WASHINGTON — You see glistening mermaid sightings on Animal Planet more than you catch glimpses of vintage John McCain on Capitol Hill.

But there he was on Tuesday, succinctly saying what needed to be said about the scourge of sexual assault cases in the military. Looking grimly at the ribbon-bedecked white male heads of all the services testifying before the Armed Services Committee, McCain scolded: “Just last night a woman came to me and said her daughter wanted to join the military, and could I give my unqualified support for her doing so. I could not.”Are women who want to join the military now more afraid of being raped by their brothers in arms than dying for their country?The seven women on the committee are driving the mission to curb the plague of sexual transgressions in the military, with 26,000 service men and women assaulted in 2012.

“Women are not going to be turned away on this one,” Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri told me.

But men on both sides of the aisle were also pressing the top generals and admirals, even though some, like Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, still seemed to be getting up to speed on the issue. “Several years ago, when we had the first females go out on an aircraft carrier that when they returned to port,” Chambliss said he recalled, “a significant percentage of those females were pregnant.” Was any investigation done, he asked, to determine whether those pregnancies were the result of “consensual acts”?The brass agreed there was a “cancer” in the military, but their rigid, nonsensical response boiled down to: Trust us. We’ll fix the system, even though we don’t really believe it’s broken.

They were unanimously resistant to the shift that several of our allies have made, giving lawyers, rather than commanders, the power to take cases to court. This even though they were having a hard time coming up with examples of any commanders who had been removed from their posts for allowing a toxic climate on sexual assault.

In fact, the military honchos made it clear that, after months of public dismay, they hadn’t even gotten around to studying the systems our allies put in place to achieve objective decision making, where commanders can’t protect buddies or Top Gun criminals. “Talking to people who have managed this problem longer than we have seems to me the very easiest place to start,” chided Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri.

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, told me the arguments of the brass “boiled down to an almost mystical notion of the commanders’ responsibility. Why can’t we cut the strings to the British system we inherited from George III? The British are baffled by us. They gave control over major crimes to professional prosecutors years ago. It’s an institutional structure that has outlived its utility and credibility.”As Sarah Plummer, a beautiful ex-Marine who served in Iraq and says she was raped by a fellow Marine who was never prosecuted, explained to NBC News’s Jim Miklaszewski: “Having someone within your direct chain of command handling the case” is like “your brother raping you and having your dad decide the case.”The military big shots admitted that they had taken their eyes off the ball, but blamed it on a decade of two wars.

“Commanders having the authority to take a case to trial hasn’t gotten rid of the large number of sexual assaults and rapes or encouraged more people to come forward and report crimes,” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand told me. “In fact, it has had the opposite effect.” She told the military chiefs that “not every single commander can distinguish between a slap on the ass and a rape.”There’s no excuse for permitting a system to allow commanders to sweep things under the rug and allow threats of retaliation. The Naval Academy is reeling from a case of a female midshipman who reported she was raped by three Navy football players at an off-campus party last year. The men were not charged, but the woman was punished for underage drinking.

West Point is roiled by two cases: a sergeant first class in charge of the welfare of some cadets has been accused of illicitly videotaping female cadets as they disrobed in the bathroom or shower; and the men’s rugby team was temporarily disbanded after players exchanged e-mails that were degrading to women.

On the Hill, the brass argued that they could not retain “cohesion” and “order” if commanders were not calling all the legal shots. But Nancy Parrish, the president of a victims’ rights group, told a chilling story about a young woman in a combat zone who had tried four times to report a soldier she says raped her. She saw him coming toward her truck as she got ready for a mission and recalled her feelings: “I shut down inside. I was lead driver in our convoy, and I kept hoping to hit an I.E.D. after that.”As Parrish sardonically asked, you call that “unit cohesion” and “good order and discipline”?