Military Affirmative Action Efforts Held Up as a Model : Minorities: Business, foreign nations have studied the services’ programs, which began after World War II.

The Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute is tucked just inside the base here, a military campus lined with palm trees next to Florida’s warm Atlantic waters. Just a block off the beach, it is where battle-trained soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines come not to learn how to fight, but how to get along.

Here, they are taught that the enemy is not always just over the next picket wire. Rather, the enemy sometimes walks among them, in the form of job discrimination and racial and gender prejudices. Here, they are taught to make nice, not war.

“Equal opportunity is a readiness issue,” Army Col. Ronald M. Joe, the commandant at the institute, tells them in six-week courses on a wide range of issues, including affirmative action and job fairness.

“This has an immediate impact on readiness,” he says. “In a time of war, we have to be able to get our airplanes up fast enough. We can’t have people disagreeing on how to do that. Because if we discriminate or if we are prejudiced, it gets in the way. And if we allow it to get in the way, we’re not going to get those airplanes up.”

Next year, the institute observes its 25th anniversary. The issue is not a new one for the armed forces.

In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order No. 9981 and integrated the U.S. military services. He declared a new policy where “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”

Since then, as American society and the civilian job sector have struggled through the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and the reverse-discrimination outcries of this decade, the military has in many ways served as both a test tube experiment for affirmative action and, in the eyes of many, the only laboratory where it ever really worked. Analysts say the main reason for its success was that the armed services’ integration efforts came about long before the divisive era of the 1960s, when society at large clashed over equal opportunity issues.

A Colorblind Policy

The military’s program began not as an effort to force quotas, but rather as a colorblind policy that seemed right when soldiers of all colors--white, black, brown--returned home after World War II.

The program grew unique to the military, a step ahead of forced integration efforts in the 1950s and 1960s at the nation’s schools and transportation systems. Today, private corporations and even foreign nations, like South Africa and Russia, have sought out the Pentagon for training seminars on how they, too, can achieve some of the military’s successes.

President Clinton, in a news conference last March, held up the military’s efforts as a model for the private sector.

“Those [programs] have not resulted in people of inferior quality or ability getting preferential treatment,” the president said, “but in an intense effort to develop the capacities of everybody who joins the military so they can fully participate and contribute as much as possible.”

The most obvious example of that full participation is retired Army Gen. Colin L. Powell, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I’m a great believer in affirmative action and equal opportunity,” Powell said during a September book-signing event in San Francisco. “I’ve seen it work in the military.

“What we’ve been able to achieve in the military is an open society where you can rise by performance,” he added. “But if you have some weaknesses to begin with, through outreach programs, through remedial programs, we bring you up to a certain level.”

But the military’s experience has not been perfect.

The ongoing debate, both within the Department of Defense and by those with the expertise to grade the Pentagon’s performance, continues. Fresh complaints of reverse racism are being heard from some quarters of the military’s traditional white male core. Likewise, demands are rising to move more women into combat jobs and other traditionally male assignments.

And questions have been raised about whether the armed forces have been a breeding ground for hate groups. This month, in the wake of the recent arrests of two openly white supremacist paratroopers on charges of murdering a black couple near Ft. Bragg, N.C., the Army announced the formation of a high-level task force to study the extent to which soldiers participate in such groups.

Nevertheless, said Charles Moskos, a professor at Northwestern University and a leading military sociologist, if the nation’s affirmative action policies ultimately are scuttled, it will be the Pentagon’s endeavor that is most remembered.

“While no utopia,” Moskos said, “the military has the best achievement on affirmative action. Bar none.”

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a Michigan-based think tank specializing in Pentagon personnel issues, believes the military has done well in keeping workplace bias at a minimum. But she complained that some hiring and promotion standards have been relaxed in recent years in an effort to keep the minority percentages high.

“Discrimination in the military is definitely not tolerated,” she said. “There are all sorts of things done to promote everybody, and I applaud that.

“But I don’t tolerate lowering standards, and that will be a real problem when we next get into a real combat arena.”

So how does the military stack up in numbers?

More Blacks in Army

The big increase in black service members came after the end of the draft in 1973. The military began to rely more heavily on black recruits--a traditional mainstay because many black families have historically been drawn to military service because of its job security and steady pay.

The numbers of black service members grew extensively during the 1970s, from 12% in 1973 (roughly the same as in the general population) to a peak of 37% by the end of that decade.

The Army, the largest military branch of the armed forces, now has twice as many commissioned minority officers as the other uniformed services.

Today, more than 5% of all black men between the ages of 18 and 21 are applying for military service--nearly twice the rate of white applicants. Consequently, nearly a third of the enlisted men in the Army are black, more than three times the percentage of blacks in civilian society. The numbers of other minorities in the service have not increased so dramatically and have held relatively steady.

In addition, black enlistees often stay longer than whites, growing comfortable with the military’s unique promotion programs and 20-year retirement incentives.

At the same time, the number of equal opportunity discrimination complaints also is rising. And today, more complaints are being sustained, or found to be valid.

In all of the services combined, the number of sustained complaints rose from 26% in 1987 to 35% last year. The highest jump was in the Navy, going from 6% to 72%. Experts attribute that to a heightened awareness of job fairness problems and an increasingly determined effort by military superiors not to look the other way.

