Leadership Quote by Louise Slaughter

A sentence like this does two jobs at once: it indicts and it inoculates. Slaughter frames the problem as a matter of "doing a better job", the language of management rather than moral catastrophe, but the target is unmistakable. If the Defense Department must improve care for servicewomen assaulted within its ranks, the implication is that the institution designed to protect people has failed to protect its own, then failed again in the aftermath.

The phrasing is strategic. "Best possible care" sounds humane, even nonpartisan, yet it quietly shifts the debate away from whether sexual assault is "real" or "rare" in the military and toward what the state owes its victims. She avoids the trap of attacking the military as a culture outright; she attacks a deliverable. That makes the statement harder to dismiss as anti-military and easier to translate into hearings, budgets, protocols, and accountability measures. In Washington terms, it is a policy lever disguised as compassion.

"Service women who are victims" also signals a tension: these are trained professionals in a rigid hierarchy, not civilians with easy exits. The subtext is coercion and retaliation, the ways chain of command can turn reporting into career suicide. Slaughter is writing into a long-running scandal cycle - stories of underreporting, mishandled investigations, and inadequate medical and psychological support - and into a political moment where "support the troops" rhetoric often drowned out scrutiny. She reclaims that slogan by insisting that supporting troops includes confronting what happens to them when the enemy is internal.