Security and Defense Studies Review 2010 Fall ... - Offnews.info

This was not the Army that Emily Perez joined as a newly-commissioned second lieutenantin 2005, five years after the author had retired. Fortunately for him, a sizable portion of his threedecade-plus military career was spent in an All-Volunteer Army that bore little resemblance to the onehe gingerly entered in 1970, a little more than three years before the draft mercifully ended and thelast U.S. troops were pulled out of Vietnam. Three years after women were first admitted, he returnedto the Academy in the summer of 1979 to teach, and was delighted to be present at commencementin 1980 when the first female graduates walked across the stage to receive their diplomas and accepttheir Regular Army commissions. In terms of gender, and race too, much had changed in less than adecade, and definitely for the better. Gratefully, 2LT Perez never knew the troubled Army of the late1960s and early 1970s, and West Point as an institution had remade itself by the time she arrived inthat innocent summer of 2001, shortly before the world would be changed forever by a handful of alQaeda terrorists filled with hate and bent on the destruction of society as we know it.Before examining the life and brief military career of 2LT Perez more closely, it would perhapsbe instructive to get a feel for just where women, and especially minority women, have fit statisticallyinto the service academies over the years. The chart below compares the three largest academies,the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy (Annapolis), and the U.S. Air Force Academy(Colorado Springs) along that score, looking at key statistics at three critical time windows—the firstclass to graduate women (all three academies did so the same year, 1980), the class that entered atthe beginning of the 21 st century and just before 9/11 (2005), and the class that most recently enteredthis past summer (2014).Female and Minority Representation at Three Service AcademiesU.S. MilitaryAcademy 1EnteredGraduatedClass of 1980 Class of 2005 Class of 2014119 (7.9%) with 7minorities62 (6.8%) with 4minorities192 (16.2%) with 59minorities147 (15.7%) with 47minorities250 (18.2%) with 78minoritiesTBDU.S. Naval Academy 2EnteredGraduatedU.S. Air ForceAcademy 3Entered81 (6.2%) with 5minorities55 (5.8%) with 3minorities156 (9.9%) with 16minorities196 (15.8%) with 51minorities148 (15.2%) with 34minorities227 (17.9%) with 59minorities263 (21.1%) with 94minoritiesTBD293 (22.6%) with 94minoritiesGraduated97 (10.8%) with 9minorities161 (17.5%) with 39minoritiesTBDFrom this data, it is clear there has been a steady increase in female representation over the years,with the latest class coming closest to approximating the overall percentage of females in the armedforces and in the U.S. population in general. The Air Force Academy, the youngest by far of thethree institutions, reflects the highest percentage of women, but not by much. This is to be expected,because overall there are more—and more varied—job opportunities for women in that service,generally viewed as more “high-tech” than the other two, and the farthest from enemy lines (if that82Security and Defense Studies Review 2010 Fall-Winter Issue / Edicíón Otoño-Invierno 2010 / Edicão Outono-Inverno 2010 / Volume 11