A Female Friendly Fighting Force Can Still Fight

The Kinder, Gentler Military, by Stephanie Gutmann. New York: Scribner, 2000. 300 pp. $25.

With her newly published book, Ms. Gutmann has fanned the flames around the national debate on women in the military. Her bomblet of a book has landed amidst two particularly captivating events relevant to the debate: Commander Kathleen McGrath's historic promotion as the first American woman ever to take a Navy warship to sea, and the Army's unprecedented revelations concerning Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy's sexual harassment charges against a fellow general officer, which stunned the entire military establishment.

Stephanie Gutmann's book, The Kinder, Gentler Military critiques how and why the military spent the 1990s attempting to reform its traditional culture in favor of a new, politically correct value system. The book charges that the armed forces have become too politically correct and sensitive--in her words, "a system which is decimating morale." Demographic and sociological issues were the two overriding factors contributing to why the military needed to reform itself. With a much improved economy in the 1990s, unemployment rates rapidly declined, recruitment became a huge challenge, and the military gradually became a less attractive career option. If one considers a whole series of gender-related scandals that cut across all service boundaries and involved all ranks and genders, the viability of women serving in the military became a serious issue of public debate. This led to a gradual transformation and liberalization of attitudes within the armed forces.

In an attempt to legitimize her argument, the author presents an irreverent dialogue of documented transgressions committed during select periods of our military history, from the Second World War, through Vietnam and the Gulf War, to the recent conflict in Kosovo. A seemingly legitimate compilation of disgruntled sound bites ensues. For example, Gutman quotes Amelia Earhart: "Men would rather vacate the arena [of combat] altogether than share it with women." While, the book raises important issues for the debate on women's roles and their integration into a traditionally masculine institutional environment, her description of the military and its operation is unbalanced, inflammatory, and more often than not, uninformed.

Gutman displays a striking amount of passion in her analysis of the military establishment and subjects the reader to story upon story of things gone wrong. For instance, the author describes how "the services [except the Marines] are meeting recruitment goals by the skin of their teeth, if at all, even though they have been scraping lower and lower in the recruitment pool...." If Gutman means to suggest that the armed forces are lowering their recruitment standards, she is wrong.

On the basis of personal experience in recruiting from 1991-96, first as a commanding officer, and later as director of operations/plans and policy for Navy recruiting worldwide, I am confident that recruiting quality standards throughout the 1990s and today are well above those of the 1980s. The dedication to these standards within the Navy's recruiting ranks was, without question, the highest that I had witnessed as compared to earlier periods of recruiting.

Gutmann offers not only criticism, but also a series of recommendations, including "eliminating quotas for women." As far as I can tell, Navy recruiting treats goals for female recruitment more like caps than quotas, that is, the targeted percentage of women is a maximum, not a minimum (a fact that gets bogged down in her argument). Recruiters are allowed, if not encouraged, to fill female places with qualified males when they cannot find females to fill them. Certainly Ms. Gutmann's implication that recruiters are forced to go out and drum up business for female enlistments, irrespective of qualification, when they should be searching for the best qualified candidates, is not true for the Navy. The Navy's goal in recruiting is not to fill a quota of females per se, but rather to find the best qualified females from among the larger pool...