Military gender integration and foreign policy in the United States: A feminist international relations perspective

Introduction

This article investigates the relationship between foreign policy and military gender integration in the United States from a feminist international relations perspective. It argues that foreign policy doctrines and debates represent gendered discourses and practices linked to gender relations in the armed forces. The objective is to show how foreign policy translates into gender-based inclusions and exclusions in the military realm, and how the gendering of international politics is intertwined with women’s (in)equality in military institutions. For this purpose, the article assesses the influence of foreign policy on the gender-specific division of military labour, military gender policies and military gender ideologies in public discourses from the Clinton to the Obama administrations. The links between foreign policy and military gender relations are currently understudied in both the literature on gender and the military and in feminist international relations. Building upon feminist international relations approaches, the article thus develops a theoretical framework for studying these links, looking at military gender integration as an issue in foreign policy concepts and debates, the gendering of foreign policy discourses, and the instrumentalization of gender issues in foreign policy – for example, as justifications for foreign interventions. This contributes to a better understanding of the interrelations between gender-specific inclusions and exclusions within the state and the gendered structures and discourses of international politics.

Background: Gender integration in the All-Volunteer Force

In the United States, modernization and professionalization in civilian and military sectors drastically transformed military workforce supply and demand in the second half of the 20th century. These developments were important preconditions for increasing female participation in the military. They led to the abolishment of conscription and the introduction of voluntary military service, which reduced the military’s access to male recruits. With the establishment of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1973, women became an important personnel reserve for a large, professionalized standing force. Starting from under 2% before the transition to the AVF, female representation increased to around 11% of active-duty personnel by the late 1980s and to over 14% in the late 1990s (US Department of Defense, 2005). Integration gained momentum in the course of military restructuring after the end of the Cold War. During the 1990s, the continued technologization of warfare and various military interventions made the military more dependent on the female workforce. As a consequence, legal measures were taken to enhance equality and open new positions and units to women. The peak level in female participation rates was reached at 15% in 2002 and 2003. Since then, a slight decrease has been observed – the first since the introduction of the AVF – to 14.9% in 2004, 14.6% in 2005 and 14.4% in 2010 (US Department of Defense, 2005; WREI, 2010).

Military gender integration has been a limited, selective process focusing on occupations for which not enough qualified male recruits are available. Gender policies adapt women’s participation to the military’s needs, and various forms of combat exclusions restrict integration to higher-qualified non-combat jobs on lower and middle ranks (Riche, 2005: 1). Women were integrated into naval and aerial combat as well as ground combat support in the 1990s, while they remained excluded from ground combat units, submarines and the special forces. This still makes it more difficult for women to get promoted to higher ranks and excludes them from the prestige and benefits associated with the combatant status. These conditions are mirrored in the ideological constructions of military gender roles. The introduction of the AVF and the resulting changes in patterns of gender-specific labour division transformed and diversified gender ideologies in the military context. Ideals of military masculinity and femininity vary according to recruitment conditions and political power relations (Stachowitsch, 2012a,b). These gender ideologies generally promote a modernized view of women’s suitability for shortage-prone tasks, while referring to traditional notions to justify exclusions from jobs in high demand – for example, ground combat and leadership positions.

The limited degree of equality and acceptance that women have achieved in the services is currently being countervailed by trends towards the marketization of military tasks. In the context of neoliberal restructuring of the state, the outsourcing of public responsibilities is transforming gender relations in the military realm in structural and ideological terms. Recent research suggests that privatization and deregulation exclude women from newly developing private military labour markets, impede gender-equality policies and strengthen masculinist ideologies (Joachim and Schneiker, 2012; Eichler, 2012). This reaffirms the nexus between state-sanctioned violence and masculinity and thus contributes to the remasculinization of warfare.

Research on military gender integration

Research on gender and the military has shown that multiple factors influence the forms and degrees of military gender integration. Larger socioeconomic processes such as labour-market developments, recruitment conditions and military personnel requirements have been established as the most influential. War and related personnel shortages have positively affected the quantity and quality of integration and women’s legal status as service members both cross-nationally and historically (Segal, 1995). High dependence on female personnel has generally been associated with the advancement of women in the services and the modernization of gender ideologies in public discourses (Stachowitsch, 2012a). Political conditions also strongly shape the speed and direction of change (Iskra et al., 2002). The nature of the relationships between governments and their opposition, between political and military leaderships, and within political elites plays a crucial role in determining the feasibility of integration policies and defines whether these enhance equality or merely serve military needs.

While these structural and domestic factors have been thoroughly addressed, previous research has so far not adequately accounted for the influence of foreign policy concepts and practices on female participation and gender equality in the armed forces. Since the military is constitutive in constructing and pursuing foreign policy objectives, foreign policy is likely to also influence military gender relations. Constructivist approaches to foreign policy support such an assumption by arguing ‘that foreign and security policy is a site of inter-subjective contestation and negotiation about the nature of a particular political community’s core values, the threats to those values and the means that might be employed to advance or preserve those values’ (Jackson and McDonald, 2009: 25). Building upon feminist international relations approaches, this study argues that these evaluations of national identity, threats and remedies constructed in and through foreign policy are also gendered and make use of gendered ideologies and discourses, and that this gendering of foreign policy is related to women’s status in military institutions.

