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berto -> RE: Women In the Infantry (3/2/2013 11:48:54 AM)
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The Truth About Women in Combat
[emphasis added]
quote:
Conservatives often stand accused these days of standing outside the "reality-based community." Yet liberals can be blinded by ideology, and nowhere is this more true than in the debate over women in combat.
Over the past two decades, the United States has moved steadily to open all military roles to women. Last month, departing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta removed the last barriers. Women may henceforward qualify for every duty, including combat infantry. The few - very few - public objections raised to this decision were met with derision rather than argument, well represented by this sneering item from the Daily Show. [link omitted here]
Yet to deny the highly combat-relevant differences between the sexes is to deny reality as blatantly as ever done by any anti-evolutionist - and with potentially much more lethal consequence.
In 2007, Kingsley Browne gathered the evidence in a clear and concise book, Co-ed Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn't Fight the Nation's Wars. The case presented by Browne won't come as news to any military decision-maker. But it will and should jolt those who have relied on too credulous media sources for their information about what soldiers do and how they do it.
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The military executes missions, and the generals and admirals understand that one of their most important missions - from the point of view of their personal advancement - is to recruit sufficient numbers of women to please their political masters. The only way to achieve that mission is to operate very unequal standards.
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Sex integration has tangled the military in double standards and collective denial. The Army, Browne reports, maintains an unofficial policy whereby women - but not men - showers in the field every 72 hours. This practice is not written down, but it's observed by the troops as another example of a demoralizing military culture of denial and lying. Browne quotes interviews of enlisted men by military sociologist Laura Miller:
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"Today all you hear in the Army is that we are equal, but men do all the hard and heavy work whether it's combat or not."
"The majority of females I know are not soldiers. They are employed. Anything strenuous is avoided with a passion. I would hate to serve with them during combat! I would end up doing my job and 2/3 of theirs just to stay alive."
(LOC 3644)
More cutting still, Browne repeats a bitter military joke that true equality will arrive - not when women receive Medals of Honor (since it will be suspected that the standards were bent in their favor) - but when women "can be subject to a court-martial for cowardly conduct."
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4) It is on the point of "fairness" that Browne expresses himself most scathingly. It's not the military's job to be "fair." It is the military's job to win wars. Our society values freedom of speech. It values the right to elect leaders. It values individual choice and market competition. All of those values are suspended in the military, sacrificed to the paramount need for military effectiveness. Yet on gender issues, the military seems to have decided that the desire of a relatively very small number of female officers to reach the highest levels of command trumps the necessities of national defense.
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Too many draw an analogy between sex distinctions and the military's discredited history of racial discrimination. Browne urges us to think of sex as a distinction more like age.
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[W]hat would happen if the United States had fifteen thousand sixty-year-old men in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of fifteen thousand women. If it did, many of these older men would undoubtedly behave bravely. Would these stories be persuasive evidence that the military should allow sixty-year-olds to enlist? Not at all. The relevant question is whether the sixty-year-old men are as effective in combat as twenty-year-old mean, and few would be (or be expected to be).
(LOC 3943)
Co-ed Combat depicts a country that seems to have made up its collective mind that it need not worry about ever again fighting a major war against a capable enemy - A country so confident in its margin of superiority that it can afford deliberately to weaken its own military performance for reasons of pure ideology. And this time it is the so-called progressive side that treats facts as unwelcome intruders.
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Sara Lister, [the Clinton-era] Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, candidly stated that the Army does not publicly discuss strength and pregnancy issues because "those subjects quickly become fodder for conservatives seeking to limit women's role in the Army."
(LOC 3831)
Well, yeah. But if your preferred policy can only be advanced by concealing relevant facts, isn't that a blaring warning of a bad policy? A big, rich country like the United States can afford many mistakes. But in this case, the mistakes will exact a cost in lives sacrificed and - very conceivably - future battles lost.
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