The Integrated Academy or Let's lower the standards so women can join.

The average woman is almost 5 inches shorter and over 30 pounds lighter (with closer to 40 fewer pounds of muscle and 6 more pounds of fat) than the average man. She has less than half of his upper-body strength, 20 percent less aerobic capacity, and lighter, brittler bones. She cannot run or jump as far; last as long; grip as well; push, pull, lift or carry as much.

Thus, the first females joining basic training suffered far higher rates of injury—including stress fractures, shin splints and tendonitis—which meant they visited the medical clinic three to four times more than the men. (And with more medical restrictions, they missed considerably more training.)

Officials responded by implementing separate conditioning standards for women: In lieu of having to do a certain number of pull-ups, female cadets were graded according to how long they could hang on the bar; on the obstacle course, they could use a 2-foot step-stool to climb an 8-foot wall. Academies adopted an “equivalent training” doctrine, striving to elicit from each cadet “equal effort rather than equal accomplishment.”

In some cases, rather than create a double standard, officials eliminated the standard altogether. Certain requirements became optional; certain activities became history. Competition among platoons (which many drill sergeants considered key to galvanizing recruits and developing squadron esprit de corps) was stopped, in part because of the unfair advantage held by all-male platoons. Boxing and wrestling were replaced by karate and self-defense or “interpretive dancing.” Once traditional training methods began to be abandoned, virtually everything came under scrutiny.

As the rigor of physical training decreased, classroom instruction increased. Even the academic emphasis shifted away from the hard sciences, engineering, history and military tactics (subjects in which women generally expressed less interest) and more toward social sciences and humanities. (This trend had been under way for decades; introducing women to academies merely accelerated it.)

Double standards extended beyond physical performance. For example, while male cadets who wanted to quit the academies were treated as being unfit to remain, women who wanted out received counseling intended to persuade them to stay.

Male cadets struggled with bad attitudes over seeing women being measured by a less-exacting yardstick. Upperclassmen, however, could see that standards were being lowered even for the men. At the end of basic training, though the women who finished had felt challenged and gained a sense of pride in accomplishment, male initiates said it had been easier than expected. The fact that women had fulfilled the “same program” diminished their pride in being a cadet. It was hard to shake the sense that they had undergone a watered-down, feminized version of the academy education.

Sex and the Soldier

Another major concern that roared into the academies with the women was sex.

With young women walking the grounds, fraternization became rife, as did public displays of affection and promiscuity. Cadets who were lectured on responsibility and high standards watched their instructors flirt with female plebes, sneaking them away on weekends. Pregnancies quickly became widespread. To solve the problem, the services one by one lifted the policy of dismissing pregnant soldiers. Within a few years, they had saturated military life with sex education, introducing mandatory classes on human sexuality and readily dispensing contraceptives. This change took the time-honored sense of military life being hard, regimented, set apart, cloistered in service to country, dedicated to austere principles of discipline and personal sacrifice—and replaced it with the perfumed atmosphere of flirtation, romance, jealousy, flings and trysts.

Adding women into the mix aggravated some problems and created brand new ones. Charges of sexual harassment proliferated as soldiers adapted to the new reality and many traditions proved wholly inappropriate. Privacy—totally nonexistent in the all-male forces—became a sought-after commodity; however, realities of military life could provide only so much of it, and soldiers had to acclimate. Single parenthood became far more problematic, simply because single mothers are many times more likely than single fathers to have custody of their children. With fully 12.5 percent of servicewomen being single moms (not to mention one third of pregnant servicewomen being unmarried), children by the tens of thousands pay the price. But the problem is hardly better for married service mothers: Two thirds of them are married to servicemen; almost none have husbands who are stay-at-home dads. In-service or dual-service marriages create logistical nightmares over housing and deployment—snags that are compounded when children are involved, which is the case more than half the time.

The utopian feminist ideal is one of “androgynous warriors”—men and women working shoulder to shoulder, interchangeably. When those who espouse this philosophy encounter sex-related problems, they routinely blame men for clinging to outmoded thinking or failing to control their hormones.

It apparently doesn’t enter their minds to reconsider the integration policy that introduced all those problems. It is beyond them to question their own unrealistic expectations of how men and women—human beings possessing emotions and weaknesses—will act toward one another in quite intimate quarters, in a stressful and often very physical environment. As Edward Luttwak told the New York Times Magazine in 1997, “The Army can’t do something that eluded the Franciscans. It can’t run a mixed monastery.”

Nevertheless, even the feminists see that a sexualized climate, with all its attendant problems, hurts the effectiveness of a fighting force.

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