Page 80 - Cormorant Issue 20 2017

PAGE 78
The New Imperative for Gender ‘Mainstreaming’
Lt Col Matt Lewis R IRISH
THOUGH MANDATED WITHIN NATO for several years, the principle of gender ‘mainstreaming’ remains barely evident in the
militaries of its leading nations. Too often framed, reductively, as a series of negative legislative obligations; or
instrumentally narrowed to highlight the global problem of violence against women, the scope and ambition of UNSCR 1325 and the UK National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security aspires to an Allied strategic culture still distant.
There has undoubtedly been progress: so why such an overly pessimistic prognosis? The events that unfolded in the US during the nal weeks of ACSC 20 would suggest the progressive trends towards gender equalities are far from linear. In July 2017 President Trump announced through his Twitter account of his decision to reverse the Obama-era policy of employing transgender service personnel
in the US Armed Forces. Coincident with the FBI’s search of Paul Manafort’s of ces, and the failure of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to drive the repeal of the Affordable Care Act through Congress, political commentators sensed a diversionary stunt: a sense heightened when it transpired that neither Secretary Mattis nor General Dunford were among the generals ‘consulted’.
A holding line emerged after initial confusion: Secretary Mattis upholding that until substantive orders emerged from the White House, Tweets did not constitute policy or direction.
But assuming President Trump’s sudden succour
to conservative lobbyists was not an elaborate
“dead cat” slung on the table to distract from other policy failures; and was in fact representative of
early Trump ‘Doctrine’, it amounts to one of the
most startling and ill-conceived of his tenure thus
far. But the disingenuousness of the ‘consultation’ with the Chiefs, the assertion that this was a question of operational effectiveness, that there
was some evidential basis to the prohibitive cost to the Department of Defense of gender realignment surgery, all evoke unfortunate corollaries with an otherwise separate gender debate in the UK: speci cally, the manner in which Secretary Mattis has stalled the ‘new’ policy process, by deferring to a period of ‘review’.
The ‘review’, we have learned in the context of UK policy, ful ls a function similar to that in the US: of ‘buying time’ either to enable greater analysis in the processes of policy development or to permit the systematic in uencing of a culture towards change.
In this regard, the lengthy ‘physiological review’ currently being undertaken to support the Women
in Ground Close Combat programme (GCC) is perhaps a welcome and necessary waypoint in the process of introducing full equality of opportunity in the UK Armed Forces. But at what stage does this review, which published its interim report in 2016,
risk resembling an institutional libuster; or a tacit recognition that the necessary cultural shift is still far off? Certainly any engagement in online discussion on the issue of GCC still elicits some ferocious resistance to change: bizarrely most vociferously from the
retired community and those with diminishing equity in the change. Instead of retaining the focus on the inherent moral case, aligned as it is with the obligation
“
Cdr Sam Truelove leading the naval contingent at the London Pride 2017 parade. The naval contingent was formed of members of Compass – the Service’s sexual orientation and gender identity network which supports all those serving including reserves, civilians, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and all the ghting arms of the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines
to re ect the diversity of our society in our force structures; the debate fetishes the instrumentality of women, and as such makes vague and unscienti c assertions whilst succeeding in objectifying women in grotesque anatomical fascinations.
Without doubt, if our corporate discourse (rather than the science) overly xates on the physiology of hips and uteri, something is surely lost: our cultural embrace of the operational advantages of diversity perhaps being foremost. If we do indeed ‘buy’ the strategic narratives currently in broad circulation - of war amongst the people - we must too subscribe
to the view that our Armed Forces require the full spectrum of human multiplicity at the point of the spear. To do so would be to operationalise the vast array of capability depicted in the empirical analysis of (amongst others) Scott E. Page in his in uential ‘The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies’ (2007).
The excellent Gender and Security Elective led by Dr Andrea Ellner as part of the Ends Module provided an excellent platform for these discussions during our time on ACSC: but, by de nition, as an ‘elective’ can hardly yet claim to represent the ‘mainstreaming’ of Gender considerations mandated by NATO doctrine. But change, we suspect, is afoot: and as news reaches the Cormorants of ACSC 20 of the Commandants opening address to ACSC 21 it may be coming sooner rather than later.
...to re ect the
diversity of our society in our force
structures...
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