Army - Kicking Tires On Jltv

Dunwoody Set Above-Average Bars to Earn Stars
A Higher Standard: Leadership Strategies
from America’s First Female
Four-Star General. Gen. Ann Dunwoody,
USA Ret., with Tomago Collins.
Da Capo Press. 286 pages. $25.99.
By Kelly S. Kennedy
Gen. Ann Dunwoody, the first female
four-star general in the Army, spent
her entire career being treated differently
because she was a woman, but succeeding
because she was a soldier.
She possessed many of the typical
traits of good soldierhood: She could run
fast for long distances. She could suck it
up and show the almost irritating excitement
about driving on that’s found in
general officers. (Five a.m. battalion inspection?
Whoopee!) And rather than
get caught up in bureaucracy, she picked
some battles, made her opinions known,
and even blew past her chain of command
when she believed it was necessary.
Dunwoody details her management
style—find good advocates, and ignore
and defy those who would hold one
back—in her book, A Higher Standard.
She writes about some of her early failures,
and uses them as examples of the
importance of preparation. They include
freezing up while reading an award citation
in front of her peers in 1977; and
failing to qualify on a firing range with a
9 mm pistol as the first female field
grade officer in the 82nd Airborne Division
in 1988.
Those lessons continued throughout
her career. She writes that she often felt
“that there was more expected of me in
order to gain acceptance and respect in
this man’s Army.”
When Dunwoody joined, following
several general officer family members,
her only option was the Women’s Army
Corps. Her first PT uniform consisted
of light-green culottes and a light-green
blouse with white Keds, an outfit she
called “ludicrous.”
She met with resistance throughout
her career, from her first jump to reporting
to Fort Bragg, N.C. Men received
positions ahead of her that they hadn’t
earned, she writes, leaving her sidelined
until other opportunities arrived. But
those opportunities always appeared.
She was one of the first women to attend
Airborne School for female officers.
“Without that opportunity, my career
would have been dramatically different,
and I certainly would not have earned a
seat at the retired four-star conference,”
she writes, hinting at the potential future
of the three women who recently graduated
from Army Ranger School.
On her first jump, one of the instructors
“smacked me hard on my rump with
what came to be known as the five-finger
tattoo,” although she writes that she never
saw that happen to anyone else. The instructors
had her jump first so the men
would be too embarrassed to “chicken
out.” She was one of four honor grads.
As a new officer in the 82nd, she went
through a ritual called prop blasting. She
was jolted by wires connected to a battery,
doused in ice water, smacked with
tree branches and told two filthy jokes.
She then had to tell a dirty joke of her
own to avoid going through it all again.
“Today it would be all over YouTube,
and heads would roll,” she writes. But she
saw the hazing as another way of showing
she could “hang tough with the boys.”
Some of the discrimination followed
more subtle paths. During Operation
Desert Storm, she became the 82nd’s
parachute officer, but she didn’t deploy
with the advance party. When she realized
it was because she was a woman,
she hopped a flight to Saudi Arabia
without orders—her only deployment.
As she waited for her angry commander,
the Army announced she’d made lieutenant
colonel—a year earlier than her
peer group.
Much of the book is about the men
who tried to hold her back, in contrast to
the advocates who recognized her abilities.
She writes about her first division
commander, who wouldn’t let women
jump out of an aircraft he was in. Others
believed she was promoted only because
she was a woman.
And yet, incredibly, she writes that she
was surprised about the assaults on
women at Aberdeen Proving Ground,
Md., in the 1990s.
“At the time, I did not believe that sexual
assaults were part of the Army culture,
but instead that this bad behavior at
Aberdeen had been tolerated in an organization
with a subculture that clashed
with Army values,” she writes. And later,
“I had been in the service for 21 years and
had never encountered any direct form of
sexual harassment or assault.”
Dunwoody defends—no, champions
—the importance of women, and diversity
in general, in the ranks. It’s not a
matter of competition, as so often happens
in the military, so much as apparent
obliviousness about sexual harassment.
Should women be in combat? They
already are, she writes. And sexual harassment?
“One incident of sexual assault
is too many,” she writes. She had teams
entirely made up of women she chose
because of their merits and, in fact,
sought a male candidate at one point to
bring diversity to her team.
“Can a woman meet the same standard
required of her male counterparts?
If she can, then there is no reason why
women shouldn’t be able to do the job.”
Dunwoody certainly could do the job.
Kelly S. Kennedy served as an Army communications
specialist during Operation
Desert Storm and is the author of They
Fought for Each Other: The Triumph
and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit
in Iraq.
66 ARMY ■ February 2016