Women in the infantry: do not conflate COIN and high-intensity warfare
Curator’s note: this post is from a serving infantry officer, and is a response to “Women in the infantry: response to Brown and King” and the articles cited therein.
To start with, I should clarify some assumptions I’m about to make. Firstly, most sensible people agree that the physical standards required of combat arms must not be reduced. I also accept Prof King’s analysis that this would mean only a very few women would actually end up as infanteers. Secondly, this discussion specifically talks about women in the infantry so that’s what I’ll talk about. It sounds pedantic but the debate is subtly different in armoured units, where close combat can be rather different in character, if no less dangerous. Finally, the role of the infantry is dismounted close combat. Recognising there are plenty of other roles it fulfils, this is what it is organised for and the thing that no other arm can do. Therefore, this environment should be the backdrop against which the inclusion of women should be tested.
Before I start, let’s talk about bias. I have recently been an infantry officer and, having attended all male boarding schools between the ages of 7–18 beforehand, might justifiably be regarded as steeped in ‘the culture of man’. Peering past the beam in my own eye, I perceive in the comments of all three protagonists in this discussion the splinters of similar social and cultural biases. The rigorous research which both Prof King and Dr Brown have conducted into this controversial topic is a long way from being ‘stunningly superficial’. But, like all academic work, it is still vulnerable to innate prejudices and priorities of the human being who wrote them. They are therefore not above criticism from less-qualified practitioners who may have to live, or possibly die, with the consequences of their work.
We need to put the recent combat experience of western forces in context. Despite the hyperbole in the public arena, we have been fighting a counter-insurgency, not high-intensity conflict. It has been a messy business, but on the whole, close-combat has been a rare event. The suggestion that 26% of women serving in Afghanistan have been engaged in ‘close combat’ is, in my opinion, inaccurate. Aside from the fact that everyone wants to say they’ve been in a scrap, I suspect those who answered ‘yes’ meant they had been in a ‘contact’ which is rather a different thing. Very few troops in Afghanistan have been subjected to ‘effective enemy fire’. Many more have experience long-range, ineffective enemy small arms fire or in some way involved in an IED ‘incident’. Unpleasant as these things are, they are not close-combat. They are not clearing house or trench occupied by an armed enemy who is trying to stop you by killing you. In fact, our asymmetric enemy was deliberately avoiding close contact because he (and it was ‘he’) knew he’d lose. Whilst death rates have been reduced by a highly sophisticated medical response, overall casualties are comparable to counter insurgencies the UK has fought in the past, but not to ‘high-intensity’ conflicts. This is where the language of ‘the front line’ has been unhelpful. COIN doesn’t have a front line, high intensity warfare does. I suggest the problem isn’t with women ‘on the front line’ but is about women in dismounted close combat. The reason I raise this here is that Prof King’s argument about the emergence of an impersonal professionalised cohesion is based on observations of soldiers operating in this kind of environment. Perhaps one can afford a more professional, and less visceral, cohesion in this kind of environment.
So, as with many other areas of doctrine, we should be careful of learning too many lessons from a failed counter-insurgency campaign in south-central Asia. In an increasingly multi-polar world, the hubris which drove the west to think it could fight such a war may be more tempered by realpolitik. We all know that western armies need to have the ability to conduct COIN in their golf-bag, but they must design themselves around high-intensity conflict. This is firstly because losing a high intensity war is likely to be more disastrous than defeat in an expeditionary ‘war of choice’ and secondly because the ability to conduct high intensity operations effectively has an important deterrent effect. The latter is suddenly looking rather more important that it did.
It seems to me that men are inherently susceptible to a culture of death and violence in a way that women often aren’t. Whilst this is generally a bad thing in society, fostering it in units designed for close combat, albeit with appropriate restraints required by a civilised society, might be an exception. As Shakespeare puts it:
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage; Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1
I remember being surprised to see Dulce et Decorum Est stamped defiantly in gilded letters on the central arch of the chapel at Sandhurst. To my generation, this phrase had lost all Horace’s sincerity and become Owen’s ‘Old Lie’. What surprised me was that I was now required to buy into it. Whether it’s a lie or not, I suggest the soldier who doesn’t believe it will be the less effective for it; as Nick Hedges points out, we must believe ‘the lie’ to fight. I remember a junior platoon commander who was showing worrying signs of limpness on operations. After being ‘gripped’, he confessed that he hadn’t anticipated the degree of role play that was involved in military leadership. He was a highly cultivated young man with a first-class degree from a top-ranked university. He fully understood the ill-conceived nature of the campaign on which he had been asked to risk his life, and he was a weaker leader as a result. The most effective Ukrainian units fighting in the East of that country over the last six months tend to be those with some pretty nasty political views. The truth is that people required to do irrational things, which close combat almost always is, probably have irrational motivations lurking in the background. Celebrating heroism and state-sanctioned murder in a macho culture of derring-do, one-upmanship and denigration of ‘the other’ probably helps.