Feminist international relations and the study of military gender integration

Feminist international relations (Enloe, 1990, 2000; Tickner, 1992; Zalewski and Parpart, 1998; Sjoberg, 2010) has highlighted the multiple ways in which international affairs and international relations theory are gendered and employ gendered images and concepts. It has demonstrated ‘how bringing women and gender into analysis of the international shifted conceptual boundaries and altered preconceptions about what was relevant to understanding, explaining and judging international affairs’ (Hutchings, 2008a: 97). This feminist turn meant ‘that the relevance of gendered relations of power to the construction and sustaining of contemporary world politics could become the focus of study’ (Hutchings, 2008a: 100). Consequently, gender research in international relations looks ‘for gender in policy formulations, military decisions, the distribution of resources, social and economic status, leadership, and other areas of the international arena’ (Sjoberg, 2011: 111). International politics has been addressed as a gendered process, one that draws on and reproduces gendered norms and ideologies. Women’s equality and gender-specific inclusions and exclusions have been shown to be interrelated with these gendered dynamics of global politics.

Feminist international relations as a research programme has thus subverted the separation of the individual, the national and the international dimensions of foreign affairs. It claims that the state is gendered and that we need to understand its gendered nature when studying interstate behaviour (Sjoberg, 2011: 116). This means that gendered power relations within the state are influential at the international level and also in the realm of foreign policy. These insights enable a more comprehensive perspective onto military gender integration than previous accounts: Instead of identifying additional factors of influence, feminist international relations transcends the divide between the state and the international level of analysis and allows for addressing the interconnections between the inner-military gender order and international politics. Thus, through the employment of feminist international relations, both the domestic and the foreign policy dimensions of military gender integration can be accounted for.

Using feminist international relations in foreign policy analysis

Conventional foreign policy analysis has integrated gender only at the empirical level, with gender differences in foreign policy attitudes being a central concern (Fite et al., 1990; Togeby, 1994). In contrast, feminist international relations scholars suggest not only that gender matters in foreign policy, but also that foreign policy is itself a gendered process and discourse. This breeds a broader understanding of gender as ‘a system of symbolic meanings that creates social hierarchies based on perceived association with masculine and feminine characteristics’ (Sjoberg, 2009a: 186). Such an approach provides a way to highlight the gendered assumptions underlying foreign policy discourse and the concrete effects on women’s status in the realm of foreign policy. Tickner (1992: 3), for example, argues that foreign policy is so strongly associated with masculinity (particularly, but not only, in realist international relations theory) that women are excluded from international politics. Dean (2001) has shown that gender has been significant in shaping US foreign policy. In a case study of the Vietnam War, he concludes that a certain kind of ‘elite masculinity’ (Dean, 2001: 18) contributed to the escalation of the war and helped create and reproduce a patriotism that regarded military intervention as crucial to US global power.

Building upon these theoretical and empirical insights, this study links the gendered assumptions inherent in foreign policy concepts and strategies to the status of women in the armed forces in a case study of military gender integration in the United States. It particularly looks at gender in ‘war stories’ – ‘narratives told about war – why we go to war, who our enemies are, what we are fighting for, and how wars will be won’ (Hunt, 2010: 116). Foreign policy doctrines and concepts are read as such narratives that are ‘used to forward problematic political agendas while simultaneously silencing other key issues’ (Hunt, 2010: 118). The objective is to show how the gendering of international politics is intertwined with women’s roles in warfare and ultimately with their (in)equality in military institutions. This is done by relating foreign policy discourses and practices between 1991 and 2011 to shifts in military gender policies and discourses on gender integration.

The following research agendas of feminist international relations guide the study: making women visible as part of/affected by international politics; showing how the international is gendered; and highlighting the instrumentalization of women’s issues in international politics. Feminist scholars have made clear that these levels of analysis are intertwined and their dynamics mutually enforcing. The gendered assumptions and discourses in the international arena reflect as well as shape women’s lives and structures of gender inequality. The analysis looks at different levels of interaction between military gender relations and foreign policy: (1) integration as a policy issue in political power struggles over the course of foreign policy (between government and opposition, but also between the political and military leaderships); (2) employment of gendered discourses and ideologies in foreign policy doctrines and debates to support the interests of different groups of actors; and (3) gender equality as a rationale in foreign policy discourses – for example, as legitimization of war. It is argued that foreign policy is an important context influencing military gender relations. While no definite causal relationship is implied, it will be shown that foreign policy has some degree of independence in this regard, in some instances breeding changes in gender policies that dominate manpower needs and domestic politics.

