Director of Personnel Plans put forward a study that recommended phasing out the WAF
program entirely, but resistance from Capitol Hill and the Pentagon, which was unwilling to cut
a volunteer program at a time when reservists were being recalled to deal with international
crises, saved the women’s program (ibid.:174).
In the 1960s, the WAF was a token program, in which women served only in traditionally
female occupations. Women recruits had to meet high standards for education and mental
capacity, and they were also expected to meet a high standard of personal attractiveness. In 1966,
according to Holm:
the Air Force Chief of Staff admonished the commander of the Recruiting Service to get
“better looking WAF.” Physical appearance became the chief criterion in the selection
process; each applicant was required to pose for four photographs: front, side, back, and
full-face. Civil rights leaders assumed the photographs’ purpose was to determine race,
but this was not the case—it was a beauty contest, and the commander of the Recruiting
Service was the final judge. (Ibid.:181)
In the late 1960s, as in the other services, the trends slowly began to shift under the
pressures of the Vietnam War and the growing women’s movement. The Secretary of the Air
Force ordered a study of the possibility of expanding the WAF program to keep down draft calls.
The Air Force, unconcerned about the other services or the larger manpower issues raised by the
Vietnam War, resisted, since it was having no trouble recruiting high-quality men, many of
whom enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into the Army (ibid.:189). The Air Force
eventually agreed to a small expansion.
After some early resistance, the Air Force eventually sent more than 500 women, more
than half of them officers, to Southeast Asia, mainly to serve with the 13
th
Air Force in Thailand
(ibid.:223-224). In 1969, the Air Force became the first service to open ROTC to women on a
test basis. The AFROTC test was successful. The few women who had been allowed in
performed well, and the air science professors reported that the presence of women helped to
make AFROTC a more acceptable presence on campus (ibid.:269), which would have been a
significant concern in the face of anti-war activity on university campuses during that period.
In the first years of the all-volunteer force, Air Force recruiting advertisements in my
sample focused on job skills and training almost exclusively, emphasizing these issues even
more than the Army and Navy did, though both of those services pushed benefits and job
training during this period. In the early AVF, the Air Force embraced a marketplace philosophy,
showcasing the service as a route to economic advancement. The Air Force’s main selling point
was that they would give airmen skills that are highly valued in the civilian work world. The
27
Convention