An additional future threat could involve a would-be regional “hegemon” who diverts considerable natural resource revenue into amassing a huge conventional arsenal, composed mainly of former Soviet weaponry. In 2025, the dictator invades a neighboring state and quickly occupies it.
The United States assembles an intervention force, incorporating ground, air, and naval components. But as the U.S. forces converge on the area, the enemy leadership responds asymmetrically. Foreign hostages are held prisoner in and around important facilities and, before American forces can occupy ports and airfields in nearby friendly countries, the enemy launches ballistic missiles with warheads containing strains of long-lasting anthrax that contaminate these facilities, rendering them unusable for the U.S. force. What is the American response?
In the final scenario the DCSINT staff developed, a major military competitor does indeed arise to challenge us by 2020. Although this nation cannot compete with us on all levels, it can field a certain number of ground divisions as a power projection force; its navy has excellent coastal defense capability; and its strategic missile systems can threaten the United States with nuclear attack. It also has some capability for information warfare to disrupt our computer systems. More importantly, this country has developed a working antiballistic missile system, which, although not perfect, could blunt many of our incoming ICBMs, thus providing some promise of protection to its missile silos.
As 2020 unfolds, this nation ignores American protests and runs roughshod over its perceived sphere of regional influence, seizing offshore islands and oil-rich sections of nearby international water without regard to its neighbors' sovereignty or protests. The United States is faced with a risky and potentially costly conventional war where its opponent will have significant advantages. Further, the United States cannot bully its way through the region under the cover of a nuclear umbrella, since this enemy has a ballistic missile defense and can also strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear missiles of its own. How does America proceed?
As these projections were developed, I did not take pleasure in their disturbing ramifications. Having spent most of my life in uniform during the tense years of the Cold War, I longed for peace, as did my fellow soldiers. But our job wasn't to thrust our heads in the sand. It was to protect our country. And, as the United States prepared its military forces for the future, we had to see the world as it was likely to be, not as we would want it to be.
Most importantly, we had to remember that warfare is first and foremost a human endeavor. Our technical advances have been truly impressive. But the Army and the other services have not reached the point of operating on automatic. The human mind is still the best judgment on the battlefield. The potential for both victory and defeat is present in each of these future war scenarios. Good judgment, courage, decisiveness, and discipline will mean the difference between success and failure. Obviously, weapons will play their part, hopefully the best weapons our soldiers and scientists can develop. But, for the foreseeable future, men and women will be the key factor in controlling those weapons.
Considering the shape of future conflict and the steps that our country must take to respond to it, we need to recognize that the advances in technology will inevitably cause a blurring or melding of the Army's existing branches and Military Occupational Specialties. Further, today's demarcation between the tactical and strategic level will become less sharply delineated. And, finally, the traditionally defined roles of women and men soldiers will change as qualification to accomplish the mission, not gender, becomes the most important criterion the Army considers.
Let's examine how these changes might play out on the future battlefield, as I have defined it in the conflict scenarios.
In the battle involving the ruthless warlords struggling for control of the squalid mega-city by using thousands of foreign hostages as pawns, advanced technology and nontraditional operations might play a critical role. Suppose the most brutal of the warlords, Commander X, decides to leverage his power by beginning the systematic (and globally televised) execution of hostages. But also imagine that the U.S. Army has a small stealth helicopter capable of silently penetrating the airspace Commander X controls in the city and electronically ferreting out his exact location through the use of his unique digital voiceprints forwarded by secure satellite link to a super-computer database on the other side of the world. The helicopter pilot can identify him, no matter what tribal dialect he chooses to employ. Now imagine that this low-flying aircraft is equipped with small “brilliant” munitions that can penetrate roofs or walls and hone in on Commander X's voice before exploding. Finally, let's imagine that the pilot who successfully targets Commander X is a young woman Army captain.
Is she a Military Intelligence officer? Part of the Aviation Branch? A member of our Special Operations Aviation Regiment? Is she operating on the tactical or strategic level? Answer: Her mission encompasses some of all these elements. The important aspect of her assignment is that she accomplishes her mission. Commander X's force is decapitated, the hostages are freed, and the other warlords must accept the fact that they too are equally vulnerable.
Now let's turn to the information warfare scenario. Imagine that America already has teams of highly trained military specialists whose mission is to detect and counter at the lowest level the hostile penetration of vulnerable information systems. When this penetration is detected, the team immediately erects firewalls to protect our country's critical computer networks. Women play vital roles on those teams. Girls and young women are as computer-literate as their male peers. And research indicates that women actually spend more time working or studying online. Women now play essential roles in guarding our country from cyber-attack, and this contribution will only increase. Again, will these soldiers operate at the tactical or strategic level? Will their MOSs be considered “combat” jobs? The distinction is irrelevant if they accomplish their mission.
Women soldiers serving in such revolutionary specialties and assignments would also make extremely valuable contributions to victory in the other two possible future conflict scenarios I have outlined.
Such a blurring of traditional military echelons and branches is already underway. The pattern will continue as the American military modernizes. And it is essential that we see this modernization through to its completion. Now, and in the foreseeable future, we will not have the largest military establishment in the world, but it is critical that we continue to have the best. It is also vital that this force be fully ready for complex, demanding combat operations virtually anywhere in the world.
But there are still those who wish to turn back the clock, to jeopardize our future readiness in order to further their own political agendas.
