Political Correctness And The American Military

One of the major worries that confronts those who study the American military at present is the question as to whether the accommodation of its units to the social and political agendas of a portion of America’s elite might not in the long run damage what has been for the past thirty years the most competent combat organization in the world. Given the darkening strategic picture that confronts the United States at present with the rising threat of China, the collapse of any sort of stability in the Middle East, and the increasingly threatening behavior of Putin’s Russia, the international environment represents one of the most important issues confronting the American people as they approach the election of 2016. It is not one to which there are simple or unambiguous answers.

At the heart of the tension between the America’s civil world and the effectiveness of its military is the role of women and gays in the services. The change in the fundamental relationship between the American military and the position of women in its ranks began in the 1970s. Richard Nixon’s decision to turn the military from one based on conscription into an all volunteer military resulted from the extraordinary unpopularity of the Vietnam war and the perception among the American people that the cost in terms of American lives was being born unfairly by the poorer segments of the American population. Exacerbating the transition from the draftee to volunteer force was the fact that the unpopularity of the Vietnam conflict was going to make it difficult to attract suitably competent individuals to the increasingly complex weapons systems that the American military were beginning to deploy. Moreover, by the end of the Vietnam War, the military services were in shambles. There were race riots in all the services; Marine and Army officers found themselves forced to carry loaded pistols into the barracks of their enlisted personnel. Drug usage was widespread. The Soviet threat added to the demand to improve the caliber of personnel.

Thus, it did not take a great leap of intuition to realize that women volunteers offered a considerable possibility to fill the gap in competent enlistees. The fact that West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs all opened their doors to women cadets and midshipmen in 1976 indicated the extent of the need to improve the manpower pool by reaching out to the 50 percent of the population that to a considerable extent the military had never tapped. Given the fact that military organizations throughout the ages have relied almost exclusively on young men, the American decision represented a move that was counter-intuitive—that young women could add substantially to the pool of well-trained members of the military and perform their assigned tasks in as competent a fashion as their male counterparts.

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