Women-in-military panel ending?

A discretionary committee responsible for prompting much of the Clinton-era gender and social experimentation in the U.S. military has been temporarily put on ice, a Pentagon spokesman tells Human Events.

The Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, or DACOWITS, whose charter is up for renewal at the end of February, had no new members appointed in 2001 and is not currently scheduled to have any of its usual quarterly meetings this year.

Although the Pentagon spokesman said that the all-civilian advisory committee is likely to be reinstated, supporters of DACOWITS are fearful, and its conservative detractors hopeful, that the high-budget committee will be permanently discontinued by the Bush administration.

"I would be surprised if it wasn't reinstated," the Pentagon spokesman said. He said that the committee's normal activities have been cancelled only temporarily "as part of our management efficiency initiative," an internal review of all Pentagon discretionary committees.

Although the activities of other discretionary defense committees – such as the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board and the Ballistic Missile Defense Advisory Committee – have not been halted, the spokesman warned against comparing the committees, which he said have vastly different priority levels.

An unaccountable lobby?

Former DACOWITS Chairwoman Mary Wamsley, a supporter of the advisory committee, directed Human Events to an open letter to "the friends of DACOWITS," which has been circulated on the Internet. The letter warns that "efforts are being made to 'minimilize [sic] and marginalize' DACOWITS, which has for many years recommended assignment advances for military women."

Elaine Donnelly, a former member of DACOWITS and founder of the Michigan-based Center for Military Readiness, said that the taxpayer-funded DACOWITS is a waste of money and "an unaccountable feminist lobby in the Pentagon."

"There's no need for military women to have civilian women telling the Pentagon about their interests," Donnelly said. "Virtually everything useful the committee has ever done in its past, was done in its past."

According to the Pentagon, the all-volunteer committee had an $853,000 budget in 2001, making it one of the top-spending discretionary committees in the department. By contrast, the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, which studies the effects of biological weapons, received $220,000, and the Ballistic Missile Defense Advisory Board got $101,000 in the same year.

DACOWITS was established in 1951 to advise the Secretary of Defense on the optimal use of women in the military. Its recommendations at that time focused on making military service attractive and feasible for women by improving living accommodations and recognition for women in the military.

But in recent years, DACOWITS has pursued very different goals. The panel has successfully pushed to establish mixed-gender basic training in every branch except the Marine Corps and to put women as close to combat situations as possible – moves that many argue have weakened military morale, recruitment and combat strength.

Some of DACOWITS's recommendations were adopted in the Clinton years. An Army spokesman confirmed, for example, that the Army began deploying women in field artillery units in 1994.

In addition, women are currently being trained in Army RSTA reconnaissance units, which – although they are not directly assigned to ground combat – are sent to seek out the enemy, so that "combat is a possibility," said Army Lt. Col. Ryan Yantis. Yantis told Human Events that "it is too soon to determine" whether the deployment of women in RSTA units would be a violation of the rule excluding women from combat positions.

This means either women will be put into combat situations, or else their training is a waste of taxpayer money, said Donnelly. "If training funds are being expended on people who are not even deployable, then they need to answer for that," she said.

In 1998, DACOWITS recommended "in the strongest possible terms" that women be allowed to serve as helicopter pilots for Special Forces troops – a recommendation that could lead to a "Black Hawk Down" scenario but with women in the thick of hostile fire. DACOWITS also pushed, successfully, for co-ed duty in missile silos during the Clinton era. That recommendation has already led to trouble for one married man, Air Force Lt. Ryan Berry (an exemplary officer by the Air Force's own testimony) who in 1999 requested a religious exemption from being ordered to spend 24 hours locked in a missile silo alone with a woman who was not his wife. Berry, a West Point graduate who sought out service as a missileer to follow in his father's footsteps, nearly faced a court-martial and was denied promotion, effectively ending his military career.

DACOWITS has sent several controversial recommendations to congressional committees over the last nine years, often against expert advice and military studies that found them impractical or unrealistic.

Among these was the inclusion of women on the crews of Virginia- and Ohio-class submarines. The plan would have put men and women – many with families at home – in the closest possible quarters for months on end. The recommendation came in spite of a 1993 study that found high pregnancy rates among servicewomen deployed at sea on surface ships. (On some ships, the rate was as high as one in three.)

In making this recommendation, DACOWITS was also heedless of some women's health concerns. A woman who discovers she is pregnant after embarking on a submarine would either subject her unborn child to the harmful levels of radiation, atmospheric pressure and carbon monoxide present in a nuclear submarine, or else be evacuated from the sub at great cost to the Navy. Forty percent of pregnancies among enlisted women on sea duty in surface ships ended in miscarriage or abortion, according to a 1998 study.

DACOWITS's more radical and impractical recommendations have aroused the ire of some congressmen on the House Armed Services Committee. The committee spiked the submarine recommendation, for example, in a bipartisan 31-to-21 vote. A spokeswoman for Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., said that in Bartlett's ten years on the Armed Services Committee, DACOWITS has actually tried to "undermine the military's effectiveness" through their focus on gender equality in the services "to the exclusion of all other considerations."

"The work of DACOWITS has put an extremely narrow, parochial interest of inclusion opportunities for women ahead of the fundamental purpose of the military, which is to fight and win wars," the spokeswoman said. "DACOWITS has pushed a 'me, me, me' agenda. But most of the women in the military are not there so that they can do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it. They're team players. They want to serve their country."

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