GUNS AND DOLLS

In the summer of 1975, I visited the Korean DMZ with the allied commander, Lieutenant General James F. Hollingsworth. Nobody could be sure that the North Korean politburo would not seize this low point for the West to order an invasion across the border. Hollingsworth, who in 1972 had mobilized U.S. air power to destroy five divisions of North Vietnamese regulars, was ready with plans to win “a short, violent war” in Korea if the Communists struck.

He set our helicopter down in a valley where a detachment of American soldiers was stationed. Among them, to my amazement, was a slight young woman weighed down with communications equipment. The general and I chatted with her about the prospect that the North Koreans would come over the mountains — a fact she was well aware of and that left her unafraid. As we were leaving, I asked Hollingsworth how he felt about the possibility that this woman would be caught up in a war. The Texan — usually profane and voluble — only shrugged.

This episode surprised me because I had assumed that there was an ironclad law against women in combat. What I had not realized was what Brian Mitchell explains in Women in the Military. After the Vietnam War, from which females were largely absent, the military had aggressively recruited women for its all-volunteer force. In 1975, there were 109,133 women in uniform — 5 percent of the total armed services and 44 percent more women than those in twenty other major nations combined.

It was just the beginning. Today, women make up almost 14 percent of the armed forces, nearly 200,000. “No other military in the world depends so heavily on women,” Mitchell writes. Of Russia’s strength of 4 million, only 25,000 (0.7 percent) are women. While American women are still not assigned to infantry, armor, special operations, or submarines, they are put in harm’s way far more frequently than servicewomen elsewhere. American women are assigned to combat aircraft, surface ships, and ground units.

“The military has succumbed to the creeping influence of 1970s social upheaval,” concludes Mitchell, a decorated infantry officer and intelligence agent who also has been a reporter for the Navy Times. The subtitle of his book argues that this is not merely an exercise in political correctness but a flirtation “with disaster.” He contends that, while women are not needed in the armed services, “their expanding presence is destroying the military’s body and soul.”

Mitchell is blunt: “Nowhere are women required to meet the same physical standards as men, and nowhere are women subjected to the military’s sternest trials of mind and body that many men face.” Gender integration has produced ” a general softening of military service.” By eliminating standards that would “aggravate attrition among women and expose their limited abilities,” the services have been deprived of “the highly trained and capable manpower needed to fight and win.” Mitchell accuses the military of denying these truths: “From the top down, the example to follow is one of cowardly, self- protective deceit.”

So, in Mitchell’s view, the charge of extremism leveled last October by the Pentagon’s Sara Lister, which forced her ouster as an assistant secretary, in fact had some merit. “The Marines self-consciously train warriors,” he writes, “and compared to the new, more motherly Army, the Marines are indeed extreme. “

Mitchell’s description of training in the ’90s is chilling for those of us who wore the uniform in the 1950s: Drill sergeants still raise voices, but not as often. They are forbidden to curse, call recruits names, or belittle them in any way. Harmless but humiliating punishments are no longer permitted. At the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, drill instructors carry laminated cards warning them not to apply any punishment that might cause a recruit ” undue embarrassment,” while recruits carry “stress” passes they can trade for convenient time-outs when the going gets tough.

Mitchell guides us in laborious detail — too laborious and too detailed, I fear — along the road to success traveled by such advocates of gender integration as former congresswoman Patricia Schroeder. (Most of these advocates had been fierce foes of the military during the Vietnam War.)

Their road became easier during the Carter administration, but, surprisingly, it was not appreciably more difficult during the twelve years of Republican control over the Pentagon. Dick Cheney, the Bush administration’s widely acclaimed secretary of defense, is depicted as acquiescent to the point of approving feminization. Holdouts against women in combat were few and fading, notably Democratic senators Sam Nunn (now retired) and John Glenn (about to retire).

Of the gender-related scandals that Mitchell reviews — Tailhook, Aberdeen, Kelly Flinn — perhaps the most disturbing is the sad case of Navy lieutenant Kara Hultgreen. The twenty-eight year-old Texan was already qualified to fly the electronic warfare EA-6B Prowler, and she volunteered to fly the F-14 Tomcat twin-engined fighter when the Clinton administration in 1993 ordered that combat aviation be opened to women. (Women were given preference over men already in the training pipeline.)

But the F-14 was held by aviators to be the most difficult plane in the Navy inventory, with Hultgreen saying that flying it was “dancing with an elephant.” Described by Mitchell as having a “poor record” handling the Tomcat, she had trouble with aircraft-carrier landings and failed her first attempt to qualify as a carrier pilot in April 1994. An anonymous fax sent to a San Diego radio station said Hultgreen was “an accident waiting to happen. Every one of her squadron mates knew it, but they could not speak for fear of reprisal.” Records showed her “making power corrections that were erratic and unpredictable.” Standard practice was violated when she was not called before an evaluation board despite four faulty landings.

On October 25, 1994, attempting to land her F-14 on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln fifty miles off San Diego in clear weather and calm seas, Hultgreen “for some reason” swung wide on her approach. She then failed to correct, responded tardily to warning signals from the carrier, and ejected too late from the plane, rocketing straight into the water. Her body was found three weeks later.

The official investigation report was supposed to be secret but was obtained by Newsweek correspondent Gregory Vistica, who said it “spelled out in clear and direct language Hultgreen’s many mistakes that led to her death.” Nevertheless, the Navy insisted on engine failure as the cause and gave Hultgreen a hero’s funeral at Arlington. “Only by exonerating Hultgreen,” writes Mitchell, “could the Navy avoid yet another Congressional inquisition led by Pat Schroeder and Barbara Boxer and the likes of John McCain and David Durenberger.”

The cover-up of the Hultgreen affair epitomizes the gloss put on gender integration by the Pentagon — including propaganda claiming that women performed well in the Gulf War. A poll of that war’s veterans by the Roper organization showed a huge disparity between the ratings of men and women, with more than half of Army and Marine Corps women rated “fair to poor.” Roper reported that sexual activity had a negative impact on unit morale. ” But ultimately,” writes Mitchell, “we won, we won easily, and nothing else mattered.”

But what about the next war? As combat-readiness diminishes thanks to gender-integrated service academies and basic training, U.S. ground deterrence loses credibility. Mitchell’s concern that the military can be ” reduced to a cowardly and corrupt institution, a high-tech danger to free peoples at home and abroad” may be premature — but he nevertheless recognizes a threat that is truly horrible to contemplate.

Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist and author of several books.