Neutering the Army’s ‘Warrior Culture’

In an epochal change in late 2011, Labor’s Defence Minister Stephen Smith announced that virtually all remaining military restrictions on women in combat would be lifted before 2016. Women in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) are now available to kill or be killed at the bleeding edge

This followed the ADF’s own announcement in April, 2011, to the same effect. Those signing off on it were General David Hurley, Chief of the Defence Force; Navy chief Vice-Admiral Ray Griggs; Army chief Lt-Gen David Morrison (current Australian of the Year); Air Force chief Air Marshall Geoff  Brown; and Major-General Gerard Fogarty, Head, People Capability. Hurley began it:

After thirty-five years in the Infantry, I know the rigours of life as an infantryman. My decision to support the opening of combat positions in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to women comes from experience and knowledge … A robust and agile ADF relies on every member having the opportunity to contribute fully and equally to Defence operations and capability.

We all share the responsibility to work towards a fair, just and inclusive ADF. After all, gender equality is the whole community’s responsibility.

The statement was emphatic that standards would not be lowered for women’s entry. It was accompanied by a “Risk Management Plan” of high formality but  little substance (maybe the nitty-gritty details are for military-eyes only). Meanwhile, Defence got a new employee, a “permanent full-time cultural change manager to assist with implementing cultural change within Army.”

Concurrently, the government tapped  the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, a lawyer, to do annual reports on discrimination against females in Defence. As might be expected from someone of her legal background, she endorsed the brass’ deal in a sentence of two, then swung back to hundreds of pages of public service trivia about gender pay gaps, leave and flexiwork.[1]

Part I: Attack of the Gender Warriors

Broderick’s thoughts on military life began with the complaint that the 86% of males in the Defence Force were evidencing excessive “masculine norms”, thus neglecting their “feminine side”. In an exercise that mixed reverse-sexism with pitiful sarcasm, she wrote

Men should always ‘be a winner’. Men should be ‘tough’ both physically and emotionally. Men should never be seen to be in any way feminine or acknowledge their ‘feminine side’. They should be ‘a man’s man’ – one of the boys.

Such male bastions weren’t “the types of environments in which healthy, respectful attitudes towards women are likely to thrive” and, thus, correctives should come from the top and middle. Thus challenged by a warrior feminist, Hurley folded like a cheap card table, and rushed to begin his forces’ feminization. [2] Broderick  seems unaware that the appropriate environment for warfare training involves encouraging troops to put their lives in danger while grasping that it is their duty to kill those on the other side. This is a horrible job and not everyone is capable of doing it. To instead put soldiers—men or women—in this role to meet a political objective, or to gratify feminists, seems extremely dangerous.[3]

The Gillard Era announcement caused barely a ripple at the time, and to this day the change is treated as just another nod to female equality. The politically correct class, including the Anglicans who’ve draped a huge “Let’s welcome all refugees” sign from the spire of Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral, seem less interested in what happens to women soldiers’ minds and bodies on the literal front line.  Major General Gerard Fogarty, managing the process, boasted 18 months after the announcement,  “We’ve had very little criticism from any segment of the community.”

Once, men went to war while women kept the home fires burning. What was good enough for Odysseus and Penelope is now passé, and the casualty lists are reading differently. US servicewomen who came home to their toddlers in body bags include Lori Ann Piestwa 23, mother of two pre-schoolers, Melissa J. Hobart, 22, mother of a 3-year-old; Jessica L Cawvey 22, single mother of a 6yo; Pamela Osborne 38, mother of three; and Katrina Bell-Johnson, 32, mother of a one-year-old.

Part of the community silence in Australia must surely be because the physical entry standards are so high very few women have managed to pass them. Indeed, the standards were tightened, rather than loosened, concurrent with the announcement, and embodied in the new Physical Employment Standards (PES).[4]  About 30% of women Army recruits were flunking the easier test, ten times the male flunk rate. The PES are supposed to be a  health-and-safety initiative to “ensure that we don’t hurt anyone”, as Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Conroy put it; pity our potential enemies don’t concur.

The policy for equal combat for women evolved python-like from an Australia-ratified UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1983. Originally, we put in get-out clauses exempting women from combat, but those have been progressively abandoned. The UN General Assembly is dominated by corrupt Third World blocs whose style is actually more inclined to burka-enforcing and female genital mutilation than combating discrimination against women.[5] The Gillard announcement came on September 27, 2011, but the nuts and bolts weren’t endorsed by Cabinet until June, 2012. The doors opened to women across the board on January 1, 2013, and those changes are to be fully phased in (technically) from next year, as of June 30.

In the Army, the new categories for women include infantry, tanks, artillery, bomb disposal and combat engineers. In the Navy, women divers are welcome to tackle mines, while Air Force women serve in cockpits, control centres and as airfield guards.

Defence watchdog Australia Defence Association says any weakening of traditional infantry-type standards, and introduction of gender targets and weaponry to suit women, would be deadly, irresponsible and immoral. But if standards were maintained pre and post-transfer, there would be no issue with psychological/emotional/social relating to women in the tough squads and deployments, it said.[6] This contrasts with my reading of numerous US studies emphatically stating the opposite. For example, corrosive jealousies among males in previously well-bonded units can arise whether or not a female comrade is sexually active.

The ADA continues that women should be allowed to opt in or out of fiercely hazardous combat tasks, but confuses itself while simultaneously baffling observers by stating that males can’t opt out. So where’s the gender equality? How can field commanders plan for combat if some soldiers have a choice about whether to become involved? Imagine the resentment among male soldiers if the dirty work always falls to them.

