Changing Weapons of Warfare Compel New Look at Gays, Women in the Army : Discrimination: Can a nation defend itself without a violent attitude toward war? Today, men no longer need be so savage to be good soldiers.

Morality and sexual conformity are often mistaken for each other--even in California. This has led to a prurient preoccupation with sexual practices. The attitudes that consenting Americans take along with them to bed seem so much less significant than the physical gymnastics they engage in once they get there. When sexual preference, more than character, is the measure of morality, sexual prejudice is born, as love and trust and decency are displaced in favor of who does what to whom.

Riverside recently revised its charter. A 1966 city ordinance called for an end to racial, religious and ethnic prejudice. Now Riverside would extend this ban on bigotry to protect the elderly, the disabled, the rights of women and of gays. Outside agitators from Orange County promptly drove into town to excoriate homosexuals, but the City Council passed the ordinance anyway, 5-1.

Other city councils and campuses across the nation have adopted similar resolutions. One by one, local communities expand the scope of toleration to include homosexual orientation. This brings localities in conflict with our nation’s military, where sexual discrimination is still practiced against homosexuals and the role of women in combat situations. Even ROTC college students cannot be gay. Once their sex life is exposed, they are less-than-honorably discharged. And women are still forbidden to be fighters, even though they’re welcome to be clerks.

The result is a genuine moral dilemma facing the California State University system, where, for instance, the presence of ROTC on campus is seen as unacceptable sexual discrimination. Several campuses--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, Pitzer, the University of Wisconsin--across the nation share this moral sentiment and have threatened to ban the ROTC. The list of unhappy hosts is growing daily.

It’s a far cry from the 1960s, when the federal government challenged local practices as bigoted. Now, local institutions consider federal policies prejudiced. In this way, smaller communities have taken the initiative, once Washington proved too behind the times to act.

The Pentagon’s current policy is: “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service. The presence of such members adversely affects the ability of the Armed Forces to maintain discipline, good order, and morale; to foster mutual trust and confidence among the members . . . who frequently must live and work under close conditions affording minimal privacy.”

If the language seems familiar, consider a recently declassified Navy memo written on Christmas Eve, 1941: “The close and intimate conditions of life aboard ship, the necessity for the highest possible degree of unity and esprit de corps; the requirement of morale--all these demand that nothing be done which may adversely affect the situation. Past experience has shown irrefutably that the enlistment of Negroes (other than for mess attendants) leads to disruptive and undermining conditions.”

If it’s not one prejudice, it’s another.

The thought behind Pentagon policy on gays suggests a fear of male soldiers coming on to one another in the barracks or while in combat. Being sexually uncomfortable--knowing that another may find you attractive--is not just a male problem: Women have gotten used to being regarded as sex objects in this way for years, proverbially by sailors in every port. The thought that you might seem attractive to someone you’re not attracted to is something each of us must live with, regardless of our gender. Yet I suspect the deeper thought behind the Pentagon’s policy is not merely homophobic--it is testosteronic, too.

Sexual aggression and sexual orientation are easily confused. When a male inmate rapes another man in prison, only the victim is seen as homosexual, not the victimizer. He is seen, instead, as having so much male hormone in him that he had to do his thing, even if that meant sodomizing a weakling. Now, obviously, the army needs soldiers under more control than that of raging testosteroniacs, but the thought remains the same--that it takes a real fighting man to kill. And perhaps that’s why gays and female combat troops won’t do. It is the perceived difference between the strong and the weak. Of course, this doesn’t follow, since gays and women are perfectly capable of violence, too. It’s just that more often than not, they’re not--or so the stereotype would have it.

Erik H. Erikson once said about the Sioux that they swaddled up their male children so they couldn’t move. This produced episodes of rage, engendering qualities required of the braves for the survival of the tribe. Nor is it at all surprising that so many armies have raped and killed and looted. They were of the proper temperament to do this. But is this necessity for aggressive rage really needed by the modern fighting man?

Urbane police chiefs do not feel a need for aggressors on the force--quite the contrary. And so they welcome women and gays. The police see their job as averting violence, rather than selectively engaging in it as well. They have little need for macho types--it will only bring the community down upon them. The armed forces have traditionally seen their role differently, as exercising violence willfully against the other side’s similarly oriented soldiers. And as long as armies are looking for aggressive warriors, they will continue to be prejudiced against gays and women, since they see them as sissies.

Can a nation at risk really defend itself without adopting a violent attitude toward war? Until recently, this simply wouldn’t have been true. Real soldiers really had to want to kill. And so they did on Iwo Jima. But the modern instruments of warfare may enable a less-impassioned attitude, making destruction more genteel, and more coldblooded, too. Men no longer need be so savage to be good soldiers. And the same is true of women.

A well-trained policeman is trained to be assertive, not aggressive, even when fighting for his life. If the armed forces were more like the police, there would certainly be less need for the testosterone to flow, although not having a real lust for killing puts something of a damper on offensive operations. It also puts a pall on body counts, rather than containment, on free-fire zones rather than restraint. One wonders whether the Vietnam vets would have fewer nightmares had they seen themselves as policemen rather than as executioners.

Yet, as long as there are wars where the object of the exercise is the death of the opposition, it seems that the armed forces will have to continue to recruit those who are sufficiently aggressive to be perfectly capable of killing, whatever their sexual orientation: Rambo, straight or gay.

Would the risk to national security be worth it, if our armed forces modeled themselves after the police rather than the other way around? At least the military would then be more representative of the nation they were sworn to serve--men and women, straights and gays.