Challenges related to the militarys decision to allow women in combat units. This is about an hour and 15 minutes. Welcome to everyone. My name is mack owens. , anffer full master degrees executive and professional masters as well. In addition, we have 18 certificates. We are very happy to cosponsor this event. Very important topic, we have a great speaker who has done a great deal of work in this area. It is a topical topic. Butundancy department anyway, as i say, we are cosponsoring this with the center for military and , and mark,history why did she say a couple of words and i will introduce our moderator . Great. Owens, thehank dr. President , and katie bridges and kevin dunn hear it you have done a wonderful job organizing this event, and thanks also to lindsay and daniel of the foreignpolicy initiative. We do events on history that have relevance to todays issues. We have been hosting one event per week since we were formed nine months ago, and we particularly like to bring in people who have not necessarily been heard inside the beltway. Sure is a tendency, as im you know, to recycle the same speakers, and so we were able to bring in our speaker from california. Wellknown, she has not spoken publicly in d. C. Before. This is the first event we have done on the subject, certainly one i think that is very relevant to military affairs because it is not just a cultural issue, but one of military capabilities and readiness, and people on both sides of the debate contend that their policy is better in terms of maximizing u. S. Military capabilities, and we do see a lot of history involved in this withssion, comparisons things like bringing African Americans into the military or women into other parts of the military, or changing the policy on gay and lesbians service, or the history of women in actual wars, so we very much look forward to a discussion of what we have learned, what we should learn from the past, and may be what lessons in the ones to follow. So, thank you. Thank you for having us. Ok, the introductions continue. I would like to introduce the moderator today. We go back a ways working on , not alwaysn tandem together, but for the most part we have been taking this issue very seriously for a very long time. She is the founder and president of the center for military readiness, an independent, nonpartisan Public Policy organization that focuses on military readiness and social issues, social issues within the military. On the Defense Advisory Committee on women in probably morend importantly the president ial commission on the assignment of women in the armed forces. She has provided testimony to congress to my published articles on military personnel issues in a variety of i thinkions, and probably the most important when she did was the one she did for the duke law review, which laid out the legal issues that was in response to an article by madeline morris. She went to the university of detroit and lives in michigan, so now she will introduce our speaker. Mack owens and i do go way back. The last time a story in person was at the Naval War College when you were a professor there and i was therefore a seminar. I have always said my did your writings and articles about issues involving women in the military. I want to thank dr. Moyer for sponsoring this program and the institute of World Politics for hosting us today. I have also been a longtime on issues dr. Simons involving women in the military. She has been chronicling the sweep of history right from the decades ago. Back in fact, i have a note from her in 1997. We were corresponding because of a book she wrote. The first meeting of its kind at a crucial time of change in the armed forces. This is perhaps the first opportunity that we will have to take stock and figure out where are we going with this. Is this a good idea or is it not . Professor simons earned her phd in social anthropology at harvard university. It is an honor to introduce her, because since then, she has been in the field of academia and im sure teaching many students common sense as well as everything she knows in the field of anthropology. Since 2007, she has been teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School in monterey, california, and prior to that, professor simons was an associate professor of anthropology at ucla and a visiting instructor in anthropology at duke university. In 2011, she cowrote a common sense approach to global security. She has conducted Field Research in somalia, fort bragg, and she wrote a book called networks of dissolution in 1995. Troubleis still a point. Her list of scholarly articles is six pages long, but she has been in all the major publications, new york times, washington post, boston globe, and the african news. I found it interesting that before she entered academia, she was involved in politics for a while as an assistant to the governor of arizona and an assistant speechwriter for president jimmy carter. I first became aware of her when she wrote her book, the company they keep, life inside the u. S. Army special forces. Her husband is a retired special forces officer, but that was not the only reason she wrote about this. She applied what she knew about anthropology to analyze that very special culture of special operations. In that, we have something in common because i am a civilian, but i have such enormous respect for the culture of people who serve, the rough men who defend our country. I think their interests, everything they believe, needs to be given more study and more awareness, and that is why we are here tonight. She has brought insight into the community of war years, so the funny thing is that there are some people who comment, social justice roy years, but they dont know anything about what real lawyers do. Dr. Simon does. I think the reality of civilian control of the military puts on all of us, civilian or former military, we all have a responsibility to watch what happens to the military. They are there to defend us, and we need to be there for them to defend them, and with great pleasure, here is dr. Professor simon. [applause] a go backd just ask