Team, had spent months studying their adversary, the Red Team, They knew the size of Red’s land, sea, and air forces. Where all its command and control systems were located. They knew all the weak spots in its national infrastructure--the power grid, national communications systems. And because the Blue leaders believed they’d accounted for Red’s every possible move on the battlefield, they expected to defeat the enemy in short order.
But on the first day of the game, Red failed to respond to Blue’s demand for immediate and unconditional surrender. Unbeknownst to Blue, the Red commander had sent attack orders to his forces through unusual means, including motorcycle couriers, calls shouted from minarets, and World War II-era light signals. They were all modes of communication that Blue had never accounted for. Why would Red use them when he had satellites and telephones?
Expecting a quick end to the battle, the Blue fleet instead found itself surrounded by a swarm of small, seemingly innocuous Red boats. Without warning, the small boats let loose a devastating volley of cruise missiles at the Blue fleet, which, never having anticipated such an aggressive move, was helpless to respond. Some of the boats were loaded with explosives and rammed into their gargantuan adversaries. By the end of the attack, several Blue vessels sat at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Had this been a real expertise, it’s estimated that 20,000 U.S. forces would be dead.
The story of Millennium Challenge is one of the most frequently cited modern examples of an ancient maxim of warfare: Know your enemy. Blue’s commanders failed in large part because they evinced a profound lack of empathy. They had never anticipated that Red would act so different than them. They had not put themselves in the minds of a devious and desperate dictator who, knowing he was outmatched in a head-to-head fight, would resort to asymmetric tactics--and some centuries old ones, at that. Millennium Challenge became an object lesson in the dangers of not thinking like your enemy, and of the potential gains of doing so.
The lessons of that war game seem especially poignant now, as tensions mount with North Korea and the United States attempts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We are reminded that U.S. intelligence about its adversaries is limited, and often not very good. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “after a high-visibility display of military power aimed at deterring North Korean provocations, the White House is dialing back the aggressive posture amid fears that it could inadvertently trigger an even deeper crisis.” A previously devised “playbook” of escalating displays of force was apparently based on a set of assumptions about North Korea’s behavior that might not be panning out.
"The concern was that we were heightening the prospect of misperceptions on the part of the North Koreans, and that that could lead to miscalculations," a senior administration official told the newspaper.
“Officials said the U.S. didn't believe North Korea had any imminent plans to take military action in response to the exercises,” the Journal reported. “Rather, the shift reflects concerns within the administration that the North, caught off guard, could do something rash, contrary to intelligence assessments showing that it is unlikely to respond militarily to the U.S. show of force.” [Emphasis mine.]
Military planners don’t like to be caught by surprise. As it happened, the ones who planned Millennium Challenge were so chagrined by Red’s audacious and hugely successful attack that they reset the game. The Blue ships were magically floated back to the surface. The dead were brought back to life. And as the game played on for another two weeks, the Red Team was barred from engaging in any more unexpected tactics. The Red commander quit the game in protest. The Blue Team, playing with the rules in its favor, won round two in a rout.
The military is fond of its war games, and for good reason. Even when the outcome is unpredictable--or in the case of Millennium Challenge, undesirable--the play itself is instructive. When properly constructed, war games convince players that the stakes are real. Even when played sitting around a table using rudimentary set pieces--pieces of paper, toy planes and ships--players somehow see past the artifice and behave as if the scenario were real.
“Gaming’s transformative power grows out of its particular connections to storytelling,” write Peter Perla and ED McGrady, two game designers, in a paper published by the Naval War College. A good game creates the kind of willing suspension of disbelief you experience when you watch an engrossing movie or read a page-turning book. But since play is not a passive experience, gaming heightens that sense of belief. “Gaming, as a story-living experience, engages the human brain, and hence the human being participating in a game, in ways more akin to real-life experience than to reading a novel or watching a video," Perla and McGrady write.
The effects of games linger after the play has finished. The authors recall a bioterrorism war game run by the White House in 1998 that so impressed President Clinton he asked Congress to increase the counterterrorism budget by $294 million to defend the nation from weaponized pathogens. The President had been primed for the plausibility of a bio-attack by a fictional account he’d been reading in Richard Preston’s novel The Cobra Event. (Preston is also the author of a non-fiction book on disease outbreaks, Hotzone, that is all the more terrifying because it’s true.)
