GETTING IT RIGHT
Published on 26 September 2016 in The Army Times
Let’s check out some history.
155 years ago black Americans were being bought and sold as property in the Old Charleston slave market. Thirty-five years ago saw the last recorded lynching of a black man. Eighteen years ago .. just 18 .. several states refused to honor Martin Luther King Day. Eight years ago Obama was elected President.
In 1953 Eisenhower banned all homosexuals from working in the government. Fifty-odd years later, the first legal gay marriage was recorded in Massachusetts. Now it’s legal everywhere.
Women still couldn’t get a credit card without a man’s signature in 1970. In 1994, the first women were assigned to a combat ship. By the year 2000 nearly 40,000 had women deployed to the Middle East, and by 2014 an end to the combat exclusion had been announced.
To put it another way, during the past ten years gay marriage has become legal, the combat exclusion ban has been lifted, and a black man has been elected President of the United States.
That's a staggering amount of social change in a very short time, and it points up something that’s been missing from all the heated conversations about women in combat: deep down, this isn’t really about women. And it's not about Clenched Fists or bathrooms. It's about the fundamental concept of equality, true equality, which doesn’t mean equal numbers or even equal presence, it means equal rights and equal opportunity for everyone. This entire ruckus is about establishing a culture of equality in the Army, an equality so established and so permeated that articles like this one are impossible.
This concept shouldn’t come as a surprise. Equality is built into our national psyche. It’s a fundamental part of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. A lot of Americans forget it, a lot of Americans fight it .. but the essential thread of equality in our national culture is undeniable. This moral/social pressure was the prime driver for the Revolution itself, to say nothing of the Civil War. It underlay women's suffrage, and the Civil Rights movement, and a whole lot more. It’s always been there, struggling to move forward. What’s new is how spectacularly fast it’s happening, and how widely.
Cultural norms, and the mores that underlie them, are the true anchors of society. As these values change ... and they do change ... sooner or later the military is forced to follow, for in America, the military and society are intertwined. No matter how tradition-driven and resistant to change the military can frequently be, it is fundamentally connected to American society, and so, whether the military leads or follows, it always ends up reflecting.
This is where all the pressure for social change within the military originates, not from senior officers, or even the White House. Don't be fooled. This is not a social experiment, and it's not happening because Obama is President. It’s happening now because Obama is President, but in reality this is a growing cultural mandate that says inequality = injustice, and injustice is wrong. Anywhere. This is a mandate that, one way or the other, is destined to continue no matter who wins in November.
The second thing everybody needs to grasp is that this is not an event, it’s a process, a very, very long process with no end in sight, especially with regards to women. What happens during the next couple of years is just the beginning, the beginning of the beginning. Gender integration is going to go on for decades at least, a lot longer than anybody currently in charge is going to see, and the process is going to change along the way. The current top leadership will retire and be replaced with leaders who grew up in a different world with different assumptions. The way young women are raised will change along with their expectations, the very way they look at careers in the military. Society itself will be different, and anyone who thinks they know exactly what gender integration will look like in the end, whether there will even be an end, is whistling in the dark.
The only thing that’s certain is the ultimate goal: equality of opportunity. The rest is details, terribly important to those involved .. terribly! .. but details nonetheless. In the end, decades from now, it will be irrelevant how many women have ended up in infantry. It will actually be irrelevant if any women end up there at all. What will be relevant .. what is extremelyrelevant right now .. is that women have an equal opportunity to end up in infantry, and equal opportunity means a lot more than taking a test or meeting a particular standard. It means operating in an atmosphere of equal opportunity, an on-going Army culture where the tests and standards and demands are created by those whose basic assumptions are based in the concept of equal opportunity. And that's the big rub, creating such an atmosphere, for all of us are tainted, yet most of us don't even realize it.
