‘In sum, the Joint Chiefs have taken a clear long-term risk for an unclear near-term political gain, perhaps hoping to diminish budgetary cuts. The question is whether increasing the individual rights of the female soldier decreases the combined combat effectiveness of the killing pack. We won’t know the answer until we fight a hard ground war sometime in the future.’
Our politics is extremely polarized and there’s rarely middle ground.
Does allowing women into combat situations make us more combat ready? As someone who’s non-military, I’ve heard these arguments made, which I find persuasive, but they’re up for debate:
-Allowing women into combat necessarily invites sexual tension into the close-knit, cohesive, adrenalin-fueled environment of combat units and infantrymen. There’s nothing like shooting and being shot at, killing up close, and the brutal conditions that occur in combat operations. It’s animalistic. You truly don’t know unless you’ve been there, I’ve been told. Men and women are both changed by the presence of women, and they get up to what nature intended with all sorts of repercussions.
-Only a very few women may even physically qualify to serve in combat, often at great physical cost, including later infertility in some cases. Many men fail to qualify, for various reasons, and failure out in the field can mean death, or the death of your brothers. This can cost us an operation, a battle, or a war. Inevitably this will lead to two different standards, and lowered standards all around. As West points out, some people pushing this change want equal access, but not equal obligation (no draft for women). It’s Title IX writ large, one more boys’ club to equalize, one more situation in which to extend the gender equity logic, often with some ideological hostility for the very organizations they want to alter, often wanting to simply extend their own political and institutional influence without always having the best reasons to do so.
-Our enemies, after capturing female infantry, will not only be torture and brutalize them, hold them as hostages and POW’s as they’ve done our men, but they could also rape them, and use our obvious attachment to a young woman service member to leverage their aims and which could lead to altered outcomes. Fewer young women serving may be willing to accept such scenarios.
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Here’s General Robert Barrow, 27th Commandant Of The Marines testifying back in 1991 (Clinton administration), whose testimony was referred to in West’s piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy–whDNNKk
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Here’s a quote by Samuel Huntington (wikipedia). The quote is from The Clash Of Civilizations and is fairly well known.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”
Do we get to extend the values of gender equality, humanism, and human rights without our military superiority? Do we ignore violence at our peril, either organizing it or being consumed by it? Are we inevitably drifting Europeward, accelerated under this administration?
Can anyone help get a video embedded and the “continue reading” option up? I don’t want to clutter the place.
My good Chris,
In your Visual pane, click the button to the left of your ABC spell check button to insert a More/Continue Reading tag into your text; in the corresponding Text pane, the button is actually labelled “more”, and you can also see what the code produced looks like.
To embed any embeddable video, paste only the URL of the video alone on its own line. Not all videos can be embedded, but one can almost always find YouTube copies of those which can’t, and all YouTube video can be embedded.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
My primary concern is the strength/endurance requirements. There’s already a little bit of fudging.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/us/politics/first-pull-ups-then-combat-marines-say.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp
How many pull-ups does it take to make a female Marine?
The answer, starting next January: a minimum of three, the same number required of male MarinesThe answer, starting next January: a minimum of three, the same number required of male Marines.
……
But even for the pull-ups, the Marines are still making some exceptions. To get a perfect grade, women will have to do only 8, compared with the 20 required for men.
“I don’t think it’s a very high bar,” said Capt. Ann G. Fox, a Marine Reserve officer who during her first deployment in 2004 worked with the Iraqi Army and who thinks women could do better if it was required of them. “I think the test should be the same as the men 20 pull-ups. People train to what they’re tested on.”
I like Capt. Fox’s attitude. I’ve known plenty of women who could beat me in a mile run. I’ve known a couple who could do more chin ups than me, mostly because they’re small and I’m not. I’m not sure II’ve ever met a woman stronger than me, or stronger than I was during my twenties, that is.
If you’re going to have women in combat, have them meet the exact same standards as men for strength and endurance.
As for the sexual tension, i.e. watching women get shot and, maybe, die. Seems it would make post Traumatic stress even more traumatic. But, everthing must be sacrificed at the altar of ideology. (I’m not sure if this is feminism, political correctness or what. I wonder how the Isrealies handle tthis? Do Istreali women fight at the same level as men? If they do, they probably have some valuable lessons for us? What do the Swiss do? I’ll try to check on this stuff later.
No, the Israeli women do not get intentionally placed in ground combat situations. But, as an Israeli woman veteran of my acquaintance once told me, the front lines don’t always stay put, and women do end up in shoot-outs now and then. This is true in combat these days anywhere in the world. BTW, the real test for women in ground combat is probably in police forces, in the US and elsewhere, where they seem to be performing quite creditably.
Why are we talking in the future and the subjunctive? Women are, and for quite a while have been, serving in combat situations in the US Armed Forces. All this official change will accomplish is to assure that those women are better trained and equipped, and get the credit and compensation for the duties they are already performing. BTW women have been in combat situations getting shot at, and sometimes shot, literally since the beginning of the Republic. We seem to worry about them only when there is a chance they might get to shoot back.
Quite true. I’m wondering how much of a difference this new policy will really make. The difference seems to be the intent of putting women in combat roles. It’s hard for me to imagine, but it’s an all volunteer military, so no one’s being forced at this point.
But the point is that while women have served honorably and creditably in the armed forces, and ocassionally in combat duties, they haven’t been trained for the infantry and combat duties directly. Their bodies perform much more poorly for biological reasons, and having even one woman there usually causes quite a change in the infantry. You likely won’t do it without changing the standards.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that because they’ve served in other areas, combat is the next logical step. Shouldn’t there be a higher burden of proof for the change?
Do the individual women who are being offered as being able to choose benefit? Does our combat readiness?
Clearly politics is a factor here as well, as this was done to partially ensure women roles in higher command. Why must there be parity?
Why must this logic be applied to all of our institutions, even if there are good reasons against it? When will gender equality ever be reached?
1) I like Bing . His book The Strongest Tribe remains my favorite.
2) AS noted above, women are already getting shot at and shooting back. They are performing well. If they can meet the standards, the other reasons to keep them out seem weak. They know the risks, so let them worry about torture and rape. TBH, out troops go overboard for each other already, so I dont see that as a huge risk or problem. If we are going to let our troops have the judgment to decide when they need to shoot people, I would be willing to trust them to figure out the sex issue.
Steve
Also, I dunno about torture, but women in the US armed forces are exposed to a considerably greater danger of rape from their own comrades in arms than from the enemy, most of the time.
I feel confident that everything will be fine. It worked well in “Starship Troopers.” :)
To riff off your comment. I always felt the greatest force for gender equity in the military was Gene Roddenberry.