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What does it mean when soldiers start treating their comrades-in-arms as if they were members of an enemy force? For one thing, and this is the bright side, it means we should be hearing a lot less of the sanctimonious argument that women don't belong in the military because they occupy a "protected" category. Not that that argument was ever anything more than patriarchal propaganda. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, for example, they slaughtered every resident--man, woman, child and pet--and waded, triumphantly, in the knee-deep blood. Nor have civilian women ever been entirely safe from their own "protectors." The subjects of Gilgamesh, the first warrior hero of recorded history, complained that "his arrogance has no bounds by day or night...His lust leaves no virgin to her lover."
But the other lesson of Aberdeen is that the U.S. military may well be, to use the classic military terminology, fubar, or screwed up beyond all recognition. Some forms of abuse--like sexual harassment--have been defined by the law as criminal. But the soldier who turns on his comrades with savage intent commits a far graver category of crime. Whether he shoots them in the back or assaults their bodies with his own, he's confusing his fellow soldiers with the foe--and the word for this is treason. When a woman can't trust her drill sergeant, neither can the nation.
We may have to concede at last that the experiment with a sexually integrated military has failed. Some no doubt saw the end coming when three American G.I.s shamed their nation by raping a Japanese schoolgirl in 1995. Others, more prescient, must have realized years ago that in the modern age of "peacekeeping," a military that runs on testosterone is about as useful as a platoon armed with maces and pikes. So enough of this indiscriminate mixing of the genders, any realist will conclude, it's time to shift to an all-female military.