Women Warriors

As you know, the debate about having women sign up for the draft has entered the Republican presidential campaign. As of today, the only candidate who has forcefully rejected the idea of drafting women is Ted Cruz. It tells you something.

The issue of drafting women easily morphs into the issue of women in combat… a policy promoted by the Obama Defense Department. The argument says that if women want to be in combat they ought to be in combat. After all, you are what you want and who are we to discriminate.

Last August, Marine Corps. Veteran Jude Eden laid out the argument against having women in combat in the New York Times:

  

Even on lower fitness standards, women have far higher rates of injury, illness, non-availability, non-deployability and attrition than men. Commanders of coed units know too well the added burdens of trying to juggle sexual dynamics, accommodations, relationships, fraternization, rape, pregnancy, hygiene and much more while maintaining troop welfare and good order and discipline, let alone mission accomplishment. These are liabilities that can result in mission failure and high casualties in the combat units, all to satisfy a tiny group of women selfishly petitioning for their own career advancement.

Selfish careerists, who knew? In fact, the push for women in combat rarely if ever considers the consequences in terms of combat readiness. If it does, it produces phony studies that defy reality. Then it insists that we all believe the lie.

Of course, our enemies do not give us extra credit for diversity. They see women in combat as what Eden calls a “self-imposed” weakness. They immediately exploit it. She offers an example from her own experience:

ISIS doesn’t care that our military has met its diversity quota and broken the so-called brass ceiling. They will see our self-imposed weaknesses and exploit them to cause as much damage as possible. That’s precisely what happened to the group of female Marines who served on entry checkpoint duty two months before I did in Fallujah in June, 2005. Insurgents targeted their convoy almost certainly because they were transporting females. They laid an ambush that began with a bomb and ended in a firefight. Three American servicewomen died (one was a single mother) and several others suffered horrendous injuries. They hadn’t made and maintained the infantry standards to be there — they were just attached to the infantry by day. Women are targeted as easy marks because their capture and torture devastate American morale, further hindering our ability to fight our enemies.

Eden developed her argument further in  The Daily Signal:

The combat integration policy has been sold to us on smoke. Advocates for it have made the demonstrably false claim that women are physically capable of anything military men are while decades of military and sports medicine studies prove the opposite. They’ve ignored the heavy negative effects that sexual dynamics already have on coed units, especially those that deploy. They’ve told us women becoming men’s physical equals just a matter of leadership and training when women tested continually demonstrate it’s Nature, not Nurture, dictating the reality here.

As happens with many policies, the notion of women in combat has been tried before and rejected. Witness Israel and Great Britain:

Although Israel hasn’t put women in direct combat since 1948, they experimented with women in tank crews and the armored corps and reversed the policy. Britain, too, has gone back and forth depending on who’s in office. Although neither are comparable to the U.S. military’s size and scope, both found the same problems: much higher injuries and lower performance among women that skyrocketed costs and degraded readiness.

One suspects that politicians promote the policy because they are pandering to women by fostering the illusion that women and men are precisely the same. 

The consequences go well beyond military training. In the culture at large more women are now single than are married. Be sure not to suggest that all of our great social experiments and our culture war has not damaged the institution of marriage. 

The war against boys has made it far more difficult for men and women to get together and to marry. If you think that women want to be alone you will be happy with these results. If you think that women do not want to be alone you should begin questioning them.

[Addendum from Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine:  In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent. In other words, for the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women. Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than 34 who had never married was up to 46 percent, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under 30, the likelihood of being married has become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans are wed by age 29, compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960.]