to california now so as not to disappoint anyone after that introduction. And fpi forank iwm hosting. I think i want to thank mark. I say i think because while i have written on this topic often on for the past 20 years, publicly speaking out is always fraught, and i would say if anyone in the room knows of anyone who is a young, aspiring graduate student in psychology, there is probably no better topic to focus on than white people respond so emotionally to the issue of women in combat units. I am going to try to stay dispassionate and be provocative, because that is my pedagogical duty as i discuss what has been missing from the debate. I have to do the necessary disclaimer, im not speaking on the Naval Postgraduate School or any other entity or dod. If my views were dods views, there would be no debate, but of course meanwhile, others in ine andm like ela other invitees have encyclopedic knowledge about the beltway history of this issue, and i know others have inside knowledge of the physiological reality of trying to meet certain physical standards. Im going to defer to them during question and answer or about injuryn rates, readiness challenges, and so on. As for the questions i want to raise, they have not gone unasked, so much as they have remained unanswered. Proponents of women in combat units, those who successfully lobbied for lifting the combat have done an masterful job of putting opponents on the defensive to just the fact i can use these two words come opponents and proponents, signifies who has the political upper hand. Panetta was brilliant when he declared that all Ground Combat units would be open to women in january 2016 and less the Service Chiefs could justify which specific units should remain closed by putting the onus on the Service Chiefs and civilian secretaries to defend the status quo. He essentially sandbagged any mail and uniform who could only been sound like a chauvinist or dinosaur if he argued for Ground Combat units staying all male. Those who favored injecting women into Ground Combat units have also long engaged in clever sleight of hand i. E. Equating women serving in combat with women serving in combat units. Only misogynist dow womens capacity for courage under fire. Combat is not the issue. Combat units are. Indeed. I dont know anyone who is more anxious for qualified women to be able to work with them on certain kinds of missions than special operators come up with some might say comprise the ultimate boys club, from operators perspective, women are already a critical asset for intelligence work, reconnaissance, and certain other sensitive missions. Operators concerned, which should be our concern, is how would womens presence help them close with and destroy the enemy more effectively. It cant and wont unless you believe has some proponents do that women links sufficiently differently from man and that without them, combat units are missing womens unique approach. I will come back to this momentarily. First though, lets review why we have combat units in the first place. And why we should want them to be singlemindedly lethal and as focused as possible. Units thatr military are responsible for handling logistics, communications, intelligence, and other functions, Ground Combat units exist to take the fight to the enemy and kill or destroyed more of them and they can kill of us, no matter how long it takes. Casualties, that is what the enemy seeks to inflict. Attrition is why combat units have to be predicated on interchangeability. When someone is wounded or killed, someone else needs to be place. Take their interchangeability brings me back to the idea that because women dont think like men, they add value, but if that is the case, then women and men are not easily interchangeable, are they . Beemale casualty could only replaced by another female, which resents the gist other challenges. So which is it . Think men and women do alike and are interchangeable as long as they meet the same physical standards, in which case, why at women . Or if men and women do not respond to situations similarly and dont think alike and are imminently excuse me, dont think alike, well then what does injecting females and two small 1012 men groups due to cohesion . Haveion, that is a term i come to despair of thanks to what academics have done to it. Intomics have split it social cohesion, which is how much people like each other, and cohesion, is asked which refers to soldiers ability to do a job regardless of interpersonal differences and dislikes. , academics have argued that the only kind of cohesion that military units is task cohesion. It no longer haul, requires individuals have anything more than the mission in common, yet has anyone asked combat units or the Sergeant Major who oversees them how they would define cohesion, or whether academics might have gotten this wrong . Though even more significantly and what academics dont tackle ecksll is, what wr cohesion . The Services Commission and command on gender integration did not delve into this. Maybe that is because all sinned tint adults know what can wreck cohesion, but if you dont seek it, you dont have to find it. Men and women have been each others most consistent distraction since the beginning of time. To pretend there want be problems when young men and women are thrown together for prolonged periods in emotionally intense situations, College Campuses anyone, defies common sense. It also defies biology. There is a darwinists truism, malemail competition and female choice, history or literature, s interest in women, and womens interest in men being interested creates rivalry, jealousy, favoritism, suspicion, distrust, and friction. Why would we want to inject any of this into combat units . In thents of course say thick of combat, no one is thinking about sex or gender. Ok, that is true, but this is also a classic red herring argument. The potential for trouble lurks after or before the bullets are flying. Around soldiers when they are coming down from adrenaline highs, depressed, upset, board or frustrated they are prone to all sorts of temptations. Twoherring argument