For example, the false issue of allegedly “rampant” pregnancy among women service members has been waved like a firebrand to inflame public opinion against the role of women in the military. But the facts do not support such uninformed and inflammatory claims. When the Army studied the cause of the “nondeployable” status of the approximately 10 percent of the total force unable to join their units sent to new locations overseas, it found that pregnancy accounted for only 6.1 percent of this already small group. By far the largest number (49.6 percent) were soldiers undergoing scheduled training that could not be interrupted for deployment. Soldiers with either permanent or temporary disabilities, pending legal cases, or who were on leave comprised the rest of the nondeployables. Yet the myth persists that women “choose” to become pregnant only when their units are about to be deployed. Since women comprise approximately 15 percent of the Army, the numbers simply do not support this claim; it's just malicious slander against women.
After the Aberdeen sexual abuse scandal, the entire issue of gender-integrated military training was revisited.
For the past two decades, the Army doctrine of “Train As You Fight” has proven eminently successful. During Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama, 770 women deployed. Three women helicopter pilots flying paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division performed well under heavy enemy fire. During the Persian Gulf War, the 41,000 women deployed made up 16 percent of the ground force. Women flew aerial refueling missions in the war zone, flew helicopters on combat air assault missions into Iraq, and performed a number of critical jobs close to the fighting front. Five women were killed in action, two were taken prisoner of war and served honorably in captivity.
In October 1997, I met one of those former POWs, Colonel Rhonda Cornum, an Army flight surgeon. She is a wife, a mother, an accomplished military leader and public speaker. In early 2001, Colonel Cornum deployed to the Balkans to command an Army medical brigade.
Men and women who enlisted to serve in gender-integrated combat support, combat service support, and Special Branch MOSs trained together from their first day of Basic Training. Men who enlisted to serve in combat arms MOSs trained in gender-segregated One Station Unit Training posts.
There has been no “feminization” or softening of the Army as critics have charged. Instead, both young women and men enlistees have been toughened by increasing the length and rigor of Initial Entry Training (which includes Basic and Advanced Individual Training). Research has shown that the performance of women soldiers undergoing this training has improved, while the training of their male peers has maintained its high quality.
I spoke out on this issue when those critics of gender-integrated training used the Aberdeen sexual abuse scandal as a pretext to demand the renewed segregation of men and women trainees, a refrain that continues to this day. What had occurred at Aberdeen, I told a congressional commission in 1998, had been “falsely associated with gender-integrated training.” I reminded the members that the Aberdeen incidents were abuses of power that had been distorted to appear as fraternization in order to further the accused abusers' legal defenses. “The basic issue at Aberdeen is that established Army leadership standards were not upheld,” I told the commission. The goal of sexual harassment is power, control, and dominance, not affection and desire. I think I made some headway. But my frank views were not popular among the conservative members of Congress who hold the view that there is simply no place for women in the military (nor, I suppose, in law enforcement, fire departments, nor in medical school, nor on the bench) and who will seize any excuse to further their outmoded belief.
But it is essential to make policy based on current experiences in military training. It is also important for soldiers to train in integrated units when they will serve in integrated specialties because first impressions are lasting and strong. Basic Training provides soldiers' first impression of their place in the Army. It is their first experience of learning to be a soldier, a safe, intensely supervised experience, where they learn discipline, acquire a sense of duty, and develop mutual respect. It is vital that all soldiers who eventually will serve together start off learning how to work with each other, and to learn that they all have had the same preparation and meet the same standards. This training builds trust: trust in oneself, trust in one's buddies, and trust in the team. We cannot expect that young men and women who are trained separately by gender-segregated drill instructors can later serve well together as equal partners in gender-integrated units.
In thirty-two years of military service, I saw the Army undergo many changes. When I enlisted in the gender-segregated Women's Army Corps in 1968, the Army was made up mainly of draftees. WACs trained separately, were assigned separately, and we were promoted separately. But in the early 1970s, the Army made the transition to the All-Volunteer Force, women were integrated into the rest of the Army, and the WAC Branch was dissolved. At that time, there were those who predicted the downfall of the Army, just as there are those today who claim the Army is being softened and undercut by the incremental increase in the percentage of women, training side by side with men, within its ranks.
But I know better. I have been trained by women only. I have seen gender-segregated units trained by gender-integrated instructors, and I have seen integrated trainees trained by cadres of integrated instructors.
That final process has produced the Army of today, the Army that defeated Saddam Hussein's massed divisions in just one hundred hours of Operation Desert Storm. The soldiers of this Army have displayed incredible courage, maturity, and discipline during challenging peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, from Haiti, to the Balkans, to Africa and Central America. I am extremely proud to have served with them.
America is going to need its women soldiers in the future, particularly as soldiers' jobs evolve. In the coming decades, demographic pressures will add to that urgency. Our population is inexorably aging. By 2021, the first of the baby boom will turn seventy-five. The pool of young, able-bodied workers contributing to Social Security to support the great bulge of the elderly will shrink. There will be increased competition for skilled workers between the military and civilian marketplace. None of the armed forces will be able to preserve obsolete concepts of gender segregation and male dominance of the military.
Further, the Army will fill its traditional role of assimilating new waves of immigrants, for whom the attraction of a military career will be the transformation to full integration as citizens and the acquisition of technical and leadership skills. Again, I am proud that the Army has served that role so well in the past and will continue to do so.
Today, people often ask if I believe an Army woman will achieve the rank of four-star general and advance to the top leadership. “No question about it,” I always reply. Sometime in the next twenty years, a woman who is today a major or lieutenant colonel will stand proudly as her fourth star is pinned to her epaulets. But that inevitability evades a broader issue. How many company first sergeants, battalion and brigade command sergeants major will be women in 2020? Will the percentage of women commanding battalions and brigades be proportional to their numbers in the Army? Will the trend toward the advancement of women soldiers that I witnessed in my career continue or will the talent that women bring to the military be marginalized? These are crucial questions, not just for the women who wear Army green, but also for the nation as a whole.