COL. SMITH: Mr. Ricks, you've studied and written about the military culture. What do you mean by this, and how is it related to what might be called the general American culture?

MR. RICKS: It's a separate culture, different from the society it protects, with different requirements, and I think increasingly different in the way it thinks about itself from the society it protects.

COL. SMITH: How does the way the media reports on the military influence the public's perception and tolerance of the military culture?

MR. RICKS: I think the media coverage influences public perception a lot. I think the media coverage is pretty sloppy. I think there's not a lot of military understanding brought, especially the big crisis coverage like Lieutenant Kelly Flinn.

COL. SMITH: Why is there this disparity?

MR. RICKS: Most reporters have no military experience nowadays and don't invest the time to understand the subject they are covering, and tend to bring kind of "yuppie" assumptions to the coverage. So they saw, with Kelly Flinn, saw the charge of adultery as the major charge when, in fact, insubordination and making a false statement carried far more severe penalties and really were what the Air Force was about on that.

COL. SMITH: Gender relations seem to have usurped race as the most prominent sociological issue in today's military. Why, in your opinion, is this issue so prominent now?

MR. RICKS: Well, basically, the military's done a pretty good job on race and hasn't done such a good job on gender. Also, race does not speak to behavior. But to an extent, gender does. Gender affects people in what they do and how they live. For example, you had a helicopter pilot in the Army recently down in Panama who wanted to breastfeed. And this has not been an issue until recently. That requires the military to change in a way that race never required the military to change. It required people in the military to change, but it didn't require basic changes in how the military operates.

COL. SMITH: What effect has gender integration seemed to have on fighting units?

MR. RICKS: Well, that's really problematic. I think it's -- the jury is really still out there. What I have seen, though, in a lot of front-line units, you don't have women in ground combat but you do have women in a lot of units that really are front-line combat units. These units really seem to me to be split along gender lines, much more than they are in any way or race or class or age.

I remember looking at a forward support battalion, 10th Mountain(?) Division, that had recently deployed to Somalia, Florida, and Haiti. There was one woman in that unit who had been pregnant for all three deployments, who was deeply resented by other people in her platoon. And I think that is a problem.

COL. SMITH: It's interesting, the British have just announced they're going to open combat engineers and artillery units to women now, but those remain closed in the U.S. Army. Do you see -- you know, one nation's change isn't a trend, but do you see perhaps down the line the same approach of opening more combat-related but not front-line combat units to women?

MR. RICKS: I think so. I think it probably will happen. It'll be a grand experiment until we actually see how it plays out when the U.S. gets in a fairly large-scale, high-intensity war. Combat engineers are front-line people, as you know. Those are people who have to go in and breach lines while the tanks or the infantry stand off. I can think of no more difficult front-line job than a combat engineer. Some women will be able to do it. Some women are better at it than men. But as a whole, I'm not sure quite how it's going to play out.

First of all, are enlisted women going to want to sign up for that? When I talk to enlisted women, they say, "No, I did not join the U.S. Army to fight on the front lines. I joined for a lot of other reasons, but not for that." I think one of the surprises has been how few enlisted women actually want to go into those jobs.

COL. SMITH: The military set the pace and example for the rest of the nation in racial integration. Yet it seems unable or, at a minimum, less able to successfully implement gender integration. Why the difference?

MR. RICKS: Gender is harder than race, I think, in many ways, because gender does go to behavior issues. Also, you have a much more conservative military than you used to have. Over the last 25 years, the U.S. military has moved heavily rightward in the officer corps. So while they have on the one hand the practical argument, this is a difficult thing to do and it does change basic military behavior, it also is someone they generally are more resistant to in political terms.

COL. SMITH: Traditionally, women and children have not been regarded as combatants. But with regard to children, this assumption has been overturned, particularly in African civil wars. Does the experience of U.S. military women in the Gulf War itself overturn this presumption in our military and, if so, what does it portend?

MR. RICKS: No, I think the Gulf War was too small a sample and too short a period to really test gender integration on the front lines. I think the test is going to be ten or fifteen years out, in some form of high-intensity combat. And I don't know how -- and I don't think anybody knows how -- the American people are going to react to seeing a lot of dead female soldiers or female POWs.

COL. SMITH: Changing track a little bit here, what is fraternization and why does the military make such an issue of it?

