The Marines are about to be hit by the same kind of sexual-harassment scandal that rocked the Army, Navy and Air Force. As yet, no Marine has gone on record talking about rape. But someone will—and I bet it will be soon. Documents I recently obtained show that the same hostility found in the other services is deeply embedded in the Marines. Worse, this past February, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld purged the committee that reported on the corps' miserable climate, and stripped the committee's charter of key investigative powers. The Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, or DACOWITS, long targeted by the radical right, isn't exactly a feminist innovation; it was established by Secretary of Defense Gen.

At least Pfc. Jessica Lynch got her wounds on the battlefront. Back on the home front, Air Force Academy women have been taking friendly fire. Rape, it seems, is the price of graduation. To many civilians, that news from the Air Force Academy sounds like déjà vu all over again. Didn't the military -- the nation's largest employer of women -- get the message after Adm. Frank Kelso lost his career over the gang grope at the Navy's 1991 Tailhook convention? Or after the press revealed in 1996 that Army drill sergeants were regularly raping trainees at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds?