Army’s Behavior Rules Found Confusing

Two studies prompted by the misconduct cases at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground have found widespread confusion among U.S. troops on the military’s sexual behavior rules but stop short of singling out more high-ranking officers for blame in the Army’s worst sex scandal, defense officials say.

The studies, expected to be released next Thursday, criticize the military leadership in a general way for failing to anticipate the problems that showed up at the Maryland training post and other Army installations in the United States and abroad.

But they find no grounds for penalizing individual high-ranking officers--a conclusion that could prompt criticism from some members of Congress and others who have argued that the burden of responsibility for sexual misconduct in the service has weighed too heavily on lower levels of the chain of command.

The studies, based on thousands of interviews with soldiers of all ranks over a six-month period, were set in motion in November by Secretary of the Army Togo West Jr. at the onset of a scandal that brought criminal charges against 12 soldiers at Aberdeen.

The senior review panel--composed of uniformed, civilian and retired Army officials--was to broadly analyze problems of sexual harassment, while the inspector general was told to focus his report on what had gone wrong at Aberdeen and other training bases.

The sexual harassment panel has been divided sharply, particularly over the responsibility issue. Officials said the panel’s report, already revised several times, could undergo further rewriting before its formal unveiling.

The voluminous survey results are expected to show that soldiers often don’t understand the Army’s so-called fraternization rules, which bar them from dating other soldiers in their immediate chain of command while permitting dating of soldiers further removed.

The surveys also detail signs of sexist attitudes among some soldiers, including the prevalence of bawdy jokes and games in some installations.

The Army “may take a battering on some of what they’ve found,” said one congressional aide, even if “a lot of this stuff isn’t too much of a surprise in an organization that’s 85% male and a long way from home.”

In the Army’s view, even more important than the studies’ analysis of the problem are the proposed remedies, some of which the Army training organization has already begun to implement.

The reports recommend that the Army add more lower-ranking officers to training units to allow unit commanders more time to mingle with the troops and make sure they have fuller knowledge of what is going on in the ranks. In the Aberdeen trials, officers and senior noncommissioned officers testified they were unaware that some drill instructors were carrying on a systematic game of sexual conquest--called “the game”--behind their backs.

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, which oversees training operations, has already shifted 100 new lieutenants for this purpose and plans to bring in more. Chaplains will also be assigned to individual training units to provide trainees an additional place to turn for counseling.

Army officials have already said they plan to undertake other remedial steps to address the problem. Such plans include increasing psychological testing for drill-instructor candidates and weeding out troubled ones, intensified scrutiny of candidates’ records, and additional instruction on sexual harassment and related issues to ensure troops understand the sexual-conduct code.

But the panel rejected a suggestion by some outsiders that the Army set up a special channel, outside the chain of command, to handle reports of sexual misconduct. A separate channel would undermine the hierarchy that is central to the Army’s organization, some Army officials have said.

In commissioning the inspector general’s investigation, West wrote that one of its purposes was to “assess the accountability of the chain of command.” The question was, he told reporters then, “whether the chain of command or some leaders either didn’t act when they should have or failed to know information that they should have known.”

But the panel reached a conclusion that many in the Army have held for some time: that officers far removed can’t be held responsible for what went on in two battalions at Aberdeen and that singling others out would not help remedy the broader problem.

As Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University, put it: “That would be a witch hunt, when what they need is to fix the system.”

The Army so far has taken only one action against the Aberdeen command: Lt. Col. Martin T. Utzig, commander of the 143th Ordnance Battalion, was temporarily suspended from duty. Seven of the accused soldiers at Aberdeen served in the battalion.

Three other present and former commanders of battalions implicated have so far been publicly untouched by the scandal. Maj. Gen. Robert T. Shadley, the former commanding general of the Aberdeen Ordnance Center and School, was moved to another assignment last month and is unlikely to be tarnished.

The Army training command could still punish noncommissioned officers or officers at the battalion level or below. But that would probably not satisfy critics--some liberal and some conservative--who have argued for more signs that there is accountability up the chain.

“If you’re the commander, you create the structure, and you have to take the responsibility,” said Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.), a former Marine.