MR. RICKS: It's a big question. Fraternization is about improper behavior between the ranks. Each of the services has a somewhat different definition. But you've got to remember that the basic purpose of military justice is not to protect the rights of the individual, it's to protect the rights of the institution and to ensure discipline. Fraternization speaks to that, which is how the institution governs itself and disciplines its members.

COL. SMITH: In the past year, the media has carried numerous stories about past and present criminal and consensual sexual relations involving virtually all ranks in the services. In terms of consensual relations between sexes, why does the military impose restrictions that do not exist in civil life?

MR. RICKS: Because military life is different from civil life. You cannot judge the military by analogy to a "yuppie" office. The military can be a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job in very strenuous conditions. When I followed one Marine platoon through boot camp for my book, they would occasionally have them simply stand in formation, strip, and change. Somewhere out in the woods or on a drill field. You cannot do that with a gender-integrated unit. I have a hard time explaining this to people in Washington sometimes, that military life can be extraordinarily intimate, both emotionally and physically.

I have walked into tents in the middle of the night and seen fifteen people curled up around each other, collapsed in fatigue after being up for, say, 25 hours at a spell. This is not office life. Yes, parts of the military do look like offices for large chunks of time. But you have to govern it by the sense that a lot of these people at some point might be put in very different circumstances.

COL. SMITH: The same thing you run into in the field exercises, I suppose, between that and an armored personnel carrier with a heater on a very cold night.

MR. RICKS: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

COL. SMITH: It'll get that intimacy.

MR. RICKS: Yes. Everybody trying to get up next to it, yeah.

COL. SMITH: Does the military treat equally men and women who are involved in consensual sex fraternization or adultery, that becomes public knowledge. In other words, things that get to good order and discipline or bringing discredit on the service.

MR. RICKS: There's actually been a lot of grumbling in the Army that the women involved in a lot of these sex scandals have not been charged. When you ask the Army why, the Army says, "Because it was an unequal relationship, there's an element of coercion there," and to which the Army guys I'm hearing from respond, "Sure it's unequal, sure there's coercion, but the woman still knew that she was in violation of fraternization rules when she engaged in consensual sex." There's a little bit of grumbling about a double standard there.

COL. SMITH: And, of course, the double standard is one of the catch words or catch phrases that run through the service now and causes resentment.

MR. RICKS: Enormously. Because what is the remaking of the U.S. military over the last 25 years about? It's about bringing up standards and holding people to standards. Well, when you have two different sets of standards for whatever reasons, good or bad, it does create suspicion and resentment. And undermine the morale of the unit.

The Army's new rules are supposedly for physical fitness go to effort, rather than performance. Which begs the question. On the front lines, are you going to say, "Thanks for trying to pick me up, Sergeant, I know you gave your hundred percent effort but I guess you have to put me down, you can't carry me out." No. You want someone to carry you out of the line of fire when you're wounded. You don't care how much effort they gave. And that does cause a lot of worry, that are we creating two tracks of standards out there for units.

COL. SMITH: This gets back to something said earlier though, too, that for women who are capable of meeting the standard, there should be no bar to them enlisting or joining units of any kind. Is that a fair assessment?

MR. RICKS: Of my view?

COL. SMITH: Yes.

MR. RICKS: No, I think you want to be very careful and slow about it. I think this goes to a lot of questions of culture and unit cohesion. What I was saying is that there are clearly women who can perform to standard. I'm not sure there are enough of them who want to, that it would be worth it to say, "Integrate an infantry unit." I think it needs to be taken very carefully and slowly. Ultimately, it seems to me the judge has to be combat effectiveness. Not individual human dignity.

The purpose of the military unit, especially a front-line unit, is to kill people and damage things. And you have to wonder, if you went to a 20 percent female infantry unit, I don't know a lot of people that say it would do that as effectively over the long term.

Also, I don't know if you can find 20 percent of military women who would want to go into that branch.

COL. SMITH: What is the combat exclusion rule, and what effect, if any, does it have on gender relations in the military?

MR. RICKS: In some ways, the combat exclusion rule is a joke. It says that women should not serve -- or may not serve in front-line ground combat units. They can fly attack helicopters, they can fly fighter jets. They can be combat medics, they can serve at the brigade level in combat units. Well, in practical terms it means that women are all over the battlefield. And the next war the United States fights is going to have a lot of dead female American troops. That is a plain and simple fact. Is it good or bad? I don't know. We'll find out. We will.

