Military must move beyond integration to inclusion

Imagine you are serving in an elite military unit. Your job is critical to its operations; your teammates rely on you for their safety and often their very lives. You were carefully screened for this assignment and selected as the best candidate over dozens of other applicants of many backgrounds. But you are excluded from some training and many team-building social events, and despite your demonstrated competence, your value and even your right to be there are constantly questioned because you are a woman. Would this make you—and your unit—less effective?

This scenario is an example of an all-too-common phenomenon: integration without inclusion. One of the co-authors witnessed this type of behavior while serving as an intelligence officer with several SEAL teams, and she is hardly alone. The phenomenon has been studied by, among others, James Minnich, a retired Army colonel-turned-Defense Department professor whose research indicates that inclusion is key to strong national defense forces and national security.

Not every SEAL team functioned this way. Many were fully inclusive—there was only one standard, and that was demonstrating superior performance. These teams’ leaders and members recognized that everyone brought something different to the team and that in itself should be valued. They also recognized the need to account for those differences, which might take the form of writing fitness reports appropriately based on someone’s occupational field, reserving additional shooting-range time for combat support, or ordering kit specifically for women’s different body types and physiological needs.

Changing culture in organizations that adhere to rigid gender stereotyping begins with recognizing that integration is not the same as inclusion. Both bring women into the security sector, but integration expects women to adapt to an existing system, while inclusion ensures that the system adapts to women.

Merely throwing the doors open and saying “anyone qualified may enter” does not suffice. This can create an environment where those who have been newly integrated are told explicitly or implicitly that they should “feel lucky” that those in the dominant group “allow them” to be where they have a complete right to be. Consequently, they become “lesser thans” within the group. Even in the best case, with leaders and fellow team members devoted to rethinking institutional culture and actually listening to people who draw attention to its shortcomings, the “firsts” in a given community have the double burden of navigating institutional and cultural barriers while also just trying to do their job.

Those who would change an organization’s culture must foster the recognition that the differences between men and women strengthen an organization. Men and women have different physiological and socialized differences. Men are generally physically stronger, particularly in the upper body; women are generally more flexible and have greater tolerance to exposure. Men generally respond to threats by fight or flight; women favor non-aggressive, tend-and-befriend options. Men hear literally; women hear nuance and tones. These differences can turn an organization from a toolbox with all hammers into one whose variety of tools make it more effective.

Integration efforts

Over the years, the U.S. military has taken varied approaches to integrating women into previously all-male teams and units. In the early 1990s, the first women to be assigned to surface combatants were sent to their ships and wished good luck. In 2011, when women were first assigned to submarines, the Navy took a boat-by-boat approach, integrating crews from the department head-level on down with several women sent to each boat at once. (In both cases, the greatest resistance came not from the male sailors, but from their wives.) During the post-9/11 wars, the military’s fighting forces created purpose-built teams of women such as the Marine Corps’ Team Lioness in Iraq and the Army’s Cultural Support Teams in Afghanistan.

Each of these efforts, and others like them, were frequently portrayed as an experimental and risky approach to the “new idea” that gender diversity is mission-essential, and as necessary as snipers or breachers or other team members. But by the 2010s, it had been clear for several years that women were already doing the job of ground-combat military occupational specialties without actually having the official title and career paths. By 2013, when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that his department would look at opening all jobs to women—an effort that would be completed under his successor Ash Carter—it became clear that any resistance to women in ground combat military occupational specialties was less about evidence and more about ego and masculine identity.

Still, these efforts were generally launched with mere integration in mind, and so failed to meet the promise of an inclusive military. Yet leaders generally remained unconvinced that more needed to be done.

In 2019, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Mary O’Brien was working on her service’s Women’s Initiative Team, an effort to lower barriers to career development for women. “It became obvious we needed to make the business case for policy change with some of our mid-level and senior leaders,” she wrote in a foreword to One Team One Fight: Diversity and Inclusion in the Department of the Air Force, published in June by Air University Press. “Once senior leaders understood how these proposals were directly tied to our warfighting capability through quantifiable metrics”—of recruitment, retention, readiness, resources, and risk to force and mission—“the criticisms of ‘diversity for diversity’s sake’ were negated, and the floodgates opened for a wide variety of changes.”

These changes extended to the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which mandates a diverse workforce: “To recruit and retain the most talented Americans, we must change our institutional culture and reform how we do business. The Department will attract, train, and promote a workforce with the skills and abilities we need to creatively solve national security challenges in a complex global environment.”

The document acknowledges that while most of the structural changes required to integrate the military have been made, the institutional culture is not yet inclusive. There have been no caps on women in the military since the mid-1970s, and most jobs have been open to women in the Navy and Air Force since the early 1990s. Yet some military specialties still have few or no women, and enlisted women and military officers are nearly one-third more likely than men to leave the military after one or two tours.

Most studies about why women depart at higher rates repeatedly cite the same issues: pervasiveness of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment and assault; poor institutional treatment, both culturally and resource-wise, regarding pregnancy and parenthood; and generally exhausting ambient sexism.

Yes, exhausting. Constantly striving to be seen, heard, acknowledged, and valued—while simultaneously not being considered overbearing or aggressive—is exhausting. Having to “prove your value” every day to your colleagues, knowing one mistake is your professional kiss-of-death, is exhausting. And as the recent online “would you rather meet a man or a bear alone in the woods” discussion among women has indicated, being constantly on alert to whether a man is a friend or a Vanessa Guillén-level threat is exhausting. For women in the military, that consideration isn’t limited to the woods, but in an office, barracks, base, ship, or deployment.

Less examined, but another possible cause, is that women learn early on that the military cares more about itself as an institution than caring for its people. From the Navy’s Tailhook coverup in the 1990s to the efforts to hide sexual assaults at the Coast Guard Academy from 1988 to 2006, there is evidence that the military has historically cared more about protecting its image than the truth, and its members. Protecting institutions over people often leads to victim-blaming; consequently, members who are treated as less valued feel less obligated to continue serving.

Moving toward inclusion

The military is a long way from where it was before becoming an all-volunteer force, when women were dismissed from the military if they became parents, and men could not receive benefits as dependents. In addition, there are numerous dual-career couples and single parents of all genders.

The past four years alone have brought a number of positive changes, including the implementation of the recommendations of the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military, Task Force One Navy, and Women’s Initiative Teams across the force. But without deliberate and sustained effort, the Defense Department and the military services, including the Coast Guard, could backslide.

An integrated military says your children didn’t come in your seabag. An inclusive military will support access to childcare as a family issue, not a “woman’s issue,” family-building resources such as assisted reproductive technologies while asking women to spend the best reproductive years deploying or as geographic bachelors, policies that appreciate the intricacies of surrogacy for gay couples, and other policies that cost nothing but the time it takes to write them. The payoff will be recruiting and retaining the most lethal fighting force to support and defend the Constitution. And once they are relieved of the additional burden of fighting for inclusion, service members can focus all of their energy on promoting a military that fosters great people, leaders, and teams.