Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth That Women Can't Fight

Abstract

Beyond the Band of Brothers: The US Military and the Myth that Women Can't Fight By Megan MacKenzie Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 200 pages, $28.000 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mr. Megan MacKenzie's newest book, Beyond the Band of Brothers, argues the exclusion of women from combat positions is rooted in ideas of male essentialism that are based on a myth. She convincingly debunks the notion "the precious and indefinable band of brothers effect so essential to winning in close combat would be irreparably compromised within mixed-gender infantry squads." According to MacKenzie, when General Scales asserts that all of "our senior ground-force leaders, as well as generations of former close combat veterans from all of our previous wars, are virtually united on one point," namely, that combat units would be "irreparably compromised" by women, what he is admitting is they have all been duped by a myth of their own making. MacKenzie begins with a historical analysis of the establishment of the "band of brothers" myth. Originally a literary creation of Shakespeare subsequently perpetuated by Darwin and Freud (though Freud admitted it was not intended to be taken seriously), it became a commonly accepted, rarely questioned, "truth" about the nature of male-only bonding. MacKenzie shows how this myth subsequently informed and sustained laws and later military policies regarding servicewomen's suitability for combat positions. Ultimately, women's exclusion had nothing to do with women's actual ability to fight; rather, it had everything to do with men protecting their position as exceptional, essential, and elite. She begins by chronicling the path to how we arrived at such a policy, and how it was sustained, even as evidence mounted showing women could, and were indeed successfully integrating in fighting units. MacKenzie details the depth of the self-deception the US military engaged in, most obviously after 9/11 as it prosecuted two wars with a growing number of women in ever-expanding roles. What made the exclusion policy increasingly untenable was the way military commanders themselves circumvented the policy to accomplish their missions. For example, co-location restrictions were violated almost from the outset, while the practice of "attaching," (in order to avoid rules that forbade "assigning") women to direct ground combat units became commonplace. …