U.S. Military Chiefs Oppose Combat Roles for Women

Several of the nation’s armed service chiefs voiced fierce resistance Thursday to placing women in combat positions and said they regard male bonding as a critical element of the “warrior spirit.”

Ten months after the Navy’s Tailhook Assn. meeting drew high-level attention to the problem of sexual harassment in the military, the nation’s senior military officers told the House Armed Services Committee that they have “zero tolerance” for such behavior toward servicewomen.

But they rejected the suggestion--made by committee Chairman Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.)--that policies excluding women from combat roles may have made them “second-class citizens” who are “fair game” for mistreatment.

Agreeing that the combat exclusion law discriminates against women and works against their career advancement, the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, said: “I still think it is not a good idea for me to have to order women into combat. Combat is about killing people.”

Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr., commandant of the Marine Corps, lauded combat aviators for their “derring-do” and defended current policies that would keep females out of the cockpits of Marine Corps jets.

The culture of combat aviators, said Mundy, “typifies the derring-do, the ‘drink tonight, gentlemen, because we launch at 0500 again tomorrow morning and all of us aren’t going to come back.’ ” said Mundy.

“It’s a warrior spirit,” Mundy added. “It is a male bonding. . . . It’s not a male bonding against anybody. It is a male bonding together.”

McPeak, Mundy and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Frank B. Kelso agreed that successful military combat pilots may have what McPeak called “devil-may-care” qualities that naturally lead to incidents like the 1991 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas--where scores of military aviators sexually harassed and molested as many as 26 women--unless these officers are closely supervised.

“What happened at Tailhook was something that you might expect of a bunch of lieutenants who get together and have too much to drink, and the tragedy of it was that there wasn’t a lieutenant colonel there to put his foot down,” McPeak said.

High-level opposition to assigning women to combat positions is not new. McPeak and Kelso outlined their objections in a June, 1991, appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mundy’s predecessor as Marine commandant and the former Army chief of staff have also expressed opposition in the past.

But Thursday’s testimony marked the first time that the chiefs have spoken out on the subject since the Tailhook scandal heightened pressure to open new military career opportunities to servicewomen.

McPeak said last year that in spite of his personal objections, he could not intellectually justify barring women from combat service. But Thursday, he reiterated only his personal objections and did not express any support for women in combat positions.

“Even though logic tells us that women can (conduct combat operations) as well as men, I have a very traditional attitude about wives and mothers and daughters being ordered to kill people,” said McPeak. “I take some solace in thinking that not all human problems yield to strict logic.”

Kelso, however, softened his earlier opposition to allowing women to serve aboard combat ships. “You certainly have to consider” the argument that barring women from combat service has placed them at a disadvantage in relation to their male colleagues, he told lawmakers Thursday.

Congress last fall repealed all remaining laws barring women from combat positions in the U.S. armed forces. The Bush Administration has appointed a commission to study the role of women in the military and to recommend further actions to open new slots to females.

On Wednesday, a panel of experts told the House Armed Services Committee that there is a link between the work of that commission and the military services’ efforts to eradicate sexual harassment. Witnesses told the panel that as long as females are blocked from serving in the military services’ most critical positions--combat slots--they will have second-class status, and that will continue to make them vulnerable to disrespectful treatment by male colleagues.

Kelso, who said Thursday that sexual harassment has become a “crisis of significant proportions” in the Navy, confessed that Navy leaders had “failed to act on . . . early warnings.” As women rose through Navy ranks, the service’s top brass was hopeful that “attitudes would change over time,” he said.

Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, the Army chief of staff who said he would oppose the introduction of women into infantry positions, said the exclusion “doesn’t mean women are treated with disrespect. It’s too complex a problem” to attribute any single cause, he said.

But he and his colleagues were staunch in their defense of policies that reserve the services’ premier slots for men.

“In the elite organizations of all the armed forces, there is that spirit of ‘We’re a band of brothers,’ ” Mundy said.