Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here with us today.
Ms. Nash can correct me if I'm wrong as I have no experience in the military. I once saw a documentary that makes a lot of sense now that I hear you guys talking about the culture that exists in the military. Soldiers were talking in the documentary at their training camp about the main goal of what the military does to them while they're in training. You said that as the years go by, it probably gets progressively worse because third-year people were the worst behaved toward you.
I was wondering if anything that I had heard was true. Basically, they were saying that the main thing was to dehumanize someone in order to build them into a soldier and to make someone who can do things that they're not raised to do from a very young age. They're raised to have certain values and to have a moral compass and to act in a certain way. When they go into the military, they have to unlearn certain things in order to relearn how to be a soldier.
Do you think that process is what lends itself to this manly and masculine culture that exists? In what ways can we maintain effective training that would allow soldiers to be effective when they're out on the ground, while not adding to this discrimination against women, and not making it about being masculine, but about other things that would make them tough soldiers?