Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Diminishing the American Military

A certain presidential candidate has often declared that we do not win any more. Whatever one thinks of said presidential candidate, the point has some merit. Forget for the minute about free trade. Under the Obama administration, we do not even want to win wars.

As we know, the Obamafied military, down to its combat units, will henceforth be co-ed. Apparently, the White House believes that in war you get extra credit for having co-ed platoons. Can the women in question do precisely the job that the men can do? Undoubtedly, they cannot.

One suspects that basic training and other physical conditioning requirements will be reduced in order to ensure that women can qualify.

Will the men in these units have full confidence in their female counterparts? I find it highly unlikely.

Will this co-edification of combat units cause morale problems and other difficulties? It already has.

Rich Lowry reports on those who support the co-ed military:

The US military doesn’t exist to satisfy the whims of the board of directors of the Ms. Foundation. Its job is to field a force that is most effective at winning the nation’s wars.

In an extensive study, the US Marine Corps concluded that mixed-gender units fail by that test, although no one is inclined to take note.

The Marine study compared all-male and mixed-gender units and concluded that women in mixed-gender units “were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons, and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield.”

The physical capacity of the sexes is different, and top-end females tend to be only as capable of the lower-end males. The males in the Marine study averaged 178 pounds, with 20 percent body fat, whereas females were 142 pounds with 24 percent body fat.

The top 25 percent of females in anaerobic power overlapped with the bottom 25 percent of males; the top 10 percent of females in anaerobic capacity overlapped with the bottom 50 percent of males.

The physical disadvantage meant that women were more likely to be fatigued and suffer stress fractures. Women were six times more likely to be injured in entry-level training than males.

As for the most recent proposal to have all women sign up for the draft, Lowry notes with chagrin that Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush approved of the plan. Lowry does not mention that when Ted Cruz was asked his opinion after Saturday’s debate, he did not approve.

The point is: a military that wants to win does not make itself into a social experiment. A military that believes it can do what it pleases and still win is saying that it is so far superior to other military forces that it can win even with a handicap. Such arrogance invites aggression.

Now, the Obama administration has taken it one better. It has given the American military a higher purpose: fighting climate change.


The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.

A new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science.”

It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy — a wide array of “climate change boards, councils and working groups” to infuse climate change into “programs, plans and policies.”

To four-star generals and admirals, among them the regional combatant commanders who plan and fight the nation’s wars, the directive tells them: “Incorporate climate change impacts into plans and operations and integrate DoD guidance and analysis in Combatant Command planning to address climate change-related risks and opportunities across the full range of military operations, including steady-state campaign planning and operations and contingency planning.”

The directive, “Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience,” is in line with President Obama’s view that global warming is the country’s foremost national security threat, or close to it. Mr. Obama says there is no debate on the existence of man-made global warming and its ensuing climate change. Supporters of this viewpoint label as “deniers” any scientists who disagree.

Beginning with the military, Obama has set out to weaken America, to punish it for its perfidies and its sins. As noted in the previous post, Obama’s mismanagement of the situation in Syria suggests that he wants America to stand aside when faced with difficult foreign challenges. He uses enough military force to shield himself from the charge that he is doing nothing.

As for climate change, one officer has cogently pointed out that military actions take place within very short periods of time while climate change—assuming that we know what causes it; and we do not—occurs over centuries and even millennia.

The Washington Times reports:

Dakota Wood, a retired Marine Corps officer and U.S. Central Command planner, said the Pentagon is introducing climate change, right down to military tactics level….

“By equating tactical actions of immediate or short-term utility with large-scale, strategic-level issues of profound importance, the issue of climate change and its potential impact on national security interests is undermined,” he said. “People tend to dismiss the whole, what might be truly important, because of all the little silly distractions that are included along the way.”

He said climate change is typically measured in long stretches of time.

“The climate does change over great periods of time, typically measured in millennia, though sometimes in centuries,” he said. “But the document mentions accounting for such down to the level of changes in ‘tactics, techniques and procedures’ as if reviewing how a squad conducts a patrol should be accorded the same level of importance and attention as determining whether the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, might have to be relocated as sea levels rise over the next 100 years.”

The Obama doctrine is: let’s cripple the military so that America will never again be tempted to intervene anywhere on earth. How is it working out in Syria?

7 comments:

  1. The Feminists are so big on "equality", they claim, but are not insisting that women be subject to the draft. Piloting an aircraft does not take great strength, normally, but many military jobs/skills/occupations do.