By making the link between integration and foreign policy, the study aims to contribute to feminist international relations by clarifying how gendered discourses and practices in the international arena are linked to domestic gender relations – that is, how foreign policy as a gendered process relates to gender-based inclusions and exclusions at the state level. This combines the feminist goal of addressing gender inequality in institutions of relevance to global politics and the theoretically more advanced project of showing how international politics is gendered structurally and discursively. For this purpose, research on gendered discourses and narratives is connected to the study of social power relations and women’s positions in national and international institutions.

The early 1990s: The ‘new world order’ and Clinton’s modernization of military gender relations

Bill Clinton’s foreign policy concepts provided an important context for the advancement of women in the armed forces in the early 1990s. In Clinton’s first term, he put emphasis on multilateralism, with the aim of ‘strengthening democracy in the world’ (Hames, 1999: 129). Peacekeeping missions were supported, and multilateral concepts of shared (military) responsibility enabled ‘humanitarian interventions’ under UN command (Hames, 1999: 138). Secretary of Defense Les Aspin formulated the commitment to human rights as a main focus of US defence policy (Questor, 1999: 159). With military downsizing after the end of the Cold War, the ‘peace dividend’ was to be utilized for domestic projects and civilian politics was to regain primacy over military matters. These objectives were related to inner-military reforms, which aimed at the structural and cultural modernization of the armed forces. Gender policy was one aspect of these reorientations, and ethnic and gender diversity in the services came to be regarded as an important asset for a modern military (Hames, 1999: 144).

As a consequence, the early 1990s saw the most comprehensive changes in military gender policy since the introduction of the AVF. In 1991, the ban on women’s service aboard aircraft engaged in combat missions was repealed. In 1993, Secretary of Defense Aspin ordered all services to open combat aviation to women, and he directed the Navy to draft legislation to repeal women’s exclusion from combat ships and the Army and Marine Corps to study opening more assignments to women. In 1994, the Department of Defense’s ‘risk rule’ was rescinded, which had closed many units supporting ground combat operations to women. The same year, Congress repealed Title 10 USC 6015, opening most Navy combatant ships (WREI, n.d.). Clinton initially also committed to ending the ban on homosexuals in the military, but was only able to achieve the compromise known as the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.

After the end of the Cold War, strategic conditions and personnel requirements generally favoured these trends towards more equality and gender pluralism in the services: military personnel were downsized, but – spurred on by what was known as the Revolution in Military Affairs – qualification requirements kept rising (Questor, 1999: 150). This resulted in a lack of qualified specialists in an increasingly hi-tech military. Shortages were aggravated by the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War and its focus on the technologically more advanced sectors of the armed forces. Women provided the much-needed personnel reserves and were rewarded with enhanced equality standards. In accordance with personnel requirements, however, integration policies stopped short of those areas for which enough male personnel were available (ground combat, submarines, special forces). While these recruitment conditions had already favoured integration during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, it was the Clinton administration in its first term that substantially advanced women’s military participation and, more importantly, linked it to issues of gender equality and equal opportunity. The Democratic majority in Congress enabled the enacting of equality measures into law.

In this context, public opinion became increasingly favourable towards military women and gender integration. Media reporting tended to depict female service members as professional, gender-neutral soldiers in a technologically advanced military and supported integration as a measure to attract the highest-qualified personnel and enhance military effectiveness. ¹ Foreign policy events and discourses, most notably in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, promoted these positive evaluations and were frequently cited as a relevant context. Women’s performance in the intervention (rather than citizenship or equality rights) was argued as the main rationale for allowing women to serve in new roles. The modernization of the armed forces in the ‘new world order’ was another important framework through which integration was interpreted. In a neoliberal discourse, Operation Desert Storm was portrayed as a ‘techno war’ and the armed forces as a ‘corporate’ military led by efficient managers (Mariscal, 1991: 106) and governed by the principles of performance and efficiency. The expansion of women’s roles and the showcasing of their brave service fitted well with these discourses and, more generally, with the new orientations in US foreign policy after the end of the Cold War.

Gender equality worldwide as a foreign policy goal and justification for foreign interventions was another discourse that connected international politics to military gender integration. New conflict lines promoted self-representations of the United States as a role model for emancipation and gender equality (Niva, 1998). Building upon Orientalist and colonialist notions, foreign policy narratives of ‘liberating Muslim women’ were generated in the context of the USA’s new geopolitical position, and both Democrats and Republicans linked equality in the services to the objectives of interventions in countries with Muslim-majority populations – a discourse that became even more influential during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this context, military women were depicted as emancipated and their integration as progressive. Their alleged freedom and equality were juxtaposed with the situation of ‘oppressed’ Muslim women.

