Carrier: Should Women Be There?

I hope you had a chance to watch all or part of the PBS series, Carrier, which aired last week. The U.S. Navy appears to have given the producers unprecedented access to the crew and their ship, The U.S.S. Nimitz, during its 2005 deployment to the Persian Gulf.

The series has only strengthened my belief that nothing the sailors and officers do aboard these mammoth ships can be considered routine.

Columnist George Will wrote a few years ago, "Right now, somewhere around the world, young men are landing high-performance jet aircraft on the pitching decks of aircraft carriers at night! You can't pay people to do that; they do it out of love of country, of adventure, of the challenge.

We all benefit from it, and the very fact we don't have to think about it tells you how superbly they're doing their job - living on the edge of danger so the rest of us need not think about, let alone experience, danger."

Unfortunately, however, the series also served to strengthen my long-held belief that the military made a big mistake integrating the sexes on Navy ships and in military units that deploy anywhere in the world.

I argue this belief on several levels. If you're able to watch the series when it re-airs, I think you'll be able to conclude with me that the distraction of placing women with men in a close-quarters environment for a long period time is not practical and has a negative impact on readiness.

On a more important level, what does it say about a country that allows its women to do its fighting?

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