The myth of the Macho military

Polity

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 137-163

  Titunik, Regina F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT HILO   (United States)

Author keywords

Aggression; Feminization; Hyper masculinity; Military; War; Women

Indexed keywords

EID: 41849112324     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300090     Document Type: Article

References (169)

1. Vernon Loeb, "Combat Heroine," The Washington Post, November 23, 2003: D 01.
2. Reeba Critser, "Female MPs join infantry on front line," Army LINK News, October 2002;
3. Ann Scott Tyson, "The expanding role of GI Jane," The Christian Science Monitor, April 3, 2003: 1;
4. Erin Solara, "Lionesses of Iraq," Seattle Weekly, October 6-12, 2004.
5. The idea of the feminization of the armed forces seemed to have caught on with the publication of Brian Mitchell, Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1989).
6. See Mitchell, Weak Link;
7. Brian Mitchell, Women in the Militay: Flirting with Disaster (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1998);
8. Stephanie Gutmann, The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's GenderNeutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? (New York: Scribner, 2000);
9. Francis Fukuyama, "Women and the Evolution of World Politics," Foreign Affairs 77 (1998): 24-40;
10. Walter A. McDougall, "Sex, Lies, and Infantry," Commentary 104 (1997): 43-47;
11. Harvey C. Mansfield, "Why a Woman Can't Be More Like a Man," Wall Street Journal, November 3 (1997): A22.
12. See Cynthia H. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
13. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein and Judith Reppy eds., Beyond Zero Tolerance: Discrimination in Military Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999);
14. Linda Bird Francke, Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military (New York: Simon & Schuster 1997);
15. Madeline Morris, "By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military Culture," Duke Law Journal 45 (February 1996): 651-781;
16. Karen O. Dunivin, "Military Culture: Change and Continuity" Armed Forces and Society 20 (1994): 53M7;
17. Gerhard Kümmel, "When Boy Meets Girl: The 'Feminization' of the Military: An Introduction Also to be Read as a Postscript," Current Sociology 50 (2002): 615-39.
18. Elizabeth Kier, "Uniform Justice: Assessing Women in Combat," Perspectives on Politics 1 (2003): 343-47.
19. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 231.
20. Interesting in this regard is Richard Heckler's account of the reactions of his friends when he accepted an assignment to teach aikido to the Green Berets. Heckler encountered an "Us and Them" outlook that labeled soldiers as the harmful "them" whom "we" are better than. Richard Strozzi Heckler, In Search of the Warrior Spirit: Teaching Awareness Disciplines to the Green Berets (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1992), 3-4.
21. See also Thomas E. Ricks, Making the Corps (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 289.
22. Cynthia H. Enloe, "The Politics of Constructing the American Woman Soldier," in Women Soldiers: Images and Realities, ed. Elisabetta Addis, Valeria E. Russo, and Lorenza Sebesta (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 89;
23. Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Faithful and Fearless: Moving Feminist Protest inside the Church and Military (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 64.
24. See Katzenstein, Faithful and Fearless, 71. In addition, the military's expectation after 1972 that the ERA would pass led to their changing discriminatory assignment policies and including more women in nontraditional occupations and leadership positions.
25. Martin Binkin, Who Will Fight the Next War? The Changing Face of the American Military (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. 1993), 6.
26. GAO Report to Congressional Requesters, Military Personnel: Reporting Additional Servicemember Demographics Could Enhance Congressional Oversight (September 2005), 9.
27. See Mady Wechsler Segal, "Women's Military Roles Cross-Nationally: Past, Present and Future," Gender & Society 9 (December 1995): 757-75.
28. Katzenstein, Faithful and Fearless, 57-60.
29. Katzenstein, Faithful and Fearless, 60, 86;
30. Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, Sound Off!: American Military Women Speak Out (New York: Paragon House, [1988] 1992 reprint ed.), 176-89;
31. Helen Rogan, Mixed Company: Women in the Modern Army (New York: G.R Putnam's Sons, 1981), 303;
32. Karen O. Dunivin, "There's Men, There's Women, and There's Me: The Role and Status of Military Women," Minerva 6 (Summer 1988): 43-69.
33. Schneider and Schneider, Sound Off!, 176-82.
34. Schneider and Schneider Sound Off!, 186;
35. Rogan, Mixed Company, 304.
36. Schneider and Schneider, Sound Off!, 180.
37. Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution, rev. ed. (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1992), 387-97.