In the context of mounting political power struggles, gender became an important ‘battlefield’ for conflicts between the administration, the opposition and the military leadership. In the face of downsizing, budget cutbacks and strategic reform, the tense relationship between political and military elites frequently became manifest in disagreements over new regulations on homosexuality in the services and the opening up of new positions for women. However, gender was not only an issue in foreign policy debates: it was also utilized as a binary logic through which foreign policy was evaluated. Conflicts on the course of foreign policy reform were heavily gendered. Traditional military elites, who feared a loss of status and control over personnel issues, and Republicans aiming at dismantling the White House’s foreign policy doctrine constructed the ‘feminization’ of the armed forces as the main framework through which military restructuring and defence policy reform were interpreted and criticized. They defamed humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping as ‘effeminate’ ways of warfare in contrast to more assertive, ‘masculine’ strategies. Missions under UN command were constructed as ‘demasculinization’ of the US military, and the nation as a whole. The relationship between civilian and military politics was also depicted in gendered terms. Media reporting on the Somalia mission, for example, portrayed the civilian leadership as ‘feminizing’ the US military (Stachowitsch, 2012a: 89–92). These discourses, which built upon gendered constructions of the government–military relationship established in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (Jeffords, 1989: xiv), were also picked up in academic debates (Van Creveld, 2000), and in some cases even drew an explicit link between women’s integration into the armed forces and the loss of US global power:

On the one hand, feminization refers to the fact that there are now many more women in the professional militaries of advanced industrial societies; on the other hand, feminization refers to a process of decline in the capacity to engage in so-called real war.… These two meanings of feminization are mutually reinforcing, with each being symptom or cause of the other. (Hutchings, 2008b: 395, emphasis in original)

The late 1990s: The ‘Republican Revolution’ and the remasculinization of integration debates

Clinton’s second term in office moved his foreign policy away from proactive multilateralism and towards a more isolationist course. The events in Bosnia and Somalia and the constant opposition from the Republican-dominated Congress and the Pentagon to the administration’s initial approach shifted the White House towards a more risk-averse foreign policy, characterized by selective involvement and unilateralism (Hames, 1999: 129–38). After the Republican Party took over Congress in the 1994 elections, a counter-revolution against Clinton’s modernization of military affairs began. Republicans fuelled public distrust in the UN as well as fears that Democrats would subordinate sovereignty to a future world government and dilute US military strength (Questor, 1999: 157). Attacks on Clinton’s reform of military gender relations were an important element in these strategies to devalue his handling of foreign affairs. Supported by conservative think-tanks, which became increasingly relevant and visible in foreign policy discourses (Abelson, 2009: 103), Republicans led a fierce campaign against gender integration. Organizations such as the Center for Military Readiness actively fought gender equality in the services during the late 1990s by referring to traditional family values, sexual morals, lack of women’s physical and (more importantly) mental strength, and their necessary protection through exclusion. This contributed to the re-traditionalization and sexualization of debates. The same media that had supported the image of military women as professional and indispensable personnel in the early 1990s now frequently depicted them as a contradiction to military culture and a disturbance to the social order. Their exclusion was portrayed as coherent with US-American values and sexual violence against them as a ‘natural’ outcome of integration.

The White House partly submitted to this pressure, and gender equality in the services disappeared from the Democratic agenda. In this context, stagnation characterized the realm of military gender policy. No significant legal changes were introduced during the late 1990s. However, many of the integration measures introduced in the earlier years of the decade were implemented and began to translate into growing female personnel ratios. As a reaction to this rise in women’s participation at a time when many (male) jobs were cut, women were again pushed back by official policy (e.g. regulations allowing cost-efficiency as an argument to deny women’s entry into Navy ships), assignment practices, and discriminatory behaviour by commanders and comrades (Harrell and Miller, 1997).

The new policies on integration and homosexuality did not only feature prominently in Republican critiques of Clinton’s military policy and as proof of the US military’s decline. Gendered images and narratives kept shaping conservative representations of the administration’s foreign policy. Republicans denounced Clinton’s approach to international affairs by drawing on the pre-existing discourse of ‘feminization’ that served as a framework for constructing the restoration of military strength and the abandonment of peacekeeping and nation-building concepts as the desired ‘remasculinization’ (Jeffords, 1989) of US foreign policy. This also revoked the basis for showcasing equality in the services as related to foreign policy goals.

Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ as anti-feminist narrative and practice

As outlined in the National Security Strategy of 2002, the strategic vision of the administration of George W. Bush envisioned ‘a world defined by the triumphant universalization of liberal ideological values’ (Quinn, 2009: 143). Key features were ‘proclaiming the universal validity of liberal political values; linking international security to the spread of liberal democracy; … arguing that historical destiny mandated the triumph of the Unites States and its ideas; and claiming US military hegemony as a virtuous objective’ (Quinn, 2009: 139). A dominant position of the United States in the global order was perceived as a guaranty for international stability. Defence policy aimed at strategic independence and was characterized by unilateral tendencies combined with instrumental multilateralism. Concepts of legitimate self-defence were expanded to include preventive and offensive military interventions. Transforming autocratic regimes towards democracy through military force was viewed as a measure to secure peace (Rudolf, 2010: 35). At the same time, the armed forces’ role and function was to be reduced: Bush regarded the military’s main purpose as combat, not nation-building or peacekeeping (Rudolf, 2010: 95). This doctrine focused on military strength in support of broadly defined security interests. It led to military growth, the militarization of foreign policy and the endemic underfunding of diplomatic institutions (Rudolf, 2010: 69).

