The camouflage baby boom

By David Hackworth

“Chief, I can’t sail. I’m pregnant.”

“Colonel, I can’t fly. Gotta breast feed Wendy.”

“Sarge, I can’t deploy. My baby sitter’s sick.”

Pregnancy and a mini population explosion in the ranks have degraded our military’s ability to fight.

A sailor can’t go to sea when she is more than 20 weeks pregnant. Pregnant paratroopers can’t jump out of airplanes and pregnant women in all the services must stand down from their regular job if it involves heavy lifting.

An Army ordnance sergeant says “Half my crew are women. If my women soldiers aren’t pregnant, they’re on maternity leave and if they’re not on leave, they’re on light duty. We’re behind schedule on everything.”

One of the most poignant photos of Desert Storm was a camouflage-clad mother kissing her child goodbye just before she climbed aboard a desert-bound aircraft.

Today, there are almost 20,000 such single parents. The vast majority of these are women.

Pregnancy and non-deployable workers don’t slow down Sears, but they sure rip up the Force. During military operations everybody plays a vital part, not unlike members of a football team. If you’re missing a quarterback, you’ll probably lose the game. In combat, if crew members are absent, you could lose the fight.

Many serving members are angry and frustrated. They have to pick up the slack, putting in extra hours doing the jobs of Jill, who’s too far along to do her duty, or Julie or Bob, who couldn’t find sitters to take care of their kids when their units moved out.

Pregnancy has always been a problem with women soldiers. Until the 1970s, a pregnant soldier was given instant walking papers. Then the purpose of the military was to defend America, not to propagate. A captain at Fort Polk says, “Approximately 18 percent of the female soldier population here is pregnant. Of that, over half are unmarried!”

About 15 percent of the force are women and at any given time five to ten percent are pregnant. The number of pregnant or single parent women who can’t deploy to a hot spot either because they can’t do their job or their baby sitter disappeared is equivalent to an infantry division.

During Desert Storm pregnancy jumped to 15 percent, leaving many units in a main strain. More recently in Bosnia, pregnancy was the single most cited reason for evacuation from the theater. A sergeant there says “It ain’t bullets that’s causing holes in our ranks, it’s babies.”

When I was a soldier boy in the 1940s, less then 10 percent of the force was married. Then the word was, “If the Army wanted you to have a wife, it would issue you one.” Today, in the all volunteer military, 70 percent of those serving are married.

Free medicine, low-income housing, and an extensive social support system quietly encourages service personnel to have children. Additionally, many female teenagers coming into the service believe they’re baby-proof.

To cope with all the kids, the Pentagon runs a $300 million-a-year child care operation.

A Navy Chief says “When I enlisted, the incentive was see the world while serving your country. Now it’s to have a big family and be looked after by Uncle Sam. Kids are causing more damage to the fleet than Japanese torpedoes did during World War II.”

Two years ago, I warned in this column about how badly our combat readiness had slipped. At that time, the top brass said this wasn’t true and everything was jake. Last week, the General Accounting Office confirmed nothing was jake and that our military readiness was collapsing.

Now the Pentagon, supporting the White House’s policy to feminize the military, says, “The women-in-the-military program is working just fine.”

This also isn’t true.

Our military is too critical to continue to be used as social laboratory for an experiment that failed long ago. Members of Congress must give this issue a hard look just as they are now examining readiness.

Our forces must return to the standard: Pregnant, unmarried women should be automatically discharged. Nor should male or female members marry until their second hitch. By then, they’ll have the means and maturity to handle marriage in an armed forces that spends far more time away from home than is healthy for any intimate relationship.

Hack Notes

The complete newsletter this week is devoted to the issue of should women be placed in all-combat positions with our armed forces in the near future.

I believe this issue is the most critical problem facing our armed forces today. Pentagon leaders just don’t seem to understand how 20-plus years of gender integration compounded by the sex scandals of the last decade have ripped the Force apart. They seem to believe that their orders, neat little lectures and sensitivity training can change the basic nature of human beings. This is about as dumb as believing a farmer can order weeds not to grow or a tree not to drop its fruit.

Defense Secretary Cohen recently said, “We are not going to tolerate the abuse of women in the military … if there is evidence of that, it will be investigated and prosecuted.”

Bet on it. His admirals and generals will echo this and things will be just fine. Right? For 20 years now, it has been all about investigating and prosecuting. And besides booting a lot of good people out of the service, degrading the combat readiness and filling up jails, these actions and threats haven’t improved things one lick.

No one on high has bothered to really examine the problem.

What worries me is that there’s clearly a stealth master agenda. Through gender creep every position in the Armed Forces will have been integrated by “X” date. For example, sources tell me Fort Benning’s Infantry Training Brigade will kick off coed basic training in October 2000. If Benning’s targeted, you can bet your sweet potato that every other combat position has a firm target date as well.

Women in almost every fighting position would be just swell around 2050, when wars will be fought with cyber and information weapons. Then space troopers won’t have to leave their air-conditioned bunkers. All they’ll have to do is press a button, flip a switch, operate a keyboard and their opponent will be melted or unplugged.

The problem is the in-between years. My take is that for the next several decades combat will be mainly what our Special Ops people saw in Mogadishu in October of 1993. It will be fought largely in cities and will be very nasty in the old fashioned kill or be killed, brutal kind of way with a new dash of NBC and terrorism to update the mix.

Since it appears that the Pentagon leaders are unable to apply common sense to this critical issue, then the only recourse is for Congress to appoint an independent commission, made up of ordinary Americans — not the standard lot of retired generals and politicians and do-gooders — folks from Main Street USA who don’t have a vested interest or an ax to grind except to see that our country has a defense force that can do the job.

If you agree, demand that your lawmaker get cracking. A starting point would be to mail him/her this newsletter and ask them to cure the madness.

Speaking of women in combat, my assistant Rhonda is a one woman show who is as stretched and overworked as the average U.S. unit.

Rhonda is the complete staff. Some folks out there think we have a huge outfit that can send back copies of pieces on demand, do research, resolve difficult issues and provide complete expertise on all living and dead matters.

Ain’t so — Anyone living near Whitefish that has a few hours to give will be welcome to Rhonda’s bunker.

Keep five yards,

–Hack

David Hackworth

Col. David H. Hackworth, author of "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts," "Price of Honor" and "About Face," saw duty or reported as a sailor, soldier and military correspondent in nearly a dozen wars and conflicts -- from the end of World War II to the fights against international terrorism. Read more of David Hackworth's articles here.