cover image The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars

The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars

Stephanie Gutmann. Scribner Book Company, $25 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-684-85291-1

From the outset, no reader will doubt freelance journalist Gutmann's answer to her own rhetorically posed question about the ""female-friendly"" armed services' ability to fight. But no doubt many will be taken aback by the evidence she presents to bolster her view that the U.S. military has been seriously handicapped by attempts to integrate women into the fighting force. Gutmann's arguments are not necessarily new; proponents of the ""old"" military have long charged that the armed forces have succumbed to the twin devils of lowered standards and political correctness. But Gutmann offers a strong set of firsthand observations as well as military studies to make the case. She begins her expos with visits to co-ed training camps where the challenges have been adjusted to accommodate less able females. At one navy site, Gutmann watches while male recruits who are navigating an obstacle course stop in midexercise to help their female comrades complete an exhausting series of pull-ups: ""boys have grasped girls' legs and are furiously pumping the girls up and down, in some cases, there's a boy on each leg."" Elsewhere the author presents startling statistics on the new, gender-integrated physical training. Even with lowered standards in place, one army research division found that the hospitalization rate among females was 10 times that of males. An advocate of a strong military, Gutmann is not in the camp of those who would ban women from the services altogether. She presents common-sense solutions, such as returning to the separation of the sexes in basic training and the elimination of sex-based recruitment quotas. Gutmann is not subtle in making her argument: if 10 years from now the U.S. gets ""utterly whipped"" in a war, she says, Americans will know who to blame: presidents Bush and Clinton, as well as the Congress that authorized today's integrated armed forces. (Mar.)