Babes in Arms

...The next real war will test whether our new mothers' army is capable of the same reckless bravery...

...But, with Hollywood promoting the idiotic fiction of "G.I...

...Our fathers' army stormed Omaha Beach...

...What the trainer has referred to as a "playground" resembles a modern dance performance to Gutmann, as the male recruits help the females by supporting them on pull-up bars and pushing them up the climbing pole...

...Gutmann makes sharp observations about the stark and subtle troubling modifications the Army and Navy have adopted as a consequence of integration...

...Some of them wind up in tears, even when only on the top of a preliminary fifteen-foot high wall, while nurturing drill instructors cajole and encourage them...

...To learn the truth, she has furtive meetings in ladies' rooms away from the watchful eye of her public affairs minder, signals her sympathy to frustrated corporals and sergeants in the hope of eliciting candor, and takes advantage of the online bulletin boards where angry servicemen exchange notes...

...But, as Gutmann takes a closer look at the Army and Navy by traveling to bases and ships for a recruit's view of training and deployment, she determines that the military is in a state of crisis, with esprit de corps at rock bottom and a lack of recruits leaving the services seriously undermanned (so to speak...

...It seems that warriors don't fight for bread alone...

...She made headlines recently when she chalked up a first for the U.S...

...When the physical demands are reduced to accommodate women, young men are denied the competitive challenge they crave...

...An Army lieutenant reports that twenty-five of the women soldiers in his small combat support unit were shipped home mid-tour from the Gulf because they had become pregnant...

...How hard can their ordeal be if girls achieve the same status...

...A female commander is onboard to offer a massage-like therapy called the "healing touch...

...The graduates of the Army's basic training haven't just been ill served by being less physically challenged and less firmly disciplined than recruits in the past...

...At the Great Lakes Naval Training Base, the obstacle course has been renamed the "confidence course" to put the recruits in a more positive frame of mind...

...The effects of coed training are not confined to the physical differences evident on the training fields...

...But the Navy Times recently surveyed sailors who were planning to leave the service about their reasons...

...At Fort Jackson in South Carolina, where 70 percent of the Army's female recruits are processed, Gutmann observes coed basic training...

...It is impossible to impose equal demands on men and women in uniform as long as a woman can become pregnant and therefore non-deployable when her unit is called up...

...Only 25 percent of the officers cited civilian opportunities...

...The recruits are told that the aim is teamwork, and exercise should be viewed as a "stress reliever...

...Gutmann's reporting leads her to conclude that sexual integration has taken a ruinous toll on morale and readiness, which the Pentagon refuses to acknowledge...

...New mothers work out the logistics of pumping breast milk to send home to newborns...

...Sergeants explain that young men are looking for discipline and for positive, tough role models...

...At Georgia's Fort Benning, Gutmann sees that a young man's lust for adventure trumps the inner voice screaming that he shouldn't jump out of that plane...

...In a rappelling exercise, the boys are cocky to the point of boredom during instructions, while the girls seek constant reassurance...

...Army by accusing a male general of groping her in her Pentagon office...

...Recruits now run in platoons formed as "ability groups" so no one is made to feel that she can't keep up...

...A drill instructor observing the training tells Gutmann, "This is too easy...

...This decent man retired just as women were being integrated into combat positions, and ambitious officers know that sharing his views jeopardizes their careers...

...The American military has surrendered to the inevitable consequence of its policy: To achieve combat integration, it must dismantle the warrior culture...

...General Kennedy welcomes the military's female-friendly transformation—as long as it doesn't get too friendly...

...Kate O'Beirne is Washington editor of National Review...

...The officers spend lots of time nurturing the crew...

...As she watches one pretty, flirtatious young woman talk with her charmed drill instructor, she wonders whether he would be capable of sending her into harm's way...

...The opportunity to succeed at something physically daunting provides a chance to rise above one's peers...

