When the law banning women from service in combat units was repealed, liberal politicians and feminists cheered. “Equal rights!” they said. “Women are just as strong as men!” they said. Current and former soldiers spoke out in great numbers, listing reasons that introducing women to high stress situations might not be advisable.
I myself posted an article at Misfit Politics (which I have reprinted below for the sake of convenience) detailing the purpose of discrimination in the Armed Forces – to ensure that we have the strongest possible force available to defend our nation.
And I posed a question: what happens when women prove to be physically incapable of meeting the standards already in place for all-male combat units? Will it end there? Of course it won’t.
And it hasn’t.
Twenty-nine women so far have attempted the Marine Corps Officer Infantry Course, and none have made it to graduation. In fact, “only four women have made it beyond the first day of the course, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test.”
This failure to successfully turn out women who are trained in combat leadership roles has lessened the Corps’ chances of compliance with orders that mandate women “be integrated into combat roles by January 2016 or provide a research-based reason why they can’t.”
To me, the response is obvious: the women who have attempted to pass the Officer Infantry Course are providing data for a practical research-based study that proves what the non-politically motivated already knew: the reality is that the majority of women are not a good fit for close combat operations.
However, interest groups in Washington DC such as the radical feminist group the Service Women’s Action Network are already generating buzz about the need to lower the standards in order to pave the way for more women in combat units.
It should be mentioned that the Marine Corps women who attempted the course are not among those demanding lowered standards. “It would entirely undercut the value of their achievement and diminish the overall fighting capacity of the Marine Corps. These officers are Marines first and individuals second. They want to succeed on fair terms.”
But what the military wants, and ultimately what is the best course of action for both the soldiers and the citizens they defend, is often at odds with what progressive groups and political activists fight to achieve in the name of “equality.”
Reprinted from Misfit Politics, January 31, 2013
The United States military is built upon a grand tradition of discrimination. To this day, they discriminate against any who are too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too stupid, too crazy, too sick – and that is the short list. Before you get your pants in a wad, they do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, or religious background. They no longer discriminate based on sexual preference. And their perceived discrimination against women is hardly comprehensive.
So why is discrimination an important part of military tradition? Because it makes us stronger. In order to weed out those who are incapable of either completing training or performing at the desired level of competency, we start by limiting the field of contenders. If we know, for example, that someone with no depth perception will crash in nine out of ten attempts to land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, why in heaven’s name would we allow that person to enter flight school?
Part of the problem is the progressive sissification of America. We have all been taught, most of us from birth, that “discrimination” is bad. And when it refers to pointing fingers and laughing at the little girl with the hearing aid because she’s different, it is bad. But what about when “discrimination” means you throw the spoiled milk away instead of pouring it on your cereal? What about when “discrimination” means that you save yourself for that one special person rather than availing your virginity to the entire high school hockey team? What about when “discrimination” keeps the Army from placing weaker and less qualified soldiers in close combat situations?
The word from the Pentagon is that “women who are assigned to combat units will be held to the same standards as men.” But I would ask the following: do they mean job-specific requirements? Do they mean that female explosive ordinance disposal specialists will have to be just as good at dismantling land mines as males? Do they mean that female medics will have to start as many practice IV’s as males? Because those standards are already the same.
It’s the physical training standards that differ, and differ by a lot. Women are not required to run nearly as fast or to do as many push-ups as males for any job in the military. When you’re talking about women who work as x-ray techs in field hospitals, it is far less of a problem. But if you take that same woman and put her in a position where she may have to outrun an insurgent or carry a fallen brother to safety, a real problem arises.
And with regard to the “equality” that is supposedly promoted by this policy change, another problem arises: will women in combat units be held to the same physical standards as the men? Male standards are the same whether the job is in administration or the infantry, in a field hospital or in the back of a tank. Why should women have different physical standards based solely on their chosen jobs if men do not? How long before the Army is once again labeled “sexist” for exactly that reason?
And what happens when women, who make up 20% of the military, demand that that percentage be matched in combat units for the sake of equality? Will we pine for the days of discrimination when our national security abroad depends on a military that can only demand the highest standards from 80% of its soldiers? And now that Secretary Panetta has opened that door, will we be able to get those days back?
