You're in the army now, girl

THE Abderdeen scandal has reopened the question of the US army's policy of integrated training for both sexes. Even the Israeli army, which has pioneered roles for women in semi combat roles, separates the sexes at the initial training stage.

In a New Republic article called "Sex and the Soldier" writer Stephanie Gutmann claimed that the US policy of fully integrated training camps was influenced by the "Tailhook" scandal in 1991 when women navy pilots were groped by drunken male colleagues at a reunion in a hotel.

The navy's clumsy handling of the affair led to the ruin of some toplevel careers. There was seen to be an urgent need to change what was called the "Stone Age attitudes of warriors returning from the sea". The remedy was to bring in greater numbers of women into the services so that the "warrior culture" could be diluted.

The more women, the more feminised the culture, the fewer problems with sex, was the thinking. But this may be leading to a falling off in the recruitment of males to whom the increased female presence is not attractive.

Gender Integrated Basic Training was seen as an important ingredient where the men and women recruits "did everything but sleep together in the same compartment". The army also set up integrated training but with some reserves Because it had experimented with it in the 1980s and found that women tended to have a higher injury rate from trying to keep up with men in physical tests such as obstacle courses.

Such tests are now graduated to allow a lower standard for women and their lower muscle content. Ms Gutman says that the army has carried out detailed studies on the effects in combat of the special characteristics of women. This includes a study on the impact "during long marches of the fact that women cannot urinate standing up. The study had the results of a test of a device to overcome this called the "Freshette Complete System". This would "allow women to pee standing up in places where foliage doesn't supply ample cover," Ms Gutmann records.

The problems of integrated training has led to a contradictory attitude in the top brass, she concludes. "The brass attempt to operate on both tracks, to honour the standards of both the civilian and the military world.

"They know they must encourage `cohesion' in their mixed gender units, but they know too that they must avoid the wrong kind of cohesion - the kind that could stimulate jealousies, lovers' spats and ... babies. So they end up sending a rather scrambled message, something like `women are different but they're not different'."