38. There is some evidence that this effort to rail back women's participation was a ploy to reactivate the draft (see Holm, Women in the Military, 390, 395).
39. Holm, Women in the Military, xiii.
40. Lory Manning, Women in the Military: Where They Stand, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: Women's Research and Education Institute, 2005), 7.
41. See Rhonda Cornum's account of her experiences as a prisoner of war in She Went to Wir, as told to Peter Copeland (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1992). Cornum, then an Army major, doctor and helicopter pilot, endured captivity with two broken arms and other serious injuries sustained after her helicopter was shot down over Iraqi territory
42. See Segal, "Women's Military Roles," 761.
43. Holm, Women in the Military, 449, 489.
44. Rosemarie Skaine, Women at War: Gender Issues of Americans in Combat (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1999), 90.
45. Secretary of Defense, January 13, 1994 memorandum, Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule.
46. Secretary of Defense, January 13, 1994, memorandum; see GAO Report to the Ranking Minority Member, Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, Committee on Armed Services, US Senate, Gender Issues: Trends in the Occupational Distribution of Military Women (September 1999), 3.
47. GAO Report, Military Personnel, 39.
48. Erin Solaro, Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006), 161;
49. see Holm, Women in the Military, 127.
50. Holm, Women in the Military, 508.
51. This view was expressed by Pat Schroeder in the aftermath of the 1996 Aberdeen Proving Ground sex scandal: see Sheryl Stolberg and Melissa Healy "Harassment is Old Battle for Many Army Women," Los Angeles Times (November 15, 1996): A22.
52. For a useful discussion of varieties of feminist thought and war see Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34-58.
53. Goldstein, War and Gender, 41-48;
54. Kümmel, "When Boy Meets Girl," 618;
55. Enloe, Maneuvers, 287;
56. llene Rose Feinman, Citizenship Rites: Feminist Soldiers and Feminist Antimilitarists (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 19-31;
57. Annette Fuentes, "Women Warriors? Equality Yes-Militarism, No," The Nation (October 28, 1991): 253, 516.
58. Goldstein, War and Gender, 41-48;
59. Feinman, Citizenship Rites, 19-31;
60. Betty Reardon, Sexism and the War System (New York: Teachers College Press, 1985), 4.
61. See R. Claire Snyder's criticism of this type of view in Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield),163; see 163-65 and 144-45. I include Cynthia Enloe's work under my broad definition of "difference feminism" although she is often seen as a postmodern feminist. It is necessary to note, in this regard, that individual feminist theorists cannot be easily pigeonholed into any particular category of feminism.
62. See Paul R. Higate, ed., Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (Westport, CT Praeger, 2003), 28, 30-31;
63. and Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers.
64. Morris, "By Force of Arms."
65. Morris, "By Force of Arms," 174; see Katzenstein and Reppy eds., Beyond Zero Tolerance, 6.
66. Franke, Ground Zero, 18.
67. Even Morris's own data shows that rape is actually less prevalent in the military during peacetime than in civilian life. For a fuller consideration of Morris's data, see Regina F Titunik, "The First Wave: Gender Integration and Military Culture," Armed Forces and Society 26 (Winter 2000): 250-51, n10.
68. Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler, All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 106.
69. Laura L. Miller and John Allen Williams, "Do Military Policies on Gender and Sexuality Undermine Combat Effectiveness?" in Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security, eds., Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 361-402.
70. Miller and Williams, "Military Policies," 374.
71. Although some servicewomen do suggest the U.S. military is ahead of civilian institutions as regards the fair treatment of women. See Sheryl Stolberg, "Forget the Scandais." Los Angeles Times (November 29, 1996): El and E4;
72. Schneider and Schneider, Sound Off! 179, 180.
73. Goldstein, War and Gender,
74. see Judith Hicks Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 226-27.
75. Carol Burke, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004);
76. R. Claire Snyder, " The Citizen-Soldier Tradition and Gender Integration of the U.S. Military," Armed Forces & Society 29 (Winter 2003): 192-93.
77. Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-1951 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 49, 66.
78. Titunik, "The First Wave," 240-11.
79. Cf. Stiehm, Arms and the Enlisted Woman, 227.
80. Walter A. McDougall, "Sex, Lies, and Infantry" Commentary 104 (September 1997): 46.
81. See Mitchell, Weak Link, 340.
82. Gutmann, Kinder, Gentler Military, 27.
83. Gutmann, Kinder, Gentler Military, 275.
84. Phyllis Schlafly, "Feminism Meets Terrorism," EagleForum.Org (January 23, 2002), emphasis added.