What I see in something like the National Training Center out in the Mojave Desert, where the Army conducts very large-scale exercises, is somebody says, "Give me the soldier that did this very good map, I need that soldier to go and get with that battalion." And something might pop and say, "Well, sir, that military intelligence specialist is a woman." And the response will be from the colonel, "I didn't ask what gender that soldier was, I need that soldier at the battalion level or at the company level right now, because there's an issue that this map speaks to. And that soldier needs to get out there."

And again and again, you see combat -- female combat medics all over the battlefield. If they're in engineers, and I think they will be, that's at the front lines. It really struck me recently, watching hundreds of trucks pull away from the front lines after a maneuver, after the conclusion of the set piece battle at the National Training Center, that the only people left out there after the tanks were gone were women. Hurtling/huddling(?) across combat medicants(?).

COL. SMITH: But that also goes to the point that warfare itself is probably going to change, in using the high-intensity combat if that ever comes again, it will not be as the world wars of this century, where you have defined lines. So women, even in the rear, could very well be on the front lines.

MR. RICKS: Yes. I think that's absolutely right, in a fast-moving, fast-flowing battlefield in which the speed of the battlefield is, say, 20 kilometers an hour, rather than the historical 5 to 10 kilometers an hour that you might have had occasionally in World War II, I think women will be all over the battlefield, and I think the interesting thing is that high-tech combat is going to prove to be even more physically taxing than the low-tech industrial combat of World War II. Because you have to carry all the same things that soldiers have to carry, you know, a weapon, munitions, food and water, and medical supplies. In addition, you've got a computer strapped on your back, and you've got some sort of visual high-tech gear that's popped on your helmet. So you're carrying an even greater load and being subjected to much greater stresses because you have information flowing in front of you at a far greater speed.

When I was at this exercise out in the desert this spring, it struck me -- I was tireder, more fatigued at the end of the week than I ever was in Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia. Because I'd been watching -- observing high-tech combat operations at a very high pace. Unlike the rather easier, slower, more cautious pace that you see in peacekeeping.

COL. SMITH: According to some studies completed in the summer of 1997, sexual harassment continues to be a significant problem, more than two decades after women started in all-volunteer force. In your view, have gender harassment and discrimination remained proportionately more prevalent in the military than in general society?

MR. RICKS: It's hard to compare, because there really are not that good numbers on a society. But clearly it is a big problem in the military, and it's bigger than the military thought it was. I think the military got a little bit cocky. "Hey, we solved race, we solved drugs." And they really weren't paying that close attention to what was going on at the very small unit level in sexual harassment. They thought that the chain of command would catch it, and I think they're really startled by Aberdeen in the Army, that somehow they didn't pick up the signals. That commanders were not going out and taking the temperature of units closely enough to know what was going on in the units they commanded.

COL. SMITH: Some comment has been made that the failure of commanders to go out and keep their finger on the pulse was in fact related to the drawdown, which placed greater burdens on individuals in command positions. What's your view of that?

MR. RICKS: I think that's whining and excuse-making. I think it's an excuse for poor command. There is nothing that prevents a good commander, no matter how small his staff, from going out, having lunch in the mess hall, taking PT and running with the troops. These are the things that good commanders do and, I'm told, did not happen at Aberdeen. It's no cost at all. You don't need resources to take the temperature of the troops. You just need to be concerned and hard-working. You show up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning in the barracks and walk through. I've been in Marine boot camp. I've watched commanders do that. Good commanders do it.

COL. SMITH: The services, especially the Air Force, have been portrayed as puritanical, intent on sexual witch hunts with regard to pursuing and punishing those who are involved in consensual sex. Is this simply bad press, poor judgment in handling non-criminal sexual incidents, or are there other explanations?

MR. RICKS: I think those are just the right explanations. I think it was bad reporting by the press and lousy handling by the Air Force that led to the Kelly Flinn media extravaganza. The Air Force really didn't explain what it was doing, it was purely reactive, and the press for weeks really did not report accurately what was happening. The joke of it is that I find the Air Force the least disciplined in the services, the least likely to really be puritanical. The Marines, by contrast, are a far more disciplined service in both their officer and enlisted ranks. And interestingly, although the Marines don't do that well on gender issues, I think they are more disciplined in that sense.