...Gutmann learned the one iron rule of current military reporting: "People on active duty do not tell reporters the truth if the truth is something they know their commanding officers will not want them to say...

...Indeed, in The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?, Stephanie Gutmann argues that the public has been little concerned with the military's "huge social experiment" in sexual integration because the uncivilized realities of combat have become too remote...

...dia Kennedy triumphantly declares in her frequent speeches as the Army's top-ranking female officer...

...But the new military demands that men be willing to send women to their violent deaths...

...The Army trainers seem to recognize that basic training should be more rigorous, because it fails to challenge the men...

...Pregnant sailors must serve on their ship until their fifth month, so the Navy has started designing its ships with the needs of pregnant crew in mind...

...Here, the crew surreptitiously complains about the wholesome dullness that has accompanied women onboard...

...In the absence of the kind of physical challenge that might hurt the self-esteem of slower, weaker women, training is now designed to "build confidence...

...Men have always been willing to fight to win the approval of other men and the admiration of women...

...Yesterday's soldiers worried about winning wars, while today's recruits spend much of their time battling human nature...

...Another sergeant grouses, "We're making peacekeepers here...

...Offered such categories as "better opportunities as a civilian," "too much time away from home," "lack of a clear mission," and even "lack of confidence in the leadership," 50 percent of the enlisted respondents and 54 percent of the officers chose "other"—and, in written comments, many cited the "change in the culture...

...The recruits are the same age, and dress identically, so the only obvious difference is sex, and the exercises reinforce this difference...

...More, military leaders work overtime to make sure no subordinates acknowledge the problems with integration...

...The exhilarating appeal of military challenges for young men is still evident where all-male training still takes place...

...Despite the Navy's strenuous efforts to create a floating coed monastery, women get pregnant during deployments at sea, just as they did when last deployed to a theater of war...

...But they dare not increase the already unacceptably high rate of injuries to women...

...I'm leaving____I want my kids to train as they fight...

...As long as it appears that wars are won in either a hundred hours or from ten thousand feet in the air, today's coed military looks combat ready...

...Being a single parent is a bar to initial enlistment, but once on active duty, the military's subsidies and policies have made the services a mecca for disproportionately female, single parents...

...She makes her most powerful observation when she points out that honorable men don't let women get hurt while they sit in safety...

...Gutmann concludes that the Army brass has been unwilling or unable to make women in uniform behave more like men, so instead it has insisted that kinder, gentler men are needed to meet the military's new peacekeeping responsibilities...

...Jane," a complacent public hasn't confronted the vivid prospect of their sisters and daughters joining some future bloody assault...

...Visitors are provided with studies supposedly documenting that recruits must be gently handled because they are likely to be the victims of broken homes and domestic violence...

...Competition is verboten...

...To become sexually integrated, the military has become inhospitable to such honorable men...

...In the classroom, during lectures on Army values, Gutmann observes the atmosphere of any progressive high school, with the recruits fooling around, whispering, and interrupting the drill sergeant...

...When former Air Force chief of staff, General Merrill McPeak, said that he opposed lifting the combat exemption because he didn't think "old men should order young women into combat," his declaration was accompanied by an apology for his old-fashioned views...

...The challenge of keeping an integrated crew chaste for months on end has young men fearful of saying or doing something to a female crew member that could be misunderstood...

...At sea, aboard the USS John C. Stennis, Gutmann observes the new Navy in operation...

...Scenes from our sexually integrated armed forces would make a sobering trailer to Steven Spielberg's graphic depiction of the horrors of combat in Saving Private Ryan...

...When the military chiefs are called upon to explain their recruitment and retention problems, they invariably cite factors outside their control, like the "booming civilian economy...

...On behalf of millions of young men, Gutmann mourns the loss of a crucial rite of passage which she regards as a welcome, secondary benefit of sustaining armies and promoting national security...

...At Great Lakes, the Navy insists that training hasn't been modified to accommodate women, but as a result of the fragile psychological state of all current recruits...