The role of gender issues in this foreign and military policy context was ambivalent. In the domestic realm, the Bush administration promoted policies that cut or handicapped institutions and committees established to protect women’s interests, appointed anti-feminists to highly visible positions, and curtailed women’s reproductive rights (Finlay, 2006). At the level of foreign policy, conservative gender policies were introduced on a global scale: The administration made US foreign aid only available to family-planning clinics that do not provide abortions or counsel women on the subject. Bush also withdrew financial aid from programmes supporting women in Afghanistan (Hunt, 2010: 121) – the very women whose well-being was used as a legitimization for going to war. These measures were an effect of changing power relations within the Republican Party. Neoconservatives, who became a ‘powerful intellectual force within the foreign policy ranks of the twenty-first-century Republican Party’ (Singh, 2009: 44), and the Christian Right had enabled Bush’s rise to power and now hoped to enforce their strategic visions, in which conservative gender values played a central part. The Christian Right, in particular, drew a direct link between success in the global ‘War on Terror’ and gender issues, such as gay marriage. Both groups strongly influenced public debates, because they were disproportionally represented in conservative think-tanks and the media (Croft, 2009: 121).

These groups also connected conservative agendas in foreign and domestic policy with the issue of women’s military integration. Organizations such as the Center for Military Readiness and the Heritage Foundation successfully lobbied for the introduction of various legal impediments to women’s status as service members. The National Defense Authorization Act for 2006 upgraded the combat-exclusion rules introduced in 1994 to the status of a law. The objective of expanding women’s roles and inhibiting the closure of occupations no longer received mention in the military budget (Murnane, 2007: 1094). The Pentagon is now required to inform Congress before ground-combat rules are changed or positions are opened or closed to women. This means that the advancement of integration, which has been most strongly opposed in Congress, has become increasingly unlikely for administrations to come. Additionally, the competences of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, military women’s main advocate, were severely cut. The Pentagon let its charter run out in 2002, reduced its membership by half and redefined its mission: gender equality and integration were removed as main responsibilities and replaced by the improvement of readiness and family issues (WREI, n.d.).

Strategic conditions, such as the increased relevance of males-only ground combat and special operations forces as well as the rise of private military companies (PMCs), also hurt women’s equality. While women are legally excluded from ground combat and special forces roles, military privatization creates new male-dominated military labour markets and weakens democratic control over gender equality in the military realm. During the Bush era, neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization were combined with conservative gender policies of exclusion and discrimination. The former established a separate labour market of masculinized private security, while the latter introduced policies that curtailed women’s participation in the regular forces. Congressional control over private military labour markets was weakened, while Congress’s influence on female participation in the regular forces was expanded in an attempt to limit women’s assignment and deployment.

However, the relationship between foreign policy doctrines and gender integration was less straightforward than during the Clinton years. Despite the impediments discussed above, none of the major integration policies introduced in the early 1990s were reversed. In retrospect, Bush’s embrace of neoconservatism and the Christian Right was limited (Singh, 2009: 33). In this, as in other foreign policy matters, he chose a more pragmatic stance than demanded by some interest groups within his party. This was partly due to the personnel requirements of the ‘War on Terror’, which strained the armed forces both financially and in terms of personnel (Rudolf, 2010: 68). Military growth, the difficulties of recruitment in wartime, and strategic adaptations to new threats from non-state actors and the demands of asymmetrical warfare (e.g. the establishment of a smaller fast-deploying force, flexible units and the stationing of support with combat troops) increased the necessity for flexible deployment of female personnel. The Army, for example, mounted considerable resistance against Republican initiatives to exclude women from forward support companies, ground combat support units that train and deploy with combat troops. A main argument of military commanders was that new threat scenarios rendered existing exclusions obsolete, as they were based on the distinctness between front and rear and no longer applied to modern warfare. Competing national and international agendas thus made gender a controversial issue, contributing to the ‘persistent tensions between the uniformed US military and the White House’ on the strategies employed in the global ‘War on Terror’ (Miller, 2009: 193).

Foreign policy interests ultimately triumphed over conservative domestic agendas. Not only did the military realization of the National Security Strategy in the global ‘War on Terror’ depend on women’s actual service, but its conceptual elements were also underscored by showcasing military women. While neoconservatism promoted anti-feminist objectives in domestic politics, its ideas on the universality of American values also provided the grounds for arguing gender equality as an objective in foreign policy to be forced onto Muslim-majority societies. These justifications for military interventions as efforts to ‘save oppressed Muslim women’ (Stabile and Kumar, 2005; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008) utilized images of emancipated female US soldiers as symbols of the USA’s moral superiority and progressiveness. For this purpose, the ‘War on Terror’ narrative constructed ‘different kinds of men and women based on race, religion, and nationality’ (Hunt, 2010: 118). Aided by the image of military women, this war story portrayed ‘white western women as liberated compared to their oppressed Afghan sisters’ (Hunt, 2010: 118). In this way, the administration’s foreign policy agendas were forwarded, while debates on gender inequality in the United States or on the unequal status of women in the military were silenced. Under these conditions, integration was depicted as a patriotic rather than an equality measure, and media discourses relied heavily on dualistic gender ideologies. They suggested that the military should utilize traditional concepts of femininity for strategic gains and supported the notion of gender stereotypes as functional for the military – for example, by showcasing female soldiers as non-threatening and peaceful to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the civilian population. An integrated military was portrayed as either a strategic or a moral advantage in the ongoing interventions.

