Last week, the privately-run Virginia Military Institute decided to admit women as cadets.

For this, VMI is to be congratulated, even if it is 20 years behind the power curve.

The service academies decided to allow women in back in 1976, and West Point has had a female corps commander (the highest-ranking cadet at the institution).

Even the Citadel, a bastion of insular Southern tradition, is allowing women in as cadets.

It is doing so even after Shannon Faulkner — who should not have been applying for any sort of officer cadet training anywhere — tanked and went home.

It’s damn well about time that these schools integrated. Women have proven beyond any doubt that they are capable of taking on just about any task in military service.

Women are now serving as frontline fighter pilots. It is somewhat surprising that they weren’t allowed to fly combat jets until just recently; women served well as ferry pilots in World War II, flying aircraft to the units where they would go into combat.

And since the 1950s, the military has known that the ideal physical type to withstand the extreme stresses of modern aerial combat is a short female. They don’t black out as easily during high g-force maneuvering than their male counterparts.

My experience as an ROTC cadet proved to me first-hand that women can do just about anything in the military.

At both Louisville and Wyoming we had female cadets on our Ranger Challenge teams, women who distinguished themselves in both their excellent performances and the amount of courage they showed in difficult times.

In particular, a Louisville cadet named Crockett could outrun and outshoot most of the men on the team and had more command presence than most of the officers and NCOs overseeing the competition.

And she had guts to spare, continuing on in the three-day series of events even with injuries and a touch of the flu, no doubt made worse by the spring storm we endured over the second and third days.

My dad, a 20-year Air Force veteran, didn’t care if someone under his command was male or female – only that he or she could get his or her assigned tasks done and done well.

Experience has made me a booster for women in the military. Hell, if they can get the job done, let them in and let them into any field or specialty, from clerical work to the infantry.

That’s probably why I found a Reuters item on America Online’s News section so disturbing.

In late July, the U.S. European Command admitted that 70 female American soldiers serving in Bosnia had been sent home because they were pregnant.

There are 1,500 women participating in the mission out of a total of 20,000 U.S. personnel, according to the report. So four percent of the women on the force have become pregnant since the mission began.

They weren’t pregnant before they left only to find out about it later; no, they got down to business, apparently with a comrade, after arriving in Bosnia.

This is rather disturbing for a few reasons.

First, it indicates that a serious lack of discipline exists both personally and within the ranks. Just what were these women thinking?

Obviously, they weren’t thinking, otherwise they wouldn’t be heading home with a new addition to the family.

Were they looking for a guaranteed ticket home from the mission? Did they just obey their hormones and forget the possible consequences of their actions?

And what of the men involved? Just what was on their minds? Well, that should be rather obvious, and it certainly wasn’t the mission.

This sort of activity can lead to serious problems within the chain of command.

The fragile glue which holds military units together can be eroded when members start getting romantic with one another.

Their focus shifts from the mission at hand and the integrity the unit to who is nailing whom.

It’s obvious that some bad feelings can develop and destroy any sort of cohesion the unit enjoys.

Plus, just who is getting it on with whom? Are superiors having sex with their subordinates? If that is the case, then the military has a serious problem indeed. It isn’t difficult to see how this could wreck the chain of command and undermine the mission.

The military should come down on this situation with a very large hammer and send a signal that it won’t be tolerated.

It’s one thing when a military woman gets pregnant while serving in a peacetime in a support role, where pregnancy wouldn’t present such a critical problem.

But women in combat specialties or on operations like the one in Bosnia should be somehow punished for such a lack of discipline. And the men who assist in the process should receive the same punishment for the same lack of discipline.

Alcohol is banned for the troops in Bosnia, but sex is not.

It’s a good thing alcohol was banned – think of how big this problem would be if it weren’t.

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Kevin S. Kirby is a senior in journalism mass communication from Louisville, Ky. He has a B.A. in political science from the University of Wyoming.