Punish Predators, Not the System

More than 100 House members are supporting legislation to segregate men and women during military basic training, an effort prompted by recent sex scandals that have mainly involved noncommissioned officers preying on young women soldiers. To end integrated training would be to reverse an essentially successful policy adopted by the Air Force more than 20 years ago and by the Army and Navy more recently. Only the Marine Corps, with a relatively small percentage of female enlistees, maintains gender-separate training for its recruits.

Defense Secretary William Cohen and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, oppose the congressional move as a needless and harmful retreat. “It’s not something wrong with the training,” Shalikashvili correctly notes, “it’s a failure by a handful of trainers.” The mechanism for dealing with such failures is through courts-martial and stiff sentences on conviction. What’s needed additionally, as recent cases make clear, is more intensive indoctrination of all newcomers to the military about their right to be free from sexual or other abuse and the recourse they have should abuses occur.

Men and women serve together throughout their military careers. The time to start getting them used to this proximity and developing the supportive and respectful relations that their work requires is the day they put on the uniform. Women serve in the armed forces as a matter of right, not as a favor. Indeed today, with an all-volunteer military, the services could not meet their responsibilities without substantial numbers of women in the ranks. A return to gender segregated basic training would mark a major step backward, for the services and for the country.