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Kayla Williams, an Arabic linguist, was the only woman with a group of about 20 troops posted to Iraq's Sinjar Mountain in 2003, and she was almost one of the boys. To kill time while off-duty, the men pretended to hump everything in sight, including the Humvee, during their relatively unsupervised patrol. They put their testicles on one another's faces in a practice called "tea bagging." Their behavior was ridiculous but common among bros deployed in dangerous, remote locations. Sometimes, the men included Williams when they threw pebbles at each other, aiming for holes near the crotches of their pants. "[They started] throwing rocks at my boobs when they were throwing rocks at each other," Williams recalls. "Is that sexual harassment, or are they treating me like one of them? Is it exclusive or inclusive? I can't answer that. It's complicated." But she didn't let it bother her too much.
Then one night, while monitoring the outpost on the side of a mountain, Williams went to relieve a guard on duty. He grabbed her hand. "He had pulled out his penis and was trying to put my hand on his cock," Williams says. She wasn't quite worried she'd be raped—the junior enlisted Army soldier, then 26 years old, was carrying a gun within earshot of others who would hear her if she screamed—but the guard was frighteningly aggressive. After trying to get her to sleep with him, or at least give him a blow job, he gave up and left.
Still, Williams was angry. When she told men in her unit about the incident, they said she'd joined a man's military and asked what she expected to happen. "It definitely made me feel guys who were sexually harassing me, who were violating the rules, who were doing the wrong thing—that guys felt they were more important as soldiers because they were men." Williams, now a Truman National Security Project fellow and the author of Love My Rifle More Than You, didn't want to be a victim, so she stopped joking around and came off as unfriendly, she says. It was a lonely decision with potentially steep costs. "It's hard to be in a combat zone when I'm expected to rely on these guys for my life, but [I] no longer felt I could trust them to not sexually assault me if I let my guard down."
The military's sexual-assault epidemic is well-known—and it is not confined to high-profile cases like the sex-abuse educator discovered running a small-time prostitution ring at Fort Hood, Texas; the Army sergeant charged with secretly videotaping female cadets in West Point bathrooms; or the 33 instructors ensnared in a sex scandal involving twice as many students at Lackland Air Force base, also in Texas. Those scandals fueled the congressional and media frenzy over the 3,374 reported sexual assaults in the military last year. The Pentagon estimates that sexual assaults actually occur far more frequently—and that 26,000 troops were victims of unwanted sexual contact (6.1 percent of the military's women and 1.2 percent of its men) last year alone. Fewer than 1 percent of adults in the civilian world experienced something comparable, according to data in the most recent National Crime Victimization Survey.
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I guess the question we should first ask is - what do you want your military to look like?
Thomas P.M. Barnett articulated the current dilemma of the US military in a insightful way. He said that we are asking the military to do two tasks. The first is to be a hyper-aggressive killing machine that obliterates all enemy resistance. He calls this "the Leviathan", the traditional armed forces that were used to stare down the Soviet Union. The second is the regime-changers, the counter-insurgency units, the forces that are designed to keep security and cobble together a fragile democracy. They are diplomatic, patient, and use measured and proportionate force. He calls this the "SysAdmin" force - the force designed to trouble-shoot and maintain the international system. The two tasks are not compatible.
For the Leviathan force, you want locker-room masculine aggression. You want absolute team loyalty and trust, and sky-high, irrational levels of confidence. They are there to rip the enemy to shreds in an unfair fight. This would be the combat arms of the the military, the line infantry, the special operations units. If women can be integrated into that environment without damaging the esprit de corps, great. But unit morale and effectiveness come first. Gender equality is a distant second priority to combat effectiveness. As Bennett put it, he wants the Leviathan force to be "male, early-20s, and slightly pissed-off."
For the SysAdmin force, I think it would be absolutely beneficial to have women, both for practical reasons - women will have access to some segments of the society that men will not - and for symbolic reasons, to show an example of American values.
So...what do you want your military to look like?