The key to a successful game is that it not only seem real, but that it present the players with an adversary that they would probably never imagine, an event that is “at odds with how you see the world,” write Perla and McGrady. The crazed scientist who builds a deadly virus. The rogue commander who uses suicidal tactics. Absent this surprise, “it is unlikely that any game architecture could present an effective, realistic scenario...”
Of course, in Millennium Challenge, the Blue Team faced just such an enemy. Did they learn from that experience? A year later, U.S. forces easily defeated the military of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But then, for the next eight years, they found themselves locked in an asymmetric war with insurgents, for which no one had planned. Blue did not think like Red.
There will be an historic burial at Arlington National Cemetery tomorrow. The first Swiss man will be laid to rest in ground normally reserved for American military veterans.
René Joyeuse, who was born in Zurich in 1920, helped gather intelligence for Allied Forces during World War II. Joyeuse reportedly escaped to the U.S. as war broke out in Europe, but he returned and joined the French Resistance. The OSS, the precursor to the CIA, recruited him as an agent. He eventually moved back to the U.S. and with his wife raised two sons.
Caitlin Gibson wrote a really nice feature about Arlington Cemetery for us a few years ago. As she noted, most of the recent burials have been reserved for veterans of World War II and their spouses. Active-duty casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for only a handful of burials each month. More than 330,000 Americans have been laid to rest at the cemetery, which covers 624 acres.
The folks at the OSS Society alerted us to Joyeuse's story. Incidentally they throw a hell of a party every year to celebrate the history of the nation's first human intelligence service. I went to the last one, where one of several gin martini toasts was offered to the French Reisstance. Another fun fact: Also in attendance that night...David Petraeus and a then lesser-known biographer named Paula Broadwell.
Former senator Elizabeth Dole (fourth from right) and a group of fellows from her foundation were in Washington yesterday for the inaugural Military and Veterans Caregivers Week. The fellows were among those who shared stories about caring for wounded veterans as part of a new study on post-combat life. Photo courtesy of Lynn Dykstra, Focused Images, and The Elizabeth Dole Foundation.
In a decade of war, the United States deployed more than 2.4 million military service members. In Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 63,000 of them suffered injuries severe enough that they had to be medically evacuated. And 720,000 may have experienced a traumatic brain injury or met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.
We know a lot about the wounded. We know much less about the people who care for them.
She--the primary caregiver for a combat veteran is almost always a woman, often a spouse--is younger than those caring for veterans of older wars. She still has dependent-age children. The wounded veteran in her care is likely to have multiple injuries, requiring the attention of different medical specialists, sometimes as many as a dozen. She is often the keeper of doctor visit schedules, as well as the person processing insurance claims; through the Defense Department, the Veterans Affairs Department, or private health insurance, and sometimes all three. How many of these caregivers there are experts can't say. There are only crude estimates, ranging from about 275,000 to as many as 1.1 million.
These are the sobering findings of a new study on so-called "military caregivers," which was released yesterday by the Rand Corporation. The study finds that the burden placed on spouses and family members caring for wounded veterans is likely to have ripple effects. In general, caregivers get sicker faster than the general population, and often faster than the people they're caring for.
And yet the size of the caregiver population cannot be easily estimated or well understood because so few studies have been made. What the researchers have discovered comes from those, but also from interviews with caregivers themselves.
They are "an overlooked and under-appreciated" group, said Adm. James Winnefeld, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a luncheon yesterday at the Army and Navy Club, where the report was unveiled. Rand researchers said they plan new studies to better understand how many caregivers there are and what additional support they might require. The study was commissioned by the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, which also awarded three grants to non-profit organizations that focus on caregivers and their families.
The foundation has also selected a class of fellows, which includes military spouses who now find themselves juggling their loved ones' physical therapy and counseling sessions with their kids' soccer games. They were among those who gave personal stories to the Rand researchers.