At the same time, Bush defended combat-exclusion laws, again linking military gender issues to the ‘War on Terror’. In his ‘axis of evil’ speech, he specifically defined such ‘civilized’ treatment of women – that is, their exclusion from fighting and killing – as a feature that separated the United States from ‘the terrorists’ (Sjoberg, 2009b: 72). Such discourses invoked images of the United States as a protective patriarch that curtails citizenship rights for the public good, wages war on a country to free its women (Young, 2003), and excludes its ‘own’ women from combat. In addition to these instrumentalizations of gender for conservative foreign and domestic policy agendas, foreign policy concepts themselves were implicitly gendered and followed a patriarchal script: The Bush doctrine constructed the United States as a patriarch within the international system who leads the way and punishes those who refuse to follow. The focus on military strength and the aversion to peacekeeping efforts were expressed in discursive patterns that associated assertive, war-prone doctrines with masculinity and alternative concepts of peacekeeping and multilateralism with femininity. Under these conditions, high dependence on female troops did not translate into improvement of women’s status as service members. The combination of conservatism in domestic policy and unilateral expansionism in foreign policy did not reverse integration, but institutionally and discursively disconnected it from equality agendas.

The Obama era: New orientations in foreign and gender policy?

US military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have become increasingly dependent on female personnel. As of 2010, women made up 11% of troops who had fought in these wars since 2001 and 14% of overall active-duty personnel (16% including the Reserves and the National Guard) (WREI, 2010). Dependency on female troops, also in combat positions, and the bureaucratic problems that legal exclusions raise for commanders in a long and arduous deployment led to the stretching of regulations and the perception that women were effectively serving in combat roles.

In addition to military personnel needs, Barack Obama’s foreign policy concepts reformed the context in which military gender integration is taking place and the framework within which it is interpreted. While the fight against terrorism was not given up by the administration, it was embedded within discourses that emphasized multilateral approaches, dialogue with the Muslim world and the restoration of the USA’s reputation (Lemke, 2011: 113). Claims to global leadership were reformulated, acknowledging the importance of coordinated action within the international system (Rudolf, 2010: 36). This had effects on how the role and function of the armed forces were perceived. In contrast to his predecessor, Obama justified the use of military power by referring to the ‘global good’ and less to a broadly defined notion of self-defence (Rudolf, 2010: 58). While elements of an interventionist doctrine remained intact, the ‘War on Terror’ was abandoned as an interpretative framework of foreign policy (Rudolf, 2010: 46–67). Stabilization and rebuilding were given more weight in strategic concepts (Rudolf, 2010: 149), emphasizing the furthering of pluralism and tolerance within civil society (Lemke, 2011: 120).

While the realities on the ground might put these aims and objectives into question, their formulation was important for the systematic inclusion of women into efforts to improve contact with the civilian population and gather intelligence on the ground – for example, in the form of the so-called Female Engagement Teams that were introduced as part of new counterinsurgency strategies. A number of legislative initiatives generally indicate renewed emphasis on equality in the services. Pentagon officials have called for an end to the ban on allowing women to serve on submarines, and the Marine Corps has opened two more categories of intelligence jobs to women. The Senate Armed Service Committee passed a provision in May 2010 to reinstate the availability of privately financed abortions at military hospitals and bases. The abolishment of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy that forbade homosexuals to openly serve in the military is also a major step towards more gender pluralism in the armed forces. Though public debates on homosexuals in the military have mostly focused on gay men, women were proportionally more often discharged on the grounds of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ (Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, 2002). The lifting of exclusionary policies will thus specifically benefit homosexual and heterosexual women by decreasing the pressure to conform to hegemonic military gender ideologies.

In this context, media interest in military women reached new heights after 2009, and coverage became increasingly favourable towards them. Their service in the war was again the main framework through which their status in the military was evaluated. The most frequent statements in media discourses argued that women were accepted and respected by their male colleagues and commanders, whom they had convinced with their performance in the war. Women were depicted as tough and resilient, heroic and courageous, and trustworthy comrades on the battlefield. The bottom line of many arguments was that women were already serving in combat and deserved credit for it. Another important argument emphasized the ‘cultural sensitivity’ that the United States displayed by sending women to interact with Afghan and Iraqi communities, reflecting the new counterinsurgency strategies and the roles of women within these.

