Losing Audie
Evaluating the costs of institutional biases
This week, the Department of Defense made a historical and radical change to policy by removing gender exclusions from all jobs in the military. Although widely anticipated, the scope is massive and the time to compliance brief. It is possible that policy will be out in front of institutional culture for some time on this issue, meaning that the debate on women serving in frontline combat units will live on, perhaps repressed. The danger in repressing this debate is that the institution may become obligatorily compliant on the surface while fomenting an undercurrent of dissention. The conversation should continue in an open and mutually respectful manner.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter was clear about his philosophy during his announcement, stating that he did not want to restrict the pool of talent in the pursuit of creating the force of the future. But one of the enduring concerns that has been associated with the debate for ages is general disparity in physical capacity between men and women.
In a recent War on the Rocks article, Paul O. Davis recounts the results of a combat performance study by the respected Institute for Human Performance conducted with the United States Marine Corps in the 1980s. Urging a focus on the mission and an unemotional scientific approach to collected data, Davis lays out his case as to why this study has valuable input for today’s debate regarding women in frontline ground combat units.
The study was conducted with researchers who embedded with the Marines to observe and partake in their training, then outlined specific performance parameters that led to the design of an individual fitness evaluation, eliminating the effects of group dynamics and simply focusing on physical performance. Davis and his team discovered, not surprisingly, that combat-style physical exertion had energy expenditures akin to running a half marathon and that an individual’s build and fitness capacity was directly correlated to their ability to sustain shooting accuracy, resist injury, and lead from the front (i.e., stay ahead of others). The results make sense and I do not dispute them.
His article is also heavy on correlations between Marines and athletes in professional-level sports. This is where the value of this study to the debate regarding women in combat begins to erode. Today’s athletes are incredible, virtually unmatched in all of human history for their physical prowess. Personally and professionally they overcome great obstacles to achieve greatness, fame, notoriety, wealth, and individual or team victory. Although there may be parallels between warriors and professional athletes, they are not one in the same, and not even closely related. Professional athletes, in the pursuit of their sport, do not face a tough and determined enemy whose independent and interminable will is bent on their death. They operate within a set and predictable range of rules and regulations, policed by referees who enforces these rules — not an ungoverned clash of competing, irreconcilable violence. They hazard personal bodily harm, and sometimes even death, but not the razing of entire cultures, peoples, and ways of life. Sports commentary often refers to a contest as “war” and “going to battle in the trenches” but let me be clear — it is not a matter of mere magnitude that separates sports from combat.
This distinction matters. Sports and war are worlds apart. It is in this distinction that the debate lies. Success in war is not attributable to the mere aggregation of the ability to lift heavy things for long distances then shoot a static, lifeless circle on a piece of paper.
Early on in World War II, a young, baby-faced man of miniscule stature walked into a Marine Corps recruiting station. In his own words, they were looking for “men, men italicized” and they outright rejected him. So did the Navy and the Army Airborne. Eventually the regular Army reluctantly took him, attempting to relegate him to mess duties and other rear-echelon billets. He may have only weighed in at a lowercase 5'-5" and 110lbs, but this young soldier by the name of Audie Murphy “italicized” his service to the tune of the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars (one with “V”), three Purple Hearts, various other personal and unit awards, and a string of citations that read like the screenplay for a Rambo prequel.
If the Marines missed out on World War II’s most decorated soldier, what would they be missing out on today, by eliminating half of the nationally available pool of potentially hidden Audie Murphys due to gender? Audie Murphy and presumably numerous other men were turned away due to slight physical stature — yet it was his true tenacity, not machismo or physique, that won him many battles and the resulting accolades. Today, we could be once again turning away an entire group of people due to an over-emphasis on the wrong factors.
In war, intangibles matter, and can have an exponentially outsized effect on outcomes. Any weakness can be exploited, but also any opportunity. This is where a lifelong education in the art of war plays such a vital role, providing the ability to weigh disparate data sets of tangible and intangible data and synthesize a decision. Taking some risk in certain areas of physical performance may very well pay massive dividends in another area. Revisiting the conclusions of Davis’s study, what if we were to apply equally passionate yet starkly binary rigor to the intellectual fitness of our force? Theoretically we could create an education study and apply it to a menu of distinguishing demographic factors, determine minimum thresholds, and create an entry exam that would require service members to exhibit intellectual qualities only seen in the upper reaches of academia. But such an approach, much like an over-emphasis on physical fitness, would blindly disqualify scores of talented individuals possessing tenacity and coup d’oeil due to very trainable factors. In recruiting and training a successful military force, we are not creating a team of mere athletes or intellectuals, but warfighters who find victory somewhere in the nexus of numerous human qualities.
I can appreciate a calculated debate weighing the tangible and intangible risks versus rewards on this issue. What is concerning is when merely in the name of a dualistic precedent such as general physical differences between men and women we disqualify all women, even those that would meet an established standard. My fear in this is that our inability to see this problem beyond our own institutional traditions and norms threatens to displace our ability to be tenacious in other realms in creative, disparate, and increasingly necessary ways. In other words, the factors that drive our inability to consider this problem beyond ourselves will make us less able to see any problems beyond ourselves. This is a cyclically decaying and intellectually incestuous path that drives us to get better and better at the tactical proficiencies we are comfortable with and already good at, all the while watching our last victorious war fade very far into the past.
It is becoming increasingly clear that, although the nature of war is indelibly fixed, the character of the battlefield is rapidly evolving. The ability to close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver is increasingly subject to dominance not only in the spheres of “trigger-pulling” but also air and space superiority, sea control (particularly in contested littorals), global logistics, and cyber/information warfare. Employed as a self-sustained, task-organized combat force, the Marine Corps needs to be able to seize the initiative and exploit opportunities across this entire spectrum. Today’s battlefield is much more like Raumschach than Chutes and Ladders, and an outsized emphasis on physical stature and fitness — the universal expectation to do 20 dead-hang pullups and hump a mortar base plate — is creating a growing cognitive synthesis gap between the rapidly evolving battlefield and the slowly adapting warrior class.
Don’t get me wrong — physical courage and discipline will always be a necessary hallmark of the warrior. Also, the evaluation of this quality to a reasonable and trainable standard of physical performance will continue to be the responsibility of the warfighting organization. Institutionally, it is hard to reconcile a service department that is willing to field a Division-I NCAA football team, yet be coy when it comes to applying institutional resources to provide all Marines the physical training they need to meet standards. It is more than reasonable to expect our leaders to achieve and maintain the appropriate level of combat readiness according to these expectations across our forces, despite it being “hard to do.”
Personally, I support the integration of women in combat units — that is, not prohibiting people from joining these units simply on account of their gender. Individuals in combat forces need to be able to meet a physical performance standard that will evaluate their ability to perform much like in Davis’s study. I believe that in moving forward from this week’s announcement under a unified and tenacious pursuit of common objectives, a heterogenic foundation of people provides critical opportunities to exploit in warfare, challenges intellectual apathy, and forges a path to discover the coup d’oeil that is so crucial to the success of military leaders and operations. I do not deny that there is very real difficulty on this path. I simply affirm that it is worth it.
Major Sisyphus is an active-duty Marine officer and aviator. He has participated in numerous operations and campaigns around the globe to include two combat deployments in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The opinions expressed are his alone, and do not reflect those of the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