I spoke with the wife of one Army veteran, Betty Easley, whose husband Greg was injured in an IED explosion in Iraq in 2003. Betty said she keeps a master calendar for all his doctor appointments, as well as the school and extracurricular activities for their six kids. The big book travels with her wherever they go, she said. Greg ping pongs back and forth between different government health care programs depending on which specialist he's seeing.
Logistics are only part of the work. Betty said she has had to learn what will set her husband off--crowds and loud noises are the usual triggers. She knows now, sometimes with just a look, when it's time to leave the store or the shopping mall, get him back to the car, and to go home. She said Greg is in counseling for PTSD and enjoys it. But she's also beginning to see the signs of emotional strain on their kids.
Talking to Betty, I was struck by the similar stories I've heard from people caring for an elderly parent or spouse. Last year, I wrote a story about a Washington couple, George and Trish Vradenburg, who are trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's Disease. They told me about a common saying among caregivers: "Look at the person pushing the wheelchair. That’s who dies first."
The initial Rand report jibes with many of the stories I heard reporting on Alzheimer's patients and their families. This is the first phase in what the researchers said will be a more concerted and focused effort to better understand how many caregivers there are, the range of their problems, and whether the existing health care system can support them better. It's being led by one of the researches who worked on an influential study about PTSD. Several people at the luncheon were hopeful that the new study would shed light on the caregivers' dilemma the way the earlier one did on vets suffering emotional trauma.
Spencer was born and raised in Washington, DC, and played high-school football in Prince George's County. Photo by Scott Ash
It's rare to find a military brat who spent his childhood years living in one place. It's rarer still that the place is Washington, DC.
Gen. Larry Spencer, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, was born at Walter Reed Hospital, in 1954. His father, Alfonzo, served in the Army and fought in the Korean War, and if not for a horrific accident, the Spencers might have lived the itinerant life of a typical military family.
Alfonzo was a heavy equipment operator, and while transporting a bulldozer from one town to another, he fell off the top and caught his left hand in the tracks. His mauled limb became infected with gangrene and the hand was amputated.
He came home and went for treatment in the hospital where his son was born. Doctors fashioned an innovative prosthetic device to give Alfonzo some dexterity. By today's standards, it was a primitive and grisly contraption.
"They cut a hole through his bicep," Spencer says. "As a kid, I could stick my finger right though it. They put a plastic sleeve on, and they had a metal hook on the end. Wires came up both sides of that sleeve. And there was a thing shaped like a hot dog that fit into the bicep. He would flex his muscle to move the hook."
Spencer says his dad was an expert marksman, and even with the new hand, he still was.
For Alfonzo, personal injury marked the beginning of a new career. He was assigned to the Forest Glenn Annex, nearby Walter Reed, where the Army was experimenting with new prosthetic technologies. "He was on the ground floor of that," Spencer says. Today, Walter Reed is still the site of the military's most advanced prosthetics research, and the technology has come a long way since the hole in Alfonozo's arm.
The Spencers lived in a quiet neighborhood in Southeast Washington. The city was different then, he says. "I never thought twice about going anywhere in DC. It wasn't considered dangerous."
Spencer joined the Boy Scouts. Before meetings, Alfonzo would inspect his son's uniform--shirt tucked, cap on straight, shoes shined. "It was not cool in Southeast to walk down the street in a uniform," Spencer says. Once he got far enough from the house, Spencer would remove his Boy Scout dress, change into street clothes, and stuff the uniform in his bag.
Spencer didn't seem destined for a military career. In high school, the family moved to Seat Pleasant, Maryland, in Prince George's County. Spencer was a standout football player at Central High School, and the team captain. "I played offense, defense, kickoff team, return team, punt team. We never came off the field. I loved football."
After graduation, Spencer played briefly in a semi-pro league in the area. "But I recognized at some point there wasn't a lot of future in it," he says. There was also no money it; the league's players were unpaid.
One day in 1971, with Vietnam War protests in high-gear across Washington, Spencer was walking through a shopping mall in Suitland, Maryland, off Branch Ave. "I don't know why," he says, "but I sort of of stumbled into the Air Force recruiter's office. And when I stumbled out of there, I was in the Air Force."
