In an effort to restore military discipline, morale, and efficiency at a time when they are most important, a campaign called "Americans for the Military" has begun circulating petitions asking President George W. Bush to "review and revise" several problematic social policies imposed by his predecessor. Launched this summer, the campaign is a project of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent organization dedicated to military personnel policy.

According to Elaine Donnelly, the organization's president and a longtime critic of social engineering in the military, the petition has already garnered over 10,000 signatures. After further promoting the campaign and attracting additional public support, Mrs. Donnelly plans to present the petition to President Bush, who as Commander-in-Chief is responsible for setting military policy.

Women serve well in the military, Mrs. Donnelly states, but the radical feminists who claim to speak for them have for too long gone nearly unchallenged. These activists-many operating from the taxpayer-funded Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service (DACOWITS)-have pressured the Pentagon into adopting several ill-considered policies that have proved detrimental to morale and readiness: deployment of women in or near combat units, co-ed basic training, liberal stances on pregnancy and parenthood, and sex-based recruitment quotas. It is these policies-all instituted under former President Bill Clinton-that the Americans for the Military campaign is asking the Bush administration to revise or repeal.

President Clinton was not known for his appreciation of the military tradition, and the officials he appointed generally followed his lead. In 1994 Defense Secretary Les Aspin, acting in defiance of congressional notification requirements, revoked the "Risk Rule" that had exempted women from involuntary assignment in support of units engaged in direct ground combat. (The change was billed as a boon to military women's "career opportunities.") The result of this policy has been the deployment of women in a long list of (previously all-male) combat-support positions where they face a "substantial risk of capture." Only this year, with the bloody ambush in Iraq of three enlisted women-two of them single mothers-have the disturbing consequences of the decision become unavoidably apparent.

Although liberals are loath to admit it, the Aspin policy has been unpopular even among servicewomen, the people for whom feminists so self-assuredly claim to speak. A 1998 Rand opinion study found that only 10% of enlisted women favored involuntary combat assignments on an equal basis with men. Similar surveys done by the Army Research Institute (ARI) between 1993 and 2001 reported the same number in all but a few years. Faced with an embarrassingly obvious contradiction of the feminist party line, in 2002 ARI stopped asking enlisted personnel about their opinions on women in combat.

"Gender-Integrated Basic Training" (GIBT) was another disruptive policy imposed in 1994 (the Clinton administration ignored the failure of an earlier experiment in co-ed training during the Carter years). The Center for Military Readiness has compiled a comprehensive summary of studies showing that GIBT has resulted in more distractions, more injuries, higher costs, lower standards, and lower discipline. Due to the physical differences between the sexes, training standards that are high enough to challenge male trainees result in a disproportionate number of injuries to women. In 1997 the independent Kassebaum Baker Commission unanimously recommended that GIBT be ended, and the Army has even admitted that the practice is inefficient-yet feminist pressure has thus far prevented reform.

Policies that reward pregnancy in the military are another legacy of the Clinton years. Regulations issued in 1995 by then-Navy Secretary John Dalton provide "overly generous education, housing, and medical benefits to pregnant sailors, regardless of marital status or number of pregnancies," according to Mrs. Donnelly. The Dalton policy even prohibits personnel from criticizing the problems caused by military pregnancies; as a result, solid information on pregnancy rates has been hard to come by. But the stunning fact that on May 23 of this year a Marine gave birth on a combat ship in a war zone-her superiors apparently had not known she was pregnant-makes obvious the absurdity of the Navy's current pregnancy policy.

Under heavy pressure from DACOWITS, Mrs. Donnelly states, military recruiters have for several years operated under a tacit quota system. In order to prevent the number of enlisted women from ever dropping below a certain percentage, recruiters must make special efforts to sign up women, even when plenty of qualified men are available. The results have been higher recruitment costs and-because servicewomen cannot fill as many positions as men-decreased military flexibility.

All of the above issues can be addressed by administrative action, Mrs. Donnelly points out, without the need for further legislation. Indeed, the most harmful policies were imposed by the Clinton administration, not written into law by Congress. For this reason, and because there is no way for civilians to influence Pentagon policies directly, the petition campaign is addressed to President Bush, who can direct Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to reform problematic policies with the stroke of a pen.

Fifteen major organizations, Accuracy in Media among them, have endorsed the Americans for the Military campaign. With this backing, plus the signatures of thousands of concerned Americans, Mrs. Donnelly hopes to meet in mid-October with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and other officials.

With major military operations in Iraq completed, the Administration should act promptly to restore sound personnel policies long before the next major deployment. Ending detrimental practices now may very well save soldiers' lives in the future.

But unless concerned citizens speak out in favor of reform, relentless pressure from feminist groups could maintain and expand the social engineering that has had such a corrosive effect on military readiness, Mrs. Donnelly says. She urges all those who support a strong and cohesive military to express their opinion by signing the Americans for the Military petition, which can be found at www.americansforthemilitary.com. It would be no exaggeration to say that the future of the military is at stake.

Read about Mrs. Donnelly's speech at AIA's Conservative University.

Sean Grindlay is an intern at Accuracy in Media. He can be contacted at sean.grindlay@aim.org