85. Sun Tzu and Sun Pin, The Art of War, trans. Ralph D. Sawyer with the collaboration of Mei-chün Lee Sawyer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 63.
86. Sun Tzu and Sun Pin, The Art of War, 77.
87. For example, according to Herodotus, the Spartans refused to honor Aristodemus at Plataea, because, though he died fighting magnificently (and had showed exceptional courage in Heradotus's view), he had rushed "forward with the fury of a madman in his desire to be killed before his comrades' eyes." In the Spartan's view, Aristodemus had "deliberately courted death" to retrieve his honor-having been the only survivor of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae-and the Spartans preferred to honor Posindonius who "without any wish to be killed, had fought bravely." Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey Sélincourt, revised with an introduction and notes by A.R. Burn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), Book 9, 605.
88. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Alan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 388a, 390e, 391a-c.
89. Claudia Kennedy, Lt. Gen. (Ret.) with Malcolm McConnell, Generally Speaking: A Memoir by the First Woman Promoted to Three-Star General in the United States Army (New York: Warner Books, 2001), 122-23;
90. see Ricks, Corps, 147 and 60-61.
91. Plato, Republic, 451c-457b;
92. Sun Tzu and Sun Pin, The Art of War, 6.
93. Sun Tzu and Sun Pin, The Art of War, 7;
94. see Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 112.
95. Lewis, Sanctioned Violence, 112.
96. See Max Weber, Economy and Society trans. and ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 53.
97. See Don M. Snider, "An Uninformed Debate on Military Culture," Orbis 43 (Winter 1999): 11-26;
98. Ricks, Corps, 63.
99. Loeb, "Combat Heroine."
100. Cf. Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 76-77,224-25, 232.
101. Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, Women in Combat: Report to the President (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992), 104;
102. Fukuyama "Women and the Evolution of World Politics"; Gutmann, Kinder, Gentler Military 241-43.
103. As regards the cohesion issue, there has been considerable debate as to whether "social cohesion" or "task cohesion" facilitates more effective group performance. On this issue see Elizabeth Kier, "Homosexuals in the US Military: Open Integration and Combat Effectiveness," International Security 23 (1998): 5-39;
104. Miller and Williams, "Military Policies," 389-90, 393-94.
105. Miller and Williams, "Military Policies," 388-89.
106. Margaret C. Harrell and Laura L. Miller, New Opportunities for Military Women: Effects upon Readiness, Cohesion, and Morale (Washington, DC: National Defense Research Institute, Rand Corporation, 1997), 99.
107. Schneider and Schneider, Sound Off! 261-62, 277-78.
108. Michelle Malkin, "Letter from a Reservist," TownHall.com Columnists (archive) (September 20, 2002).
109. Pfc. Christina Carde, "Deployed mom defends military choice" (July 11, 2003), http://www.dcmilitarycom/army/pentagram/8_27/commentary/24137- 1.html.
110. R. Cort Kirkwood, "The Military vs. Free Speech," LewRockwell.com. (June 21, 2003).
111. Carol Barkalow, "Let Women in the Military 'Be All They Can Be,'"Zas Angeles Times, 28 July 1991, opinion.
112. Matthew Bigg, "Camaraderie key for U.S. blacks fighting in Iraq," Atlanta: Reuters (December 25, 2006).
113. David R. Segal, Recruiting for Uncle Sam: Citizenship and Military Manpower Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 123;
114. Solaro, Line of Fire, 302.
115. Report of the Federal Advisory Committee on Gender-Integrated Training and Related Issues to the Secretary of Defense, (December 16, 1997), http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/git/report.html.
116. Snyder, "The Citizen-Soldier Tradition," 196-97.
117. Schlafly, "Feminism Meets Terrorism."
118. Gutmann, Kinder, Gentler Military, 76.
119. HQ USCENTCOM, Tarnak Farms Friendly Fire Incident Near Kandahar, Afghanistan, 17 April 2002 (14 June, 2002), 2 and 9.
120. HQ USCENTCOM, Tarnak Farms, 18.
121. HQ USCENTCOM, Tarnak Farms, 9-10.
122. The text of the decision is available from CBC News Online, "U.S. Air Force Verdict" (July 6, 2004), http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/ friendlyfire/verdict.html.
123. Bevin Alexander, How Great Generals Win (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1993), 24.
124. Polybius, The Histories of Polybius, 2 Vols., trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), Vol. I, 268.
125. Lt. Col. David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little Brown, 1996).
126. Samuel A. Stouffer, Arthur A. Lumsdaine, Marion Harper Lumsdaine, Robin M. Williams Jr., M. Brewster Smith, Irving L. Janis, Shirley A. Star, and Leonard S. Cottrell Jr., The American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath, Vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 159.
127. Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), 368.
128. Polybius, The Histories, Vol. I, 268.
129. Schneider and Schneider, Sound Off!, 281.