Attitudes of inequality are everywhere, but when you’re a member of the dominant group (yep, straight, white males .. including the author) it’s often hard to see. The things you say and do are just there. You never really think about them. You've just taken them for granted since your earliest years, and that makes it extremely difficult to sort out some of the deeper implications, so easy to dismiss complaints as a bunch of Political Correctness. “Don’t bea pussy” may be sexually offensive to some, but the real problem is the implication that if you have a vagina, you’re weak. The same with defining women soldiers as being “either a virgin, a whore, or a dyke.” As offensive as those words may be, the real demeaning aspect is that a woman is defined by her sexuality, and not her performance.
Racial inequality ought to be even more obvious, but for most whites it isn’t. The truth is is, racism affects every black person, every day of their lives. That so many whites don’t understand that, just demonstrates how deep it goes.
These are the kinds of underlying inequalities of attitude that the Army has to address in the coming years, and it won’t be easy. In civilian society, cultural change just sort of happens, in unplanned fits and starts that often drag out for decades, or even centuries.
The military is quite different. It’s highly disciplined. Change comes by fiat. Orders are given. Results are expected, quickly.
Well, you can order people to do things. You can order them to say things (or keep their mouths shut). But you cannot order them to change their attitudes. You can only lead them to do that. Experiences and awareness change attitudes, nothing else. So as various directives flow out, it’s important for everyone at all levels to be aware of what the real issues are, what the real purpose of all this is, because figuring this out on a practical level is going to be tough. No one “knows” the right way forward, and nobody is truly impartial (you’d have to be a third sex, or a race of aliens). And yet wisdom is exactly what’s going to be needed most, a lot of it, and perspective, by everyone. A slew of directives are going to come down in the next few years. Some of them will be well-thought out, some of them not. Some of them will just be plain confusing, and some will smack of politics. It will be everyone's task to sort through all this and find the right way forward, and not just the senior leadership. Generals may give the orders, but NCOs and junior officers make it happen. Companies and platoons, that's where real leadership is especially going to be needed, real wisdom, and that won't be easy either.
And then there's West Point. West Point is the Army's soul, the font of its ethics, the source. Change at West Point doesn't mean the same change automatically takes place in the rest of the Army, but it does mean standards are set. It means a direction has been laid out. And so what happens at West Point during the next few years .. and how it's seen .. is incredibly important. The Corps of Cadets, those now and those that follow, these are the Army's leaders of tomorrow, the standard bearers to come, the people who will really have to deal with this. They have to be ready.
The military is different from the rest of our society. It’s mission is different, it’s ethics and attributes are different, and nowhere more so than in the Army. Physical courage is not a qualification to work at Apple. Neither is the kind of toughness it takes to pass Ranger school, or to ruck twenty miles with seventy pounds on your back. But an even bigger difference is the sense of mission and sacrifice, the concept of serving your country, of doing more than making money.
These differences are what there is such a disconnect between the civilian world and the now all-volunteer Army, why things like "thank you for your service" so often ring hollow. But this same disconnect, the sense of belonging to a a separate fellowship is also why so many in the military fail to grasp that, sooner or later, social change in the civilian world means social change in the military. In a democracy such as ours, military culture and civilian concepts are forever interwoven. The question now is whether the Army will go along with the social change that are demanded of it, or whether it will lead the way for the rest of society, whether it will stand up and shine a light.
And will it truly be ready for what lies ahead?
Thirty years from now there will still be a United States Army, and it will be sorely tested .. far more than it is now. The challenge won't be a new World War, it won't be Desert Storm, and it won'tbe ISIS. It may be all three, it may be something else entirely. What is certain is that America will need the Army desperately, and it will need an army filled with the best and the brightest, the most courageous and the most creative. It will need them for cyber warfare and peace-keeping, for an infantry manning weapons that haven't even been imagined yet, for still other roles no one can foresee. America will need them all, every single qualified individual it can find, and the seeds of that force .. for better or worse .. are being planted today.
by J.M. Purvis