I actually think that the Kelly Flinn thing was the result of poor discipline from the academy on up. They seem to be turning out officers in the Air Force who don't have a basic understanding of military culture and are not adequately indoctrinated into military life. I think that's the result of poor standing -- poor training at the academy level and in boot camp for the enlisted.

COL. SMITH: One critic of the military's approach to gender relations believes that, irrespective of public commitment to gender integration by top DOD officials, little will change in the preexisting critical mass of women are present in the military units. Some say about 10 percent could be women. Given the general conservative drift of the officers in the senior noncommissioned officer corps, can sheer numbers of women eventually change the reality?

MR. RICKS: No. I have problems with the mass argument. Because it seems almost an excuse. "Oh, these things happen because we didn't have a mass of women," and somehow you have postpone addressing this until you get a mass of women. First of all, you're not going to get a mass of women in certain areas. Second of all, it seems to me that that postpones the hard work that needs to be done. I've seen Army units where they have some problems with gender but they are not massive problems. They're addressed.

And when I look, what I consistently find is the commander has made it his business. It's not his Equal Opportunity officers, it's not the senior woman in the unit, it is commander's business. Race, drugs, gender integration. He has made that his business and he speaks to it and he enforces it. In those units, it works. And that's irrespective of whether it's a majority female, which you have in some units, or just a few females.

COL. SMITH: So it comes down to one word. Leadership.

MR. RICKS: Leadership and standards. And what does leadership do? Leadership enforces standards. Which is a problem I have with Army boot camp. Especially for the noncombat arms. Those boot camps are not holding people to standards, and I think showing inadequate respect for the individuals they're training. You really want to respect an individual? Hold them to standards and train them so they can do their jobs right.

COL. SMITH: Is the gender controversy a reflection in part of the traditional forms of warfare? That is, will it become less of an issue as the military incorporates more technology that removes the human from direct contact with opposing forces?

MR. RICKS: I actually think rather the opposite. I think the high-tech battlefield of the future is going to be more stressful, more difficult, place more of a burden on the individual. You're going to find a fast-moving battlefield in which you have to carry a lot of your stuff very quickly and react to information very quickly.

COL. SMITH: Some sociologists make a distinction between enlisted women, who fear there may be more sexual harassment in combat arms, and women officers, who fear advancement will be limited unless all arms of the service are open to them. Does your research reflect this dichotomy and, if so, how important is it?

[Interruption]

MR. RICKS: The question again is?

COL. SMITH: Enlisted women who fear that there may be more sexual harassment if the combat arms are open to them versus the officers who are -- who fear that their advancement will be limited if the combat arms is not open to them. There is dichotomy which has been raised. What does your research show, and is there? Is it significant?

MR. RICKS: I think it is definitely there. There is a class divide between the career officer, the female career officer who wants to make a career and realizes that if you're going to rise to the top of your service you really need to serve in infantry, artillery or armor. And then the enlisted woman, who really joined for very different reasons. Even if she wants to make a 20-year career, she joined to get out of a small town, maybe out of an abusive family situation, she wants decent housing, a safe environment, perhaps an education. She does not want to be facing enemy guns, generally.

Not all officers -- not all female officers are asking for combat arms, not all enlisted are turning it down, but generally that dichotomy does exist.

COL. SMITH: Is it harder for women to be assimilated into the military culture and, if so, what are the reasons and what are the remedies?

MR. RICKS: You really need to call it military "cultures." It's a plural, as you know. There is a warrior culture, there's a management culture, and there are other cultures. Yes, it is very hard for women to be assimilated into the warrior culture, but we all know women warriors. I think of some of the pilots I know. And these are genuine warriors. But real sacrifices have to be made to be part of that warrior culture. And some of the women are aware of it, but other women seem to be saying, "No, I want to change that warrior culture," and that's where a lot of the friction comes from.

COL. SMITH: Anything you want to add that we didn't cover?

MR. RICKS: Yeah. The one thing I would say is I think culture is the single biggest issue facing the U.S. military today. It is the umbrella under which all these other issues fit: gender, the gliticization (phonetic) of the military, the changing nature of the U.S. military profession in the post-Cold War era. Culture is a very difficult issue, and it strikes me that a lot of civilians aren't even aware of it, don't even know how to talk about military culture. But even in the military, it's what we talk about when we're really talking about other things. I think it's one reason that, for example, sex becomes such an issue. But even inter-service rivalries. Very much, I think, are culture issues. It's the Marines --

(Recording interruption.)

(End of proceedings as recorded.)