130. Michelle Cottle, "G.I. Jane" The New Republic. 230 (May 24, 2004), 38.
131. Linda Chavez, "Sexual tension in the military," Townhall.com (May 5, 2004), http://www.townhall.com/columnists/lindachavez/lc20040505.shtml
132. Linda Chavez, "Women in combat will take toll on our culture," TownHall.com (April 30, 2003), http://www.townhall.com/columnists/lindachavez/ lc20030430.shtml
133. Elaine Donnelly, "Mean Girls in the Military" Center for Military Readiness (May 18, 2004) http://www.cmrlink.org/culture.asp?DocID = 225.
134. Barbara Ehrenreich, "A uterus is not a substitute for a conscience," Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2004: M1.
135. Cynthia H. Enloe, "Wielding Masculinity inside Abu Ghraib: Making Feminist Sense of an American Military Scandal," Asian Journal of Women's Studies 10 (2004): 96-98, 100.
136. Enloe, "Wielding Masculinity;' 99.
137. Enloe, "Wielding Masculinity? 99. It might be observed that women have proven capable of torturing and tormenting captives in war apart from a need to gain male acceptance. For example, Yugoslav women partisans horrified a male colleague who disparagingly described their torturing captive Nazi soldiers in a sexualized way by stomping on genitals and choking one captive with "his own testicles," in Linda Grant De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 238.
138. Enloe, "Wielding Masculinity;' 92.
139. Incorporated into Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004).
140. Enloe, Wielding Masculinity," 100.
141. Eric Schmitt, "Army Chief Raises Estimate of G.I.'s Needed in Postwar Iraq," The New York Times (February 25, 2003);
142. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006): 97.
143. Eric Schmitt, "Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force's Size and Cost," The New York Times (February 28, 2003).
144. Ricks, Fiasco, 97.
145. Schmitt, "Pentagon Contradicts General."
146. Thomas Ricks reports that "Wolfowitz asked to come but Shinseki declined to invite him," in Fiasco, 156.
147. Eric K. Shinseki, Gen. (ret.), "Farewell Remarks," General Eric K. Shinseki, 34th Chief of Staff of the Army Retirement Ceremony (June 11 2003), http://www.armymil/features/ShinsekiFarewell/farewellremarks.htm.
148. Hersh, Chain of Command, 16, see 48.
149. "The Schlesinger Report," in The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 944.
150. "Memorandum of February 7, 2002," in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 134-35.
151. "The Schlesinger Report," in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 940, 949.
152. "The Taguba Report," in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 409, 451.
153. "The Taguba Report," in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 409.
154. "The Schlesinger Report," in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 911-12, 925.
155. "The Schlesinger Report," in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 923;
156. Hersh, Chain of Command, 3, 71.
157. In Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 123.
158. "The Schlesinger Report in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 923, see 947;
159. see also Gonzales's recapitulation of this position, which he finally regarded as unpersuasive, in Memorandum of January 25, 2002, in Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, 120.
160. The Justice Department and the military also came to loggerheads about permissible interrogation methods for detainees at Guantánamo Bay under the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which has been codified as Sections 2340-2340A of Title 18 of the United States Code. See the memoranda written by the judge advocate generals (JAGs) for the Army Air Force, Navy and Marines in Congressional Record: July 25, 2005 (Senate), S8794-S8796.
161. Shannon E. French, The Code of the Warrior Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present, foreword by Senator John McCain (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2003), 5.
162. French, The Code of the Warrior, 10.
163. Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, "A Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison," Naval Research Review 26 (September 1973): 1-17.
164. French, The Code of the Warrior, 10.
165. Richard Champion, The Children's War, in progress.
166. Rudyard Kipling characterized NCOs as the "backbone of the army" in his 1895 poem "The 'Eathen." This line has been incorporated into the U.S. Army's NCO Creed.
167. Eric Schmitt, "First Woman in 6 Decades gets the Army's Silver Star," The New York Times (June 17, 2005): A 16.
168. Elaine Donnelly, "Army Changes DOD Rule on Women in Land Combat," Center for Military Readiness (March 14, 2005), http://www.cmrlink.org/WomenInCombat.asp?docID = 245; Rowan Scarborough, "Women in combat ban again at issue," The Washington Times, (February 4, 2005).
169. Rowan Scarborough, "GOP Retreats on Women-in-Combat Bill," The Washington Times (May 26, 2005). Important among the Republican opponents to the proposed measure was Rep. Heather A. Wilson of New Mexico, who is an Air Force Academy Graduate.