Feel the Love, Part II

"Victory after all, I suppose!" he said,
feeling his aching head.
"Well, it seems a very gloomy business."
--The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien

A soldier who won't fuck,
won't fight
--attributed to General Patton
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[This post is a follow-on to "Feel the Love" (7 Dec 09) re. Command Sergeant Major (CSM) Teresa L. King]:

CSM Teresa King was the Commandant of the Drill Sergeant for the last two years, until her recent suspension for as-yet unspecified reasons. Ranger opposed her appointment in 2009 on the basis of her gender and rank, asking: Is the Army about sexual and social equality or does it exist to win wars? The two goals require different realities.

Further, why did King keep her post for two years? In the past, a command slot was a 12-month tour, especially in Tradoc / non-deployable school environments.

Some recent traffic in comments at the '09 post prompted this update -- the criticism there argued for the illusion that an enlisted man (EM) can be Commandant just because the school is an EM level course. If officers are isolated from the command structure, then how does the army expect the EM to understand officers and bond with them via daily contact? (CSM King's suspension was brought to Ranger's attention immediately after those comments supporting King.)

As fine as any CSM may be, he is still not an officer and lacks that perspective. They are CSM's exactly because they are not officers. If we are so sold on the concept of blurring the lines here, why not eliminate rank altogether?

Further, Ranger will never accept the presence of female soldiers in maneuver units on any battlefield. Nada! Wars, and specifically battles, are not won by sexually integrated units. Sex will continue to be a daily occurrence when a sexually-integrated unit exists. If a U.S. President cannot resist the urge to play with an intern, how can we expect soldiers to be more circumspect?

It's disingenuous to believe that soldiers, whether EM or officer, will not bump uglies wherever they chance to be. With women in the ranks, I call it "Roll Your Own," a variation of the old, "If you got em, smoke 'em." Them's the facts.

Minor point: In the original article on King she is quoted as yelling at a soldier, "Get off my grass!" Perhaps this was cited to show her toughness, but it means precisely nothing. Perhaps she was priming the soldier for service in the Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy has paid untold sums of money to put lawns in the desert around the complex. Maybe that's a shout-out to all Iraqis: STAY OFF OUR GRASS!

Why did we need General Petraeus when a CSM would have done the same thing without even writing a new manual? "Keep off the grass" sums it up perfectly.

Feel the Love

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We believe the Army made a mistake in its recent appointment of CSM Teresa L. King to the job of Commandant of its Drill Sergeant School at Ft. Jackson (First Woman Ascends to Top Drill Sergeant Spot):

"It may come as no surprise that the Army’s new top drill sergeant idolizes Gen. George S. Patton Jr., has jumped out of planes 33 times, aces every physical training test and drives a black Corvette with “noslack” vanity plates."

How does a sergeant -- or even a sergeant major -- become a commandant in any U.S. Army endeavor? When did sergeants gain the command authority to issue orders?

Commandant orders are not sergeant-level or doctrinal realities. Officers command, NCO's follow, except in today's Army that rule has been subverted. Even Warrant Officers are being given command authority, a misuse of the concept. Warrant Officers and NCO's are not officers.

King "says she regrets not having been deployed to a war zone during her 29-year Army career." It seems ridiculous to have a senior NCO who has never deployed to a combat zone -- let alone had combat duty -- be in charge of all the drill sergeants in training. Today, there are service members with as many as seven deployments, yet a slick sleeve gets the top job? This is a poor call for the chain to make.

Why would the Army want a non-combat arms type in charge of training all of our Drill Sergeants? When was the last time the CSM of the Army was not a combat veteran? Why should a non-combat arms female who never deployed be given this plum assignment without paying her combat dues, as did all of her male predecessors? The Army does not need a support type in a top command leadership position.

As if to justify King's choice in the face of her service weaknesses, she is described as both hard and soft, in an attempt to showcase what a woman might bring of especial import:

"Yet for all her gruffness, she can show surprising tenderness toward her charges. She describes her soldiers as “my children” and her approach to disciplining them as “tough love.” She wells up with emotion while describing how she once hugged a burly master sergeant whose wife had left him."

Pardon me, but if a man hugged a female soldier we would be crying sexual harassment. Yet when CSM King does it, it is seen as matronly and praiseworthy. Most soldiers would pass on the hugs, even from Momma Bear; that is not why we join the Army.

As an aside, the Times article on CSM King carries a misleading statistic regarding "gender integration" in the military:

"Just 8 percent of the active-duty Army’s highest-ranking enlisted soldiers — sergeants major and command sergeants major — are women, though more than 13 percent of Army personnel are female."

The figures are misleading because they do not consider the fact that not all slots/units have female soldiers. The actual percentage of women in high-ranking positions factoring out the above would reflect a different number, one more consistent with women's actual presence.

All things considered, this looks like a token appointment, and not one to the betterment of the service.


Tomorrow: More on CSM King and women's role in the Army

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We remember the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the "date which will live in infamy"