Arms And The Enlisted Woman

10. Myths Necessary to the Pursuit of War

10 Myths Necessary to the Pursuit of War How is one to understand the competing and sometimes contradictory views, data, and analyses presented above? What sense can be made of the explanations given for policies enacted and rejected? Should one simply ignore the abrupt changes in accessions? Should one disregard the tenuous relationship between research and policy? Should one overlook dubious legal distinctions and contradictory yet sincerely held opinions? Must one simply accept incongruity, disparity, the apparently surreal, or is there a discernible pattern in what has been set forth? One thing seems certain. To the professional military, the enlisted woman is a raw nerve. To discuss her too thoroughly is to open Pandora's box. To make her, her role, and her status the object of careful scrutiny is to display what the military (and probably civilians, too) would prefer to leave decently draped. But just what is revealed? It appears to be the fact that certain ideas that are essential to the military as we know it are not literally true. That is, the mere existence of enlisted women seems to make it difficult to believe certain myths that are thought to be necessary to the pursuit of war. A myth is a widely shared, deeply rooted belief that gives meaning to action. Whether true or not, myths are functional. They can encompass contradiction. They are also not very susceptible to either logical or empirical disproof. This means that demythologizing is an often futile exercise-myths are hydra-headed; they possess many lives. Indeed, wide acceptance and "irrefutability" are identifiers. Empirical evidence of the width and depth of belief in a particular myth can be obtained; functional or psychological explanations can be developed; however, the - 223 Copyrighted Material 224 - Meta-Influences on Policies red flag, the sure cue, is the acceptance of the logically and empirically dubious. In The Disappearance, Philip Wylie neatly displayed the separate worlds in which men and women, even those who sleep together, may live.l Today, the thoughts and acts of women seem scarcely to impinge upon the managers of legitimate violence in the United States. Women mayor may not understand how irrelevant they and sometimes logic and evidence are to those who direct that large, expensive, awesome institution we call the U.S. military. But to at least this outsider, women do not seem irrelevant at all. In fact, they seem to be absolutely essential to the military. Their essentialness, though, lies in their absence. It is this which explains why enlisted women, who are by definition present, are unsettling. Their mere existence contradicts three ideas fundamental to the military enterprise: 1. War is manly. 2. Warriors protect. 3. Soldiers are substitutable. * MYTH NUMBER ONE: WAR IS MANLY Today's U.S. military violates national tradition, first by being a "standing army" (more than 2 million in uniform with a million civilian employees), and second by being committed to fighting anywhere, any· time (an ideal embodied in the Rapid Deployment Force). It also violates a broader norm that holds that peacetime militaries-legitimate, trained, bureaucratic, honored, professional institutions prepared to wield violence -are the exclusive domain of men. Women have always fought and died in war. However, they have usually been called to difficult and dangerous tasks only to replace men who have assumed even more difficult and dangerous tasks-or to replace those whose tasks have led to death. Cynthia Enloe has referred to women as a "reserve Army," and it seems clear that women will be used should the going get rough.2 Ordinarily, though, women are not allowed to serve in peacetime when it is safe and when one can acquire enough rank to have real responsibility and authority in wartime. Again, what is unusual about U. S. military women today is their number (10 percent of the total), the number of traditionally male jobs they hold, and, most *All the services are committed to these myths, but each comes to different "therefores " in developing its policies. This makes the myths more accessible than they would be if the services had developed uniform policies. Also, the myths' patent inapplicability to the Air Force (in spite of that service's devotion to them) makes it easier to see that they are not necessarily true for the other services either. Copyrighted Material Myths - 225 important, the fact that they serve as "replacements" for men who have chosen to stay...