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  2. All true, but let's drill a bit deeper and ask just WHY this is happening.

    The fact is, Obama won twice on such a Hate America platform, so it is quite clear that his views represent those of a majority of those currently inhabiting the land mass that we still refer to as the "United States of America". Not only that, but I would suggest that a substantial share of his vote came from those voting on that issue alone.

    As our land mass continues to fill up with Third World vermin actively hostile to the USA and our almost-inoperative Constitution, the effort to undermine our military will actually intensify.

    I don't know why any white male (especially those coming from families with a long military pedigree) would volunteer these days to get blown away for a country that holds him in contempt.

    Better arm yourself. Things are going to get ugly.

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  3. Let's be clear... the U.S. Constitution is a inconvenience. -$$$

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  4. Ultimately, it has always come down to this: What nutty things will a man do to rescue a compatriot in his team who happens to be female versus one who happens to be male?

    Answer: A lot. Lots of really nutty, crazy things. It's biological. We've been told for many years that men are brutes. But men know this. That's why they don'tt want brutes touching their chicks. It's a reality lesbians don't comprehend.

    Feminists will evaluate whatever evidence they want concluding there is no difference. The rest of us normal Americans will think for 6 seconds and think this ridiculous.

    There you have it. Combat arms with a feminine side. In other words, a distracting side. All women know this. That's why 98.723% of women think this is a crazy-ass idea.

    Men want to defend women they care about, beyond what they care about with women's blanket opportunity, because they understand the sexual threat involved. If you don't get that, you're nuts. It's real. It's going to happen. You think combat PTSD is a problem? Shit.......

    So its agenda over reality. We get to decide what wins out. Enjoy. -$$$

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  5. The U.S. military has the duty of projecting credible threats, so it would be a dereliction of duty to discount threats simply because they don't intend us harm.

    I admit calling on "climate change" itself might be too focused, but war itself threatens the environment, like the Kuwaiti oil rigs set on fire for months after the first gulf war, and in the 1980's the idea of "nuclear winter" arose as a threat, that a nuclear war wouldn't just destroy cities, but could fill the upper atmosphere with ash and particles that could reflect sunlight back into space, leading to a number of years of darkened skies and perhaps crop failures and snow in July in Iowa's breadbasket.

    But part of the problem with climate change, global or local, human caused or not is that humanity itself is still expanding by about 1 billion people every 13 years, and people need to live somewhere, and most people live near coastlines, where low lands and higher tidal surges can threaten more and more people every year. So even if storms stay the same, the costs to those storms will increase.

    And Africa's population is increasing the fastest and no sign of slowing. Meanwhile the Sahara desert also continues to expand, and reducing crop lands available to feed the people of Africa.
    http://www.vdare.com/posts/the-worlds-most-important-graph-african-population-projections
    http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/live-news/2015/6/the-sahara-desert-expands-every-year.html

    People are worried about say 20 million refugees now from Syria and the middle east, while climate change could encourage the mass migration of hundreds of millions of people from overpopulated third world countries in the coming decades.

    So the U.S. may seem relatively safe from much of that chaos, including mass migrations. But who knows, maybe the next decade will be Trump's century, and the great wall of China will be dwarfed by all the new walls going up in the world, to keep the wrong sort of people on the other side.

    Myself, I have an affinity towards walls as a military tactic. The alternative is like the locust swarms, and a future where hundreds of millions of people flee from country to country looking for safety, and what ever country is most hospitable to this migration will be chewed clean until local civilizing forces are overwhelmed, and chaos arises, and they move on somewhere else. So it really is better to help people fix their problems where they are than wait until it gets so bad they'd rather risk dying elsewhere than staying in hopelessness.

    That's not a good view of humanity, but it is a good reason to support family planning and contraceptives, just in case helping families stop at 2 or 3 kids instead of 7 or 8 really matters.

    And that's climate change too for me, since every surplus person born (over the death rate) is contributing to an increase in unsustainable consumption of one-time resources our descendants won't have, whether because we run out or it becomes too expensive or because the environmental costs overwhelm us.

    I don't think we should depend on the military to solve any of these problems, but if we don't act more rationally, they won't run out of things to worry about.

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  6. Dear Rich Lowry, et al:

    President Obama and his supporters do not care about facts or evidence.

    Regards,

    IAC

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  7. Winning means that someone else will lose. We can't have that. We're the nice people.

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