Broderick speaks of modern warfare involving new technological skills “rather than simply manual or physical strength”, as if any front-liner — an artillery trooper, for instance — can be quarantined from huge exertions. She wants the women-friendly squads to be hand-picked to ensure women are treated well, and there should be “no less than two women in each work section of ten or less, with the grouping of women within a category to achieve as close to a critical mass as possible.”[7]   More than that, she also wants to lift more women up the chain of command and achieve this goal by means of quota, not equal treatment (so far, about 5% senior officers are women and 8% of NCOs).Quotas are a common technique of the Left to get their favorites into powerful positions when they cannot get there by ability.

Broderick disparages the front-line “warrior culture” and “war-fighting mission” as barriers to accepting that women can make good combat troops. By her reckoning,  less warrior culture in the Army would be a good thing! [8] Further, the promotion of women should not require combat experience , as “leadership” and “ability” are enough.

Strong ADF leaders should come from a range of ADF occupations not just the combat corps… Though indisputably important, a lack of combat experience is just one of a range of obstacles to women’s career progression…

She concedes combat experience lets ‘real’ (male) soldiers gain the respect and regard of their peers, in turn cementing their authority as leaders. But she countered that line of reasoning by insisting that more than 40% of Australian women veterans reported past exposure to “hostile action”. That could mean anything. To get around combat-bias among promotion board members, she urges “diversity” on promotions boards (women? Indigenes? Muslims?) and even seeks to install non-military members, tasked with helping the original and befuddled board members reach her idea of correct targets for high-ranking women. Says one military critic in correspondence with the author: “I’m buggered if I’d jump out of the trench on the say-so of someone who has spent their life shuffling paper. Orders from a Patton or a Montgomery — they’re different.”

As to Broderick’s specific suggestions, she wants the  Army, Navy and Air Force to start with a model squad involving not less than two women in a unit of ten people “with clustering of women within a category to achieve as close to a critical mass as possible.” In a bizarre example, she laments the lack of women  mine-clearance divers, asserting that frogwomen would inspire many other women to join them. Similarly, they should be appointed to “key roles”, such as army combat officers in infantry and armour.  Alarmingly, she seems to labour under the misconception that “non-combat” officers include those attached to the artillery and engineers.[9] For soeone with such sweeping plans to “reform” the military it seems passing strange that she is unaware of Coral Fire Support Base near Saigon in 1968 being partly over-run by North Vietnamese regulars. One soldier who cracked under pressure had to be handcuffed to a stake behind the gun line to keep him out of the way.[10]

The new, gender-liberated combat roles would never attract more than 4% of female recruits, Broderick theorises. She continues, “But we are doing this because, to sustain the workforce into the future, we want to access our fair share of the talent in the Australian labour market, which is increasingly female.” So women are to fight and die to help the ADF  improve its recruiting, and those recruits may well be slotted into roles they can’t handle, endangering themselves and their comrades, male and female alike.

She has little to say about sexual shenanigans with women among testosterone-fuelled men, but quotes some conservative male officers on the topic. They told her they feared to discipline women because female underlings might retaliate with sexual harassment claims. (This is a serous issue in civilian employment as well). One officer said that when he told a woman she was no good at her job, she went up the line with complaints and left him “shit scared”. “Since then,” he lamented, “I won’t speak to a female one-on-one.” Another suggested why bonding in combat units is necessarily weak in mixed-gender units: males sleep in their own tents separate from women; men are also reluctant to relax with them in case something said is misinterpreted.

In middle ranks, as the US experience has demonstrated, the ban on sexual relations within a unit are often (if not usually) viewed as a challenge to be circumvented. In any year, 10% of US servicewomen have an accidental pregnancy, twice the national average. In the Gulf War, despite an official and total ban on sexual fraternisation, 5% of deployed servicewomen got pregnant. In Australia, policy-makers simply don’t know how much sex goes on during training and operations and what disruptions to unit cohesiveness result.[11]

Anne Summers in a piece on women soldiers in The Monthly, inadvertently made the case against mixed-gender military squads by noting that women are not always acculturated to tough locales, such as misogynist Arab backwaters. She cites Matina Jewell, who a decade ago was a  uniformed Australian officer with UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. Summers writes, “A [Lebanese] civilian leeringly masturbated in front of her … She is critical of the lack of support she received from her superiors.” Her Australian commander “confirmed to (her) that he did not believe that the incidents was significant enough to report”.  (A fortnight earlier she had been grabbed in daylight by two would-be rapists but kicked them off).  Jewell in her  book, Caught in the Crossfire, says the flasher was identified as a local nutter and pervert. Jewell went into distinguished retirement as a major in 2009 after war injuries and, make no mistake, is a credit to our country. Pardon me if I feel a little sympathy for her then-commander, who is still getting stick some ten years later for not having rated her complaint about the pervert as high official priority. Would a male soldier have demanded official follow-up, one wonders, if he had been propositioned by a gay harasser?

A retired military-sector chief  says: ‘Will full integration give us the capability to kill more enemy soldiers?’ Malcolm Turnbull, Lt-General Morrison, and the Human Rights crowd would find that question offensive and disgusting. But what else are infantry for?”

Summing up, Australia’s new policy of killer female soldiers has been launched but is so far having no positive effect, with significant potential for distracting the Defence Force from its primary mission of defending Australia.

The Sisterhood and its Defence acolytes and enablers will, in my view, shortly be campaigning to drop entry standards to elite jobs to make the policy work their way. You read it here first.

Tony Thomas blogs at No B-S Here, I Hope