But is our motivation in defending single sex combat arms really so pure? The more inclusive, tolerant and progressive a society we become, the further we stray from the elemental nature of man’s traditional role in most human societies from time immemorial. You only have to look at Chelsea fans on the Paris Metro to see how unacceptable many of the aspects I have described in the paragraph above are in an advanced liberal democracy. That incident does actually illustrate our debate. Why is racism so hard to ‘kick out’ of football? Probably because football crowds are full of otherwise responsible members of society who go to football games to revel in that uncomplicated sense of tribalism, that aggressive and uncompromising contempt for ‘the other’, that the rest of society now, rightly, forbids. This camaraderie of the terrace is deeply liberating to many, and let’s be honest, those people are usually men. I found the same liberation in Iraq with the butt of a GPMG in my shoulder, as have many others in conflict of all sorts. I wonder whether those of us who have defended the exclusion of women in the combat arms are in fact rather like those football fans. Do we defend this macho culture in regular armies because it is a ‘last bastion’ where that same liberating sense of exemption from society’s ‘feminised’ rules can be justified?
I also think that the impact women have on the moral cohesion of an infantry/armoured unit is dependent on the social mores or the society from which they come. Let’s take the example of openly gay soldiers. It’s as unlikely that an openly gay man would have been accepted in a platoon of infantry soldiers in the 1930s as he would in a working man’s club or city boardroom. Most of us have been surprised at how rapidly soldiers have accepted openly gay people in their ranks. I’m not so sure we should have been; most of those arguing against it were people with little current experience of regimental duty who were remembering how things used to be. They didn’t take into account that many 19-year-old private soldiers now have either a former school friend or perhaps a relative who are openly gay. My instinct tells me that we like to think we live with a warrior code, with values separate from society, but the reality of a regular army is that soldiers are much more integrated with social norms than they might imagine. We do after all tend to marry civilians, drink with them at the weekend, follow the same football teams, read the same newspapers and watch the same TV programmes. Some of us even work with them! In fact, they are not really ‘them’ at all. There are differences of course, but if a society generally thinks women are too sensitive for close combat, or that they’ll reduce men’s effectiveness at conducting it, it’s likely that soldiers will think the same and the impact on moral cohesion will be equivalent. If a society generally thinks that’s a lot of old fashioned nonsense, I reckon that most soldiers probably will too and the impact on moral cohesion of the inclusion of women in the combat arms will probably be a lot less. Both Prof King and Dr Brown will be able to provide a lot of examples of how societal norms have created different cultures in armed forces.
We must also understand the realities of our position and balance it against the effectiveness of our resources. British society will increasingly demand that women are included in the combat arms, indeed the decision has effectively been made in both the US and UK. Defence chiefs are forced to pick their battles with politicians, and where it involves a shift in social norms, they are likely to lose. The shift in US policy is, after all, to a legal decision, not government policy. If the writing is on the wall, it would be better to take control of the change in a way that will make it work, rather than have arbitrary solutions pushed on you that won’t. For example, our ability to maintain current physical standards for the infantry might be taken out of our hands if a decision is forced upon us. In my view, that would have a really grievous impact on fighting power.
Can we afford to sustain an irrational culture that celebrates violence in our military? Is this compatible with mixed gender units? How far should we acquiesce to political demands we think might degrade our fighting power? Do we over-emphasise its importance to fuel our self-perception as a group without the constraints of normal society? All tricky questions to which, not being a professor, doctor or particularly talented web-based commentator, I fear I have not answered very clearly.
So, to clarify my position by way of conclusion: I think that we should recognise that we are talking about close combat in high intensity conflict, not just being in harm’s way. I think this disqualifies much of the experience of western armies in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as much of the vacuous public debate about ‘women on the front line’. We also need to be honest about the value of masculine ‘warrior’ culture in close combat and how realistically we are able to sustain this in the modern world where technology decreases the isolation of the armed forces, both at home and abroad. We also need to clear about how such a small number of women who are likely to serve in the infantry might dilute this culture, particularly when our soldiers will are coming from a society where women attain increasing equality in every other work place. Finally, we must be realists and manage society’s changing demands of us in a way that will minimise any putative loss in fighting power.
I recognise the effectiveness of the uncompromising, impulsive and downright uncivilised aspects of male-macho culture in close combat, but also that some of us are irrationally attached to protecting this because it makes us feel special. Either way, I think that in the future, women will dilute this culture less than they might now, and certainly than they would have in the past. I think if we rigorously enforce standards for infantry personnel (something we don’t do very well right now by the way), I don’t see that the very small number of women who would serve in its ranks would sufficiently reduce the warrior spirit of our units; at least not to the point that we need to continue with their exclusion in the face of significant societal and political pressure to do otherwise. I don’t like it, but then I think of Slim’s advice that ‘nothing is either as good or bad as at first it seems’ and I think that maybe I could live with it.