Gender equality and the empowerment of women also received renewed attention as a foreign policy objective, and an explicit link to US national security interests was established. In her confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she would put women’s issues at the core of foreign policy. In a New York Times interview, she argued that ‘so-called women’s issues are stability issues, security issues, equity issues’. Providing more rights for women would thus contribute to the achievement of US foreign policy goals in the fight against terrorism: ‘If you look at where we are fighting terrorism, there is a connection to groups that are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident in their treatment of women’ (Landler, 2009). These sentiments were also echoed in Obama’s call to promote women’s empowerment by strengthening the efforts of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to improve gender equality (Ellis, 2009). There has also been enhanced attention by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to gender issues in Afghanistan in the realms of education, the labour market and health. ISAF has also been involved in the training of female members of the Afghan National Security Force.

A large-scale military intervention with blurred frontlines, new foreign and security policy concepts, and a Democratic administration committed to social and cultural modernization has the potential to improve gender equality in the services. However, a final evaluation of the Obama presidency would be premature. With the Republican power gains in the 2010 Congressional elections, comprehensive relaxation of combat restrictions has become increasingly unlikely, because Congress has proven to be the main obstacle in this regard and its influence on integration has been strengthened during the Bush administration. The drawdown of forces and the associated increase in private contractors might also inaugurate a new phase of traditionalism. The dynamics between the private military labour market and existing discriminations within the state military are likely to reproduce or even strengthen current gender-based exclusions from the military sector.

Military privatization as a new impediment to equality

In recent decades, the United States has increasingly relied on PMCs to carry out its military goals and implement foreign policy objectives (Singer, 2002; Avant, 2005). Gender-critical scholarship (Eichler, 2012; Higate, 2012; Joachim and Schneiker, 2012) has addressed the gendered nature of privatization processes and their effects on military labour division, public scrutiny over gender equality, and the gendering of public discourses on military matters: The shifting of boundaries between state and private military sectors has led to women’s enhanced exclusion from the military realm, less state control over military gender relations, and the reconstitution of military masculinity as a state-supporting ideal. Increased utilization of private contractors might thus also contribute to the remasculinization of foreign policy.

As the state partially withdraws from recruitment and PMCs take over military responsibilities, women are excluded from military jobs and marginalized as a military workforce. Their underrepresentation in the military and the police, the main recruitment pools of PMCs (Schultz and Yeung, 2005: 4), is not only mirrored but aggravated on private military labour markets, because the preferred occupational specialities of private security providers are those from which women are formally excluded in the regular forces (Elsea et al., 2008: 37). PMCs are also less dependent on the female workforce, because they are not bound to national borders in recruiting. Women’s integration into the private security sector is thus uneven and limits them to positions that are low in status and unskilled (Erickson et al., 2000). While women have gained increased admission to the regular forces and a certain degree of equality therein, military functions are gradually being removed to the private security market. Women’s struggle for equal access to military jobs, involvement in military policy, and attainment of full citizenship rights via military service could thus become increasingly futile.

For the realm of foreign policy, this effectively means that military functions associated with foreign policy – that is, defending national interests and defining the nation’s role in the global order – are increasingly carried out by men. At the same time, initiatives for more gender equality in the services are undermined because growing numbers of those fighting wars are not affected by state regulations on gender equality. Military privatization also has the potential to harm gender equality in the societies in which contractors operate: The cultivation of aggressive masculinity in the institutional culture of PMCs has been linked to human rights abuses such as forced prostitution and the trafficking of women and children (Schultz and Yeung, 2005: 4–5). At the discursive level, privatization reaffirms the link between foreign policy and masculinity, when PMCs represent themselves as the efficient, assertive, masculine counterpart to the inefficient, weak, democratic and gender-integrated state military. Though masculinity concepts in the private sector cannot be reduced to the stereotype of ‘trigger-happy Blackwater Cowboys’ (Higate, 2012: 322), the private security sector provides a new arena in which masculinity is being redefined as the efficient guarantor of national security, a core competence in warfare and a privileged category in regard to matters of security and foreign policy.

In recent years, initiatives have been taken to enhance public scrutiny of the private sector and ensure protection of US and local women from contractor violence. These were often motivated by a fear that public scandals involving contractor misconduct would harm the USA’s reputation and increase insurgency violence. The Department of Defense has taken a number of steps to improve the management and tracking of contractors (Schwartz and Swain, 2011). Cases of sexual harassment and rape of female contractors by their male colleagues have also led to Congressional investigations (Elsea et al., 2008: 14; Inspector General, 2010). These attempts to limit and control the private security market are related to the shifts in the course of foreign policy discussed above. Military privatization during the Bush years contributed to the depoliticization and militarization of foreign policy (Leander and Van Munster, 2007) – trends that have been reflected in exploding Pentagon budgets and shrinking funds for the State Department and USAID. In this phase, private security experts have become more influential with their interpretations of diverse global problems and international conflicts as ‘security threats’. The Obama administration is trying to move away from a threat-based foreign and defence policy and to re-establish diplomatic institutions and processes. All of these objectives imply restraining the private military industry. Obama and Secretary of State Clinton both took a tough line against the contractor business during their electoral campaigns. Obama also introduced legislature to increase the accountability and transparency of PMCs during his term as senator. It remains to be seen how the administration is going to balance these commitments with the growing dependency on PMCs after the drawdown of forces.

