"By Force of Arms: Rape, War and Military Culture"

"By Force of Arms: Rape, War and Military Culture, " by Madeline Morris. Duke Law Journal 45(4), 651-781 (February 1996).

The questions concerning the employment of women in combat units of the U.S. armed forces has been on the front burner since the recent conflict in the Persian Gulf. Women continue to be integrated into most combat arms -- seemingly successfully. Yet, while the policy has not been tested in war, it is disrupting units even in peacetime because of pregnancy.

Recently, Duke law professor Madeline Morris published an extended treatise on women in the armed forces. The stated purpose is to find ways to reduce the rape incidence as compared to other violent crimes in the armed forces. Indeed, the opening part is concerned with a statistical analysis of rape. Nevertheless, the bulk of the paper addresses the issue of opportunities for women, with the author proposing that females comprise half the complement of combat units. In arriving at this position, she invokes numerous plausibility arguments and outright speculation, but offers no supporting evidence beyond the badly flawed and irrelevant report on "Tailhook '91" by the DoD Inspector General.

According to Morris, the principal agent of cohesion in military units is "male bonding" advanced by appeals to masculinity, "Macho" in Morris' terms. This reviewer must confess that he saw little of Morris' "macho" in his naval service. Crew cohesion resulted from reliability, technical competence, dedication to duty, and the ability to interact well with other people. In short, it was a matter of trust. "Macho," perhaps of fleeting importance in "boot camp," was irrelevant in our ship, a typical U.S. destroyer.

Eschewing masculinity and ignoring the considerations listed above, what does Morris suggest as alternatives? She proposes investigating the bonding elements of certain religious orders, Communist Party cells, and the French resistance underground in World War II. On the face of it, these choices seem rather absurd. Nothing at all about religious orders seems pertinent to the ultimate function of armed forces -- defeating an enemy in battle. As for Communist cells and the French underground, do we really want the cohesion of our armed services to be based upon conspiratorial organization? Such arguments are moot anyway because of the strong tendency of systems with "feedback" to self-organize. The unexpected will surely dominate the efforts to impose cohesion from above.

That the services have problems dealing with large-scale assignment of women to operating forces is beyond dispute. As stated above, the main current problem is pregnancy. A second problem stems from lack of adequate physical strength in almost all women. Few women sailors, for example, are capable of dragging charged fire hoses into nearly inaccessible spaces, shoring sagging bulkheads, or rigging patches on underwater holes in the hull; such was necessary to save USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) in the Persian Gulf conflict. To try to prove her point, the author cites Soviet and Israeli combat experience. Women were employed in combat units during World War II and the 1948 war, respectively, only because of insufficient man power. The Soviet literature is sparse, but contrary to the author's statements, the Israeli's found the practice, adopted as an act of desperation, to so adversely affect unit performance that it has never been used again.

If Morris' paper were merely one more addition to the archival legal literature, it would not excite much interest. However, the author was for a time a consultant to the Secretary of the Army on female issues. For this reason, her views and advice are important public business. The services can struggle along with the problem in peacetime without courting disaster. Performance in war is another matter. The author, who appears to be without military experience, seems unconcerned, waving aside such considerations as being "at the margin." In battle, the margin is all too frequently the difference between victory and defeat, not to say unnecessary deaths as well.

Reviewed by Robert C. Whitten

Copyright Dr. George Kourvetaris Summer 1999
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