The Last Battlefield in Gender War

Kelly Flinn may or may not have committed one or more offenses against the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Since she has not been brought to trial, it is impossible to say. All we know is that she is alleged to have committed adultery and to have made a false statement to investigators.

What can certainly be guessed is that, among the thousands of male pilots who have flown the B-52 since it came into service 40 years ago, some certainly committed adultery and none has paid the penalty of publicity to which 1st Lt. Flinn has been subjected. Perhaps those who were detected made a clean breast of their misbehavior to the investigators, who were probably male, and were let off with a caution.

So the suspicion is that Flinn has been made a test case. A female B-52 pilot is a test case in any event. Until recently, the U.S. armed forces maintained a policy of withholding combat appointments from its female enlistees. They are still barred from bearing arms in ground combat units for eminently sensible reasons. Ground combat is a business in which physical strength counts, women are not as strong as men and male soldiers have a defensible right not to be encumbered with, literally, the weaker sex.

That argument does not apply to combat roles that can be performed sitting down. The U.S. services might have seen that problem coming when they decided to increase female enlistment, a policy that has raised female strength to 10%. The original motive was to maximize recruitment to the all-volunteer force, at a time when it was feared not enough males would come forward to make up the numbers. That was after Vietnam and pretty much before feminism. Now the forces find themselves with a large female contingent, some of whom may be feminists, all of whom are certainly urged by the leadership of the feminist movement to settle for nothing less than full professional equality with their male comrades.

Faced with the threat of being branded unequal opportunity employers, the services gave in, bit by bit. Women were allowed to go to sea (though still not in submarines), women were allowed to fly (but not, at first, combat aircraft). Then the illogicality of barring women from an assignment that requires no physical strength dissolved that barrier. Women became combat pilots. Flinn became the first to graduate to B-52s.

It is not difficult to explain why men have objected. Males believe that females lack the biological drives for aggression that make for combat success. If male pilots value their careers, they will not say so, but they will believe it nonetheless. What is difficult, particularly for a European male, which I am, to understand is why women want to be in combat at all.

In Europe they do not. But then European women also show little interest in the feminist movement. That does not stop them succeeding in life. The British, during the 1980s, had a female head of state and female head of government and expressed no surprise at all. The urge to equal men at everything in direct competition seems an exclusively American phenomenon. Why should that be so?

One might as well ask why Europeans went to America before the Revolution. They went to escape from a continent where birth defined station in life to find a new world where success would be achieved by work. Aristocrats do not work. The Founding Fathers reviled aristocracy and Americans have taken their lead from them ever since. The only trouble is that, having made success in work their supreme value, Americans have unwittingly created a new aristocracy, just as much based on birth as in the old Europe. It is an aristocracy of gender, male over female.

Since aristocracy is un-American, it is no wonder that the United States has the most powerful feminist movement in the world. It is equally unsurprising that the feminists have targeted the armed forces as the last bastion of male power. Having broken the work barriers everywhere else, it was a necessary demand that the combat barrier should be broken too.

The Flinn case therefore really is an issue about American principle. If it is interpreted that she lost, feminism will have met a check. If the general discharge is seen as a win, American women will have won the right to behave as badly as men, in the workplace or outside. What the outcome will mean for the combat efficiency of the armed forces is another matter altogether.