Conclusions

This analysis highlights the multiple ways in which military gender issues and foreign policy interact. At the policy level, there is often an explicit link between foreign policy doctrines, military reforms and gender policies. This concerns the inner-military gender order as well as the role of global gender equality as a goal in international politics. Negotiations on gender issues are thus frequently a crucial element in power struggles between military and political elites over the course of foreign policy. At the discursive level, foreign policy concepts and debates utilize gendered terminologies and images, as different groups of political and military actors argue for or against a particular course. Gender-based inclusions and exclusions in military institutions are thus linked to the gendering of foreign policy discourses. Consequently, foreign policy debates are to be read as contributions to gender debates and vice versa.

Analysis of the time period between 1990 and 2011 shows that foreign policy concepts that emphasize multilateralism, diplomacy, human rights and peacekeeping were tied to the most comprehensive gender equality and integration measures. Clinton’s first term serves as an example for a time period when recruitment conditions, domestic politics and foreign policy concepts all favoured integration and equality in the services was significantly advanced. His second term, which introduced a more risk-averse isolationism, was characterized by stagnation in military gender matters. Integration was under constant attack by the Republican majority in Congress, military commanders, think-tanks and the media. Discourses on the ‘feminization’ of the armed forces and foreign policy successfully challenged the administration by associating some of its strategies – cooperation, compromise and ‘soft skills’ – with femininity. In the context of this mounting conservative pressure, the administration largely abandoned gender equality in the military as a political goal.

In the context of the expansionist, unilateral and threat-based foreign policy of George W. Bush, the far right was able to gain considerable influence in domestic and international gender matters. At the same time, the military implementation of Bush’s global vision depended on women’s military participation and the integrated military represented an important asset in the war narrative of ‘liberating Muslim women’. Foreign policy doctrines emphasized the superiority of US values and the necessity to impose them on other societies, even by preventive military interventions. In the context of this doctrine, gender equality served as a symbol of the USA’s moral superiority and at the same time women’s military participation was dissociated from equality and civil rights issues. Under these conditions, the favourable recruitment environment did not translate into more equality for women in the services and some impediments to women’s status were even introduced. But, despite frequent demands by conservative interest groups, integration was not reversed. Foreign policy imperatives thus ultimately triumphed over the conservative, anti-feminist agenda in domestic politics.

The Obama administration has redefined the objectives of US foreign policy. In this context, gender equality was reframed as a security issue in its own right rather than a justification for the use of military force. The empowerment of women became a concrete objective, pursued by concrete foreign and domestic measures. Initiatives since Obama’s inauguration suggest that this emphasis on gender equality in the global context is also paralleled by measures to enhance the rights and status of women and sexual minorities in the armed forces. New approaches in the peacebuilding process have also led to a revaluation of female service members in the war zone. However, trends towards the privatization of military tasks and power gains for the far right within the Republican Party could countervail these trends towards more equality.

Foreign policy concepts and practice are inherently gendered, make use of gendered discourses and ideologies, and mirror the gendered assumptions that an administration holds on the international order, the nation’s role within it, sources of conflict, and acceptable and efficient ways to solve them. As such, foreign policy not only reflects but also influences gender relations at home and abroad. By defining what US global power means and how it is to be pursued, it identifies the function of the armed forces and the role that women are supposed to play within them. While personnel shortages account for increased female participation in the military, foreign policy rationales and the relevance of military force within them have made a difference to women’s concrete status and function in the armed forces. While war has generally led to more integration, women’s participation differed according to how a specific intervention was conceptualized and in what foreign policy concepts it was embedded. Women’s status and gender equality in the armed forces are thus not only an outcome of recruitment conditions or domestic power relations, but also linked to a nation’s position in the global order and its interpretations of that position. Military gender relations are closely connected to the gendered notions of national identity constructed in and through foreign policy.

Feminist international relations enables this broader understanding of military gender integration as interrelated with both the gendered dynamics of global politics and domestic power relations. It advocates engagement with the connections between gendered discourses, social power relations, and women’s status in national and international institutions. This study contributes to understanding how women’s equality and gender-specific inclusions and exclusions at the state level are interrelated with the gendered structures and discourses of international politics. As the analysis shows, gender-critical inquiry into state institutions helps account for state behaviour in the global arena. Vice versa, examining the gendered dynamics in international politics contributes to the understanding of inner-state gender relations. The study also highlights some of the processes through which both are connected: the inclusion/exclusion of gender issues in/from foreign policy doctrines, the gendering of foreign policy discourses, and the instrumentalization of gender equality as a justification for foreign intervention. Through scrutiny of these different levels of interaction, comparative research on the relationship between national and international gender regimes can be conducted beyond the study period and the US case.