Monday, February 22, 2016

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.]

7 comments:

Sam L. said...

"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."

I used to be one of those.

priss rules said...

I would go further.

For almost all of history, men did all the fighting, getting killed or wounded.

It's women's turn, no?

I say ban all men from military and have women take all the positions.

Let them do the dying and getting maimed for a change.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Women serving in combat is a social disaster, a moral outrage, ethically vacuous and biological insanity. I expect nothing less from people whose formative coming-of-age experience was amidst the nihilism of the modern academy. Postmodernism offers women in combat because it is neither programmed nor equipped to deliver anything else.

Who's going to bear children? Men with uteri??? A society has to be able to replace soldiers lost.

I also predict the female soldiers will suffer acutely from the consequences of PTSD and POW more significantly than anyone imagines -- not because women are weak/weaker, but because women are not biologically suited to operate in expeditionary environments (force projection) nor in a foraging army (long-term operations). Female POW camps will become rape camps. Female soldiers in support roles? Okay, but even those can fall into the battle space with little warning. As far as I know, female soldiers in support roles near combats zones are currently permitted, and have been for years.

And yes, I understand there are Israeli women widely dispersed throughout the IDF. That's what happens in a small country with its back to the sea and existential threats on the other three sides. That's called necessity. But when was the last NYT photo you saw of female soldiers facing Palestinian enemy fire, stone-throwers or taking prisoners into custody in a combat zone?

I'm not old-fashioned. It's math. You have to be able to replenish numbers. The gestation period of a new, healthy human being is 9 months, and will always be. Women are good at certain things, men are good at certain things.

This is a perfect example of where an ideological need to demonstrate "equality" comes up the biological demands of reality. I would agree with Priss were it not for the inequality of consequences. And I've also never felt that women were necessarily wanting their husbands, sons and nephews to go to war. Again, it does happen... amidst necessity. Someone needs to defend the tribe, and some people need to be left behind to attend to the tribe's territory. Women do that. Rosie the Riveter was necessary and important, but she was safely in the homeland. And Rosie went back into the home after the war.

There is nothing necessary about having Anerican female soldiers in combat roles. And I don't care about their career needs. And I don't care about their aspirations for equality. And I don't care about their desire for heroism. You wanna be a heroine? You wanna give back to national security? Have a child. Be a mother. You don't need a medal for that, because you will always have children who know they're alive because of momma. That will never change.

Disagree with me all you want. It's &$@#ing math!

IAC

sestamibi said...

The issue of drafting women is a red herring based SOLELY on the assumption that they would be filling combat roles, especially since there hasn't been a draft in almost forty years and the military brass don't really want to bring it back.

Once we step back from that I see no reason not to make them subject to the draft if it becomes necessary. We can still keep them out of combat positions, but dammit if they're going to compete with men every step of the way for economic and political power they'd better be prepared to make the same sacrifice of at least two years out of their lives that men do. They don't have to fight on the front line, but there are plenty of other things they can do to keep the military going.

Dennis said...

sestamibi,

The reason for this being pushed now is because it would make it more difficult to defend or project military power because if women are or could be a significant part of the casualties those in power would aways be on the side of protecting women for the reasons that IAC so ably commented on. It would be almost impossible to react in a timely manner where our interests are at stake and to a real existential threat. One must also mention that women are more prone to vaginal diseases that would or could be a part of "slogging around in the mud" where the affects of death and destruction incubate. This is not considering the sexual problems that may exist when young people believe they may die soon
The Israelis do have women in the military, but they attempt to keep then away from the forward areas where the battle is happening. Even their studies have shown that men will put their lives unnecissaryly at risk to save a woman as one might expect. One cannot train men not to want to protect women nor should we desire to do it if we want our culture to survive, prosper and grow.. It is a force multi[lier to train women, who are every bit as patriotic as men, to fight if it comes to that.
It is the reason that the left has for years pushed to re-enstate the draft. It would weaken our ability to respond to the challenges of modern warfare and political realities. Notwithstanding weakening the ability to produce a force capable of meeting the exigencies of war.
In the main women care about this country in the same way many men do and should be part of protecting this country.

Bizzy Brain said...

I was drafted and became an infantry platoon sergeant in Vietnam in 1968, the bloodiest year of the war. The idea of women serving side by side with men in combat is insane. The type of camaraderie that develops among seasoned combat male troops that is necessary for survival and success cannot develop between men and women in combat situations. Worse yet, in this day and age of ultra-sensitivity to sexism, women call the shots. In today’s Army, if I gave some woman an order she didn’t like, or came down hard on her for poor performance, all the woman would have to do is claim harassment and I would have to back down. Case closed. You ask any lifer in the service now, and he will verify that women get their way and call the shots. I was not a career soldier, but did have a lot of respect for the military the way it was back then. Now that it has been feminized and faggified, I wouldn’t dream of volunteering. They can stick today’s Army and all their women in combat bullshit up their ass.

Dennis said...

Bizzy Brain,

I can relate to giving a woman an order to accomplish a required task and the first thing that she tried to pull was the "sexism' card. This also happened with the "race" card as well and I stuck to my "guns' and had money removed from this person's pay. My response was I will get a female NCO and we will come in on Saturday and you will finish the task I assigned you. Never had another problem with other women or minorities once the word got out.
Unfortunately this does not work in a combat situation where adherence to orders are tantamount. If past is any prelude to the future what normally happens is a number of women will get pregnant and not be available for duty. Once the personal danger passes the number of abortions go up.
One sees the problem of women not being able to relate to the banter and put down sessions males are prone to participate in, These put down sessions create an spirit de corps and camaraderie that is necessary to endure the pressure of war, business , et al. Few women can join in effectively and understand they need to give as good as they get. RESPECT is gained not given. The few women who can have little trouble relating to men in almost any situation. Then the problem for most of these women is the pure physical requirements needed to be an effective member of a ground combat group. It is why one sees women excel in flying planes, helicopters where individual merit and responsibility are necessary.
Sadly, feminism does significant damage to the enduring relationships needed in almost any endeavor, especially the environment of war fighting, to make an effective team where there can be NO doubt of the person's reasons for being a part of the team. Feminism is bigotry and selfishness and cares little about the needs of the job or mission accomplishment. Feminism is a disease of the soul.