Language and Gender in the Military: Honorifics, Narrative, and I ...

Unfortunately, these stereotypes persist despite the fact that nearly a decade has passed since he wrote those words. Such arguments are, though, typical of one who has not actually served in the military—for whom military service is a theorized and studied construct. Such judgments are often imposed upon the military—and especially upon women in the military—by those who observe but have not served.

The lack of active-duty military experience embodied in the academic and political elite who dictate the U.S. military’s personnel and strategic policies has put us far behind the militaries of many of our NATO partners in terms of social and gender equality and civil rights. Oddly, Fukuyama and others assert that discrimination against certain groups is critical to our military readiness, where integration of women and gays and lesbians in the militaries of our NATO partners has hardly proven to be catastrophic. In recent American decades, and to this day, military service has been cast as a proletarian endeavor. As a result, those with the greatest political influence over the military are mere observers. Few legislators and even fewer in the executive branch have banded with peers to endure basic training, pulled a strategic alert, learned to don chemical gear, spent hours on the rifle range, thrown a grenade, devoted hours to simulator time of one sort or another, been trained as to how to secure a base or post if Force Protection Condition “Charlie” is declared, or been imbued with the service ethic which demands not only integrity, but also loyalty to the welfare of subordinates and superiors alike, no matter their race or sex.

Outdated notions regarding the twenty-first-century military serve to perpetuate bias and bigotry when personnel policies are dictated purely by opinion and not by the intellectual and physical demands of a specific military task. What is more, to the extent that our manner of thought infiltrates our operational and strategic perspectives, the pervasiveness of this strictly masculine approach limits the variation in perspective that is needed in an ideological war. The nation does itself a disservice if it allows its military and diplomatic decision makers to languish in a limited masculine mindset stuck in the Napoleonic era of force on force while in the midst of a war of ideas and perceptions, rather than nuclear weapons.