He didn't have a single semester hour of college credit. He went home to tell his parents that he'd joined up. "They couldn't believe it," he says. Spencer asked his dad to drop him off at the bus station early the next morning. Later, he took his first plane ride, down to Lackland Air Force Base, in San Antonio, Texas, to begin basic training.
Spencer says he took to the regimented life immediately. Up early. Exercising all day. "It was like being at football practice." He worked his way through college at nights and eventually went to Officer Training School and was commissioned in 1980.
Unlike his father, Spencer did move around throughout his career, to various assignments in the US. But his roots stayed in Washington. His mother, Selma, lives 20 minutes from his office in the Pentagon. Spencer is a die-hard Redskins fan, and says one of the highlights of the past year was attending a game and meeting Robert Griffin III.
Spencer has been back at the Pentagon since 2006, working frequently on budget and personnel issues as the military braces for cuts and tries to reintegrate thousands of combat veterans into life stateside. It wasn't until recently that Spencer got the chance to talk with his father about his own experience in war.
Like a lot of veterans of his generation, Alfonzo never spoke about his service, his son says. "But we noticed little things. On the Fourth of July, the fireworks going off would bother him. But we didn't think much about it."
It was only eight years ago that Spencer found out what had happened to his father in Korea, including the details of his injury. Finally sharing his story, Alfonzo realized that he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Sixty years after he'd gone to war, Alfonzo joined a group counseling program for veterans that met in Baltimore.
"I tell people now coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, my father waited until he was 80 years old to go in for PTSD [treatment]," Spencer says. The message is clear: Don't wait. Times have changed. Alfonzo died in 2009.
Spencer's parents probably wouldn't have guessed he'd one day become the highest-ranking African American in the Air Force. But he comes from a family of path breakers. In 1951, Spencer's mother, along with 450 of her classmates, walked out the doors of the all-black R. R. Moton High School, in Farmville, Va., to demand better conditions at their tiny school, which was built to handle only 150 students. The one story-building had eight classrooms, no gym, and no cafeteria. Moton's teachers earned less than their white counterparts at other county schools.
The student protest led to a lawsuit, which was later joined with Brown V. Board of Education and heard before the Supreme Court. In 1954, the justices ruled unanimously that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
In January, during celebrations honoring Martin Luther King, Spencer spoke at his mom's old high school, which is now a museum. "I am reminded of Dr. King's words," he said. "'Courage is an inner resolution to go forth despite obstacles. Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.'"
"My mother, her classmates and countless others during the civil rights movement are a key reason why I wear this Air Force uniform today. Many people sacrificed a lot back then to change a country that now allows me and others to graciously and happily sacrifice for it."
In rescinding an order today that prevented women from serving in ground combat roles, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who in 2011 presided over the repeal of a ban on openly gay service members, solidified a legacy as one of the most significant reformers of the U.S. military. Taken together, those two policies mark perhaps the broadest and most significant change in the social structure of the military since the advent of the all-volunteer force, in 1973, and prior to that the deactivation of the last all black unit in the Army, in 1954, which completed racial integration of the military.
American women have been serving for more than a century in war zones, frequently in support positions such as nursing or transportation. (Nearly half a million served during World War II.) And women have been allowed to fly in combat since the 1990s. But a 1994 rule prohibited women from assignment to units engaged in direct ground combat.
Panetta rescinded that order today. Now, more than 200,000 women, approximately 15 percent of the overall force, will be eligible for frontline battle positions, including serving in the infantry, in tanks, and special operations forces, or any position in which they are likely to encounter an enemy on the ground and take fire. The military services must begin to open positions that were previously closed to women or provide a reason why they should continue to be restricted only to men.
For Panetta, who is preparing to step down as the nation's 23rd Defense Secretary, lifting the ban caps a storied Washington career. He has served both as an elected member of Congress and also in a variety of appointed, senior positions in the executive branch. He has been known as a shrewd manager, an expert navigator of Washington politics and bureaucracy. In his prior position as director of the CIA, he succeeded largely by being a staunch defender of his agency to the public and on Capitol Hill, even amid the widening controversy over clandestine use of lethal force. (Today, the United Nations announced an investigation into the use of drone strikes, which has been the CIA's primary means of attacking terrorist groups overseas.)
