Mixed-gender training and the US military

David Hackworth is at it again, with a blistering article he originally wrote for GQ. The article’s first paragraph gives you a taste of his tone:

Nothing is more basic than Basic Combat Training. Basic to the ways of war. Basic to national security. Basic to the very survival of the United States. So how come Fort Jackson, the single largest producer of Basic grunts, male and female, is under the command of a general who piled up more friendly fire casualties than anyone else in Desert Storm?

It goes on from there to examine, or rather lambast, the current state of US Army basic training. I admit to a certain degree of Marine Corps bias, but…

it’s hard to disagree with the basic principles of his article: you fight like you train, and so when training is substandard, so too will be the overall quality of your combat forces. The base thrust of his argument seems to be that mixed-gender training is the root of the problems he saw at Ft. Jackson; however, he doesn’t do a good job of dividing global problems (e.g. the Army accepts unqualified or unfit recruits and does nothing to weed them out; training isn’t rigorous enough) from gender-related one (e.g. too many recruits are distracted by booty calls during boot camp; women are held to generally lower standards of performance).
It’s very unpopular to espouse the idea that gender-separated activities are OK… if you’re a man, that is. It’s OK to have women-only colleges (think: Agnes Scott) or high schools, but it’s evidently not OK to do the same thing at, say, VMI or the Citadel. Perhaps that’s why the Army is doing what it’s doing.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that it would be wrong to bar women from participation in the US military (although I’m still not settled on the idea of having mixed-gender infantry, artillery, or direct combat units). I served with a number of female Marines who were every bit as committed, competent, and capable as you’d want Marines to be. This despite the fact that the Corps doesn’t have mixed-gender basic training, and never has. Why not? They argue that it would greatly reduce the effectiveness of the basic Marines who graduate from boot camp. So far, they’ve been able to make it stick. Why hasn’t the Army? Have they even tried?