number is that men voiced the same objections about blacks and gays and got over those objections. They will get over the excepttion of women too, attraction between the sexes is different from racism or bigotry the oppositet is end of the interestdisinterest or likedislike spectrum. Number three is that numerous allies have opened Ground Combat units to women, so weshould to, but why sh should ask if they done so. One reason is to model social justice. They are quite explicit about this, which of course they can well afford to be. Why . Because who in the end will come to their rescue . Disrespect, but few allies can get anywhere without our logistical help, combataving our ground units is the only thin line between us and harm, so how will injecting women into their midst make them more lethal in combat, and why havent proponents been made to answer this . Or maybe advocates here would tell us that our Ground Combat units likely to serve purposes other than combat as well. For instance, maybe they need to beyond excelling at fighting and need to exemplify social justice or equity, but if equity is what proponents care about, then why dont they lobby for a draft and universal service . Or for those who invoke patriotism, a love of country, and womens desire to defend the United States in the same way men do, why dont they argue for allfemale units . Or for those concerned about career advancement, which does traditionally favor combat officers, why not challenge the Promotion System overall, since anyone come a male or female, who is not in a Ground Combat unit must be similarly disadvantaged and although here is where more Research Needs to be done. Are there positions that could prepare woman to compete for a shot at being able to be a wartime Combatant Commander without her having to lead an infantry squad, a platoon come or special forces team first . Could a woman do other jobs and still be able to lead an infantry battalion, brigade, or division . Gs with a say need to be climbed . Maybe there are several ways to finesse the issue of getting more women into senior attorney command positions without having to alter the makeup of ground cop units Ground Combat units. Is it perceivable that women would have what is needed without having been a grunt first . Maybe she does not have their speed, strength, and stamina, but if she proves smarter, why not . If this is one area of research, a second involves data that already exists. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on studies, but what about systematically analyzing what is in the records . For obvious reasons to do with and political sensitivities, neither the army or marine corps will voluntarily air their dirty laundry, but how many hours have been lost to investigation and disciplinary actions relating to fraternization, sexual assault, and or allegations of these and other gender related issues when men and women have been colocated . Publicly everyone says glowing things about combat support and female engagement teams, and some officers i know are deeply grateful they were sent american women who could search and interact with afghan women. Their teams expense no problems with american women who along to either combat support teams or female engagement teams, living on their fireplaces, but some teams were torn apart. How many . Where is the data . And why isnt this considered relevant . Of course read the studies and they acknowledge between the lines that looking too closely in this direction would prove devastating. Why . Because one conclusion reached prior to the lifting of the ban is that men and women should really be trained together. You should not just thrust them together downrange. When they trained together, that and become protective of rather than predatory on one another, which is interesting, especially since once again the very real prospect of attrition is being ignored, but say one of these units that had bonded thanks to training together takes a gender casualty . Then what . Does the whole unit need to be pulled out so it can be retrained together . The question is if training together from the outset is so critical, does that mean when there is attrition . For anyone not familiar with them, and as i hope i am making clear, combat units have no civilian analog. No other entities are designed to be sent into harms way for such an definite periods of time in order to inflict harm. Wildfire firefighters might come closest in terms of having to unstable similarly 24 7 environment, but every job you might think is comparable to combat involves shiftwork. Only to go home, but get a break from one another. They can decompress and regroup apart. Not so in Ground Combat units, although then people say, what , surely theyuts are stuck together and have to get along . To which my first one word response is, attrition, attrition and interchangeability challenges once astronauts are in space . My second one word response is aggressiveness. Even if we forget all the other differences between astronauts and combat soldiers in terms of age, presumed maturity levels, and the extensive screening astronauts receive, nasa does not need testosteronefilled fighters. Ground combat units do, but what else is associated with testosterone . According to what advertisers keep imparting as with if you watch tv at all, with test also run comes a heightened interest in sex. Maybe that is marketing spend. In all seriousness, for all of the attention that has been paid to cortisol, and whether men and women handle stress similarly, what about testosterone . If they havent canvassed the literature, why havent they . Doneng from these studies preparatory to all crown combats to women and what has been avoided thus far doesnt suggest but confirms this topic has been too politicized for too long. The research is incomplete. At best, these studies done are insufficient. At worst, they have been biased. If, as seems to be the cased, we era where social science is led to trump common sense, social scientists should be more thorough, which means they need to be sent back to the drawing board on this top