Although not as dramatic as the increase in blacks, the percentage of women in the military has increased in recent years, going from about 10.2% in 1987 to about 13% this year. That modest climb has come about because of new career possibilities for women in the services, along with a large number of males leaving.

“We are continuing to make a concerted effort to enlist across gender lines,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Deborah Bosic, a Defense Department spokeswoman. “We’re very conscious that in the past, women have not been allowed to be in certain jobs. And now that they are, they have more opportunities for promotions along with their male counterparts.”

For women, the number of sexual harassment complaints is on the rise, and again with more and more complaints being sustained. The number of sustained complaints climbed from 38% in 1987 to 54% last year. The biggest increase--again--was in the Navy, up from 50% to 83%.

The Navy, indeed, has suffered some of the most embarrassing public relations problems, most notably the 1991 Tailhook sex scandal in which dozens of Navy women and other women complained that they were assaulted by Navy airmen at a Las Vegas convention. The chief of naval operations, Adm. Frank B. Kelso, ultimately left his Pentagon office over the scandal.

But there have been other problems, too.

For example, a Navy review panel found Rear Adm. Ralph L. Tindal, deputy commander of NATO forces in Spain and Portugal, guilty of adultery, fraternization, conduct unbecoming an officer and sexual harassment for his involvement with a female subordinate with whom he’d had a yearlong affair. He took an early retirement from the Navy.

Yet despite these problems, many females still find a military career attractive.

“Women are promoted at rates equal to or faster than men,” said Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, who also served on a 1992 presidential commission studying the issue of women in combat.

“That trend has been in existence since the mid-’80s. The military has a tradition of promoting women at a very fast rate. And for those women who choose the military, they find that aspect very desirable.”

Aware of some of the shortcomings in an affirmative action environment that has otherwise stood the test of time, the Pentagon recently has begun new efforts to shore up its programs.

Last spring, Defense Secretary William J. Perry revived the position of deputy assistant secretary for affirmative action, which had been dropped in 1986. He was worried that some efforts promoting job equality were becoming complacent.

He also has in the past year ordered all senior officials in the Defense Department to attend two-day equal opportunity training seminars. And he has has upgraded a special Pentagon council that oversees affirmative action programs, putting a deputy defense secretary in charge.

In May, Edwin Dorn, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and Sheila Widnall, secretary of the Air Force, released the findings of a special Pentagon Task Force Report on Discrimination and Sexual Harassment.

New Guidelines Issued

The task force listed a variety of ways to increase the promotability of women and minorities, through remedial programs and other ventures. It also established more policies and guidelines to ferret out race and gender bias on the job.

“The military team succeeds only when all members are accepted as equals,” Widnall said. But even with these ambitious programs, the men and women in uniform do not always see the military as presenting a level playing field.

Last summer, for instance, a young white male from Orange County sued the Navy in a job discrimination complaint that said recruiters passed over his application to enlist as a military lawyer in favor of an African American.

Specifically, Matthew G. Monforton, now a private attorney in Newport Beach, is challenging the Navy’s new policy calling for an officer corps that is 12% black, 12% Latino and 5% Asian American, Pacific Islander, Eskimo and American Indian. Those numbers were set by Navy Secretary John Dalton after he took office under the Clinton administration. In 1991, they had been set at 7% black and 4% Latino.

Monforton complained that when he tried to enlist last year as a Navy lawyer in Los Angeles, his high test scores were disregarded in favor of an African American applicant. He said he can show that in his application group, nine minorities and 25 whites sought enlistment and that the Navy took all nine of the minorities but only a third of the whites.

“My government is engaging in state-sponsored discrimination,” he said in an interview. “And I don’t use that term lightly.”

The Department of Justice’s Federal Programs Branch in Washington, which is defending the lawsuit, told the federal court in Santa Ana that it denies “each and every allegation” by Monforton.

At the Pentagon, Navy Cmdr. Jim Kudla, a spokesman for the Bureau of Navy Personnel, said the Navy adopted the 12-12-5 program in an honest attempt to set goals for making the service mirror the racial makeup of American society. He said that as of this fall, the Navy’s officer corps was 5.3% black, 3.1% Latino and 4.6% Asian American, Pacific Islander, Eskimo and American Indian.

Kudla added that the Navy--like the other services--provides special educational programs to help anyone regardless of race or gender enter the Navy and be promoted through the ranks.

“No matter what a person’s background is, no matter who they are, if they are troubled academically or otherwise, we have programs for all of them,” Kudla said.

But Donnelly, the consultant from Michigan, is critical of the 12-12-5 program.

“When you make a number rigid like that and lower your standards to meet that number, that is not the right way to go,” she said. “It’s not fair to the women and minorities either, because it brings their credentials into question. They are hired under a cloud of suspicions.”

It is in Florida at the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute that all branches of the military strive to knock down those suspicions.

Col. Joe and his staff of 35 civilians and 72 military employees teach courses exposing hidden prejudices and job discrimination tactics that many supervisors sent here profess they never realize existed.

The staff also conducts training at bases around the country and at military installations throughout the world. More than 16,500 Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps supervisors have graduated from the course training.

Joe leaves the Army next year and plans to start a new career in the private academic field. He knows he leaves with the job undone. An African American, he was drawn to the Army because of its many career possibilities. He hopes the services continue to provide job equality for all races and both sexes.

But, he adds, “I still believe there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in the military.”