Women Warriors in Combat

For those who claim to care about scientific facts Heather Mac Donald’s Wall Street Journal op-ed will come as something of a shock. You see, thanks to the Obama administration, the American military has decided that gender diversity trumps combat readiness. It does not matter whether female recruits can do the training. It does not matter if their presence disrupts morale. It does not matter if they are less fierce and less capable than male recruits. We must have more women in the military, because we must ply national security to the feminist will.

In truth, Mac Donald reports, the Marine Corps studied the question. The results showed clearly that placing women in infantry units was a bad idea:

In September 2015 the Marine Corps released a study comparing the performance of gender-integrated and male-only infantry units in simulated combat. The all-male teams greatly outperformed the integrated teams, whether on shooting, surmounting obstacles or evacuating casualties. Female Marines were injured at more than six times the rate of men during preliminary training—unsurprising, since men’s higher testosterone levels produce stronger bones and muscles. Even the fittest women (which the study participants were) must work at maximal physical capacity when carrying a 100-pound pack or repeatedly loading heavy shells into a cannon.

Of course, the Obama administration, led by Defense Secretary Ash Carter, ignored the study and opened all combat units to women. Naturally, he had to change the fitness standards, thus ensuring that women would not be respected as equals. But, no problem there.

Mac Donald continues:

Ignoring the Marine study, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all combat roles to women in December 2015. Rather than requiring new female combat recruits to meet the same physical standards as men, the military began crafting “gender neutral” standards in the hope that more women would qualify. Previously, women had been admitted to noncombat specialties under lower strength and endurance requirements.

If women are held to the same standards, the expected comes to pass:

Only two women have passed the Marine Corps’s fabled infantry-officer training course out of the three dozen who have tried. Most wash out in the combat endurance test, administered on day one. Participants hike miles while carrying combat loads of 80 pounds or more, climb 20-foot ropes multiple times, and scale an 8-foot barrier. The purpose of the test is to ensure that officers can hump their own equipment and still arrive at a battleground mentally and physically capable of leading troops. Most female aspirants couldn’t pass the test, so the Marines changed it from a pass/fail requirement to an unscored exercise with no bearing on the candidate’s ultimate evaluation. The weapons-company hike during the IOC is now “gender neutral,” meaning that officers can hand their pack to a buddy if they get tired, rather than carrying it for the course’s full 10 miles.

Moreover, when women become part of these units, morale suffers. Who would have guessed:

Putting young, hormonally charged men and women into stressful close quarters for extended periods guarantees sexual liaisons, rivalries and breakups, all of which undermine the bonding essential to a unified fighting force.

Mac Donald continues:

A Marine commander who served in Afghanistan described to me how the arrival of an all-female team tasked with reaching out to local women affected discipline on his forward operating base. Until that point, rigorous discipline had been the norm. But when four women—three service members and a translator—arrived, the post’s atmosphere changed overnight from a “stern, businesslike place to that of an eighth-grade dance.” The officer walked into a common room one day to find the women clustered in the center. They were surrounded by eager male Marines, one of whom was doing a handstand.

None of this should have come as news:

Long before infantry integration became a feminist imperative, evidence was clear that a coed military was a sexually active one. In 1988 then-Navy Secretary Jim Webb reported that of the unmarried enlisted Navy and Air Force women stationed in Iceland, half were pregnant.

Of course, pregnancy gets you relieved of duty. Why do you imagine that these fierce and courageous women warriors are so likely to get pregnant? Is it because they are lusting for battle?

Given the choice between victory and diversity, the American military is now wedded to diversity. Mac Donald concludes:

… war isn’t about promoting equality. Its objective is to break the enemy’s will through precise lethal engagement, with the lowest possible loss of American life. The claim that female combat soldiers will perform as lethally as men over an extended deployment entails a denial of biological reality as great as the one underlying the transgender crusade.

It’s not just about promoting equality. It’s about pretending that equality exists when it doesn’t.