In lifting the 1994 order, Panetta was joined by Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1974, two years before it admitted its first female cadets.
Both Panetta and Dempsey left little doubt that they believe they're on the right side of an historically contentious issue, one that each weighed in light of the sacrifice and service of women during 10 years of war.
"The fact is [women] have become an integral part of our ability to perform our mission," Panetta said, noting that 152 women have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The next greatest generation will be one of men and women who fight and die to protect this nation."
Dempsey remarked that he'd seen a TV news ticker announce that women were about to be allowed to serve in combat. "We're way beyond that," he said. "Women are serving in combat and have been."
But both men acknowledged that the full integration of women won't be accomplisedh with the stroke of a pen. The process will occur "expeditiously," Panetta said. But it will likely take years. Each branch of service will have until 2016 to put the new policy in place and argue for any exemptions to the new rule.
The services must assign women to positions on a gender-neutral basis. There can be no lower set of requirements for women compared to men, including physical requirements. Panetta insisted that the military would not lower its standards. "Let me be clear; we're not talking about reducing the qualifications for the job," he said. "Not everyone is going to be able to be a combat solider. But everyone is entitled to a chance."
Dempsey explained, "The burden used to be that we said why should a woman serve in a particular specialty. Now it's why shouldn't a woman be allowed to serve in a particular speciality."
Lifting the ban was perhaps inevitable in light of women's combat service over the past decade. While they have been restricted from frontline ground positions, the nature of insurgent warfare has blurred the definition of combat. In asymmetrical wars with few constant battle lines, servicewomen who technically aren't supposed to engage the enemy have nevertheless found themselves in harm's way.
According to figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service, in 10 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan more than 800 women have been wounded. As of last February, more than 20,000 women have served in the two countries. And on several occasions, women have been recognized for heroism. Two have earned the Silver Star.
But since the services have the option of carving out certain exceptions in particular jobs, the policy "will likely not be a completely open door," according to an analysis from private security firm Stratfor. Even if women are allowed to serve in combat units, they might be restricted to duties at headquarters, the analysis noted. It also raised concerns about how the inclusion of women will be accomplished in light of recent cases of sexual harassment in mixed gender units. "This policy will likely exacerbate the problem," the analysis concludes.
But Dempsey said that lifting the ban might alleviate the problem, arguing that professional inequality between men and women makes harassment more likely. "I believe it's because we've had separate classes of personnel, at some level," he said. The disparity "establishes a psychology that in some cases led to that environment. I happen to believe that the more we can treat people equally the more likely they are to treat each other equally."
Dempsey also rejected the idea that a need for personal privacy would make it difficult for men and women to live and work together. In the first Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) he said forces were "essentially nomadic," moving around and camping in the desert. Panetta added that women also serve alongside men in the close quarters of Navy submarines.
Those who oppose Panetta's decision said the wholesale dismantling of the 1994 ban is too broad and too swift. "Because that policy has worked so well for so long, I am concerned about the potential impacts of completely ending [it]," said Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. As the committee engages in oversight, "I suspect there will be cases where legislation becomes necessary," he added.
One retired flag officer echoed concerns that the Defense Department is bowing to cultural pressures, and reiterated that the military is already struggling with instances of harassment among mixed-gender units. "I don't think we should use our military for social engineering," said retired Admiral John Poindexter, a 1958 graduate of the Naval Academy who served in several command positions and became the National Security Adviser to Ronald Reagan. "Commanders have enough problems as it is."
In a statement, Poindexter's Annapolis classmate, Sen. John McCain, said he supported Panetta's decision, adding that it is "critical that we maintain the same high standards that have made the American military the most feared and admired fighting force in the world--particularly the rigorous physical standards for our elite special forces units."
The proportion of women in military service has risen over the decades. By 1998, 20 percent of enlisted recruits were female. "It was time to make this decision based on the performance and the record of women in combat," said Tanya Biank, the author of the forthcoming book, Undaunted: The Real Story of America's Servicewomen in Today's Military. "You can't erase the impact that servicewomen have had in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade."
