[Vision2020] Women in Authority and Leadership!

[heirdoug at netscape.net]

Tom,



Below is a very clear answer to your continued bombardment of pictures 
and stories of women in uniform.

I for one don't believe that real men want women to go to combat. You, 
not being a real man, do! I have never said that women can't do the 
job. I just say that they shouldn't. Now before you get all hot and 
bothered about how you were under a lot of female officers I only have 
one thing to say. Being a private for all of those many years of 
military service you were bound to be passed over for advancement for 
someone with greater talent and superior skills and intellect. And I'm 
sure most of them were women!

I'm also certain you could beat a women up if you were called upon to 
do so, in combat of course. I'm sure it would have made your mother 
proud to have you exercise your inner amazonian side!



Doug!



ps The day job is going just fine!







 What Kind Of Nation Sends Women Into Combat?



by R. Cort Kirkwood



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The ridiculous spectacle of rescued POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the feisty, 
ballyhooed warrior of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company, which was 
butchered early on in Iraq, occasioned the usual war whoops. Yet no one 
asked a simple question: What in heaven's name was a hundred-pound 
girl, barely out of pigtails and high school, doing in a combat zone?



The more cosmic abstraction of woman in combat evokes little if any 
debate these days, and what little debate we hear isn't loud enough. 
Other women have been killed and captured, including at least one 
single mother, and it's all just part of the modern military. As one 
lady columnist for the Washington Post triumphantly pronounced, the 
debate over women in combat "is over."



How many Americans knew that?



Whatever the answer, a few days ago in this corner of cyberspace, this 
writer suggested a fine way to stop American wars of conquest: 
Conscript the sons of politicians and bureaucrats who start them. 
Nearly three dozen letters came in, almost every one posing this 
question with the corollary mandate: Why are you excluding the 
daughters? Let Bush send his daughters to war.



It's a passionate and in some ways understandable reaction.



And most likely, it won't be long before women, along with young men, 
are required to register for the draft; the explanation for that 
observation appears below. But first, an answer for those 
correspondents: The debate over women in combat turns on two questions: 
whether women can do it (handle the rigors of combat) and whether they 
should do it (is it morally acceptable and socially desirable).



In a word, no. It is un-American, un-Christian, and immoral.



The Practical Question



As a practical matter, 99 percent of women are unsuited for combat, and 
that includes flying combat aircraft and serving on combatant ships. 
That women do these things doesn't mean they should; it just means the 
military has been feminized and civilianized, as any military man will 
admit after a few shots of Jack Daniels at the Officers' Club, and of 
course, after his commanding officer leaves.



In the early 1990s, I was a staff member on the Presidential Commission 
on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. The evidence the 
commission gathered was clear on one thing: Women don't belong in 
combat.



The evidence showed women lack the necessary physical prowess. The 
strongest woman recruit, generally, is only as strong as the weakest 
man. Given that the services try to weed out the weakest men, it's 
counterproductive to recruit even the strongest women. And our 
volunteer military, remember, doesn't get the strongest women; it gets 
average women.



As well, women suffer higher rates of bone fractures, and other factors 
such as menstruation, pregnancy and aging militate against recruiting 
women as combat soldiers. The 20-something woman, for instance, has 
about the same lungpower as the 50-something man.



Well, that might be true for ground combat, the feminists insist, but 
surely they can fly jets and bombers. It's all just a Nintendo game up 
there. Again, untrue. Flying high-performance jets requires incredible 
conditioning and strength, particularly in the neck. Top Gun fighter 
pilots told the commission (and news reports later confirmed) that 
unqualified lady pilots routinely passed Naval flight training. At that 
time at least, officers were rated on the number of women they 
promoted. The result in one case? Kara Hultgreen, the first woman to 
"qualify" flying an F-14, was killed when her jet crashed because she 
couldn't land it on the carrier Abraham Lincoln.



But let's suppose women fly jets as well as men. What happens when one 
is shot down? The safety of the high-tech cockpit is gone, and she is 
alone on the ground, trying to survive. She is another Jessica Lynch.



As for the ships, consider the obvious: You don't send a few nubile 
sailorettes aboard Navy ships with 1,500 horny sailors, no matter what 
the Navy says about its "leadership" correcting carnal temptations. As 
well, the strength deficit surfaces again in many shipboard tasks too 
numerous to mention here.



Military training is another area where the women fall flat; they 
cannot survive the same basic training as men, so it is 
"gender-normed." That means the services (and military academies) have 
different standards for women than for men, and not just for hair 
length. If women were held to the same standards as men, more than 14 
percent of our armed forces would not be women; they could not attend 
the academies. Oddly enough, the feminists aver that scrapping the 
double standard would be discriminatory! So much for judging someone on 
her true merit.



In the decade since the commission heard tons of testimony on these 
points, nothing has changed unless women have evolved markedly improved 
muscle and bone.



In reply to these unassailable facts, some suggest some women can meet 
the same standards with the proper weight training and physical-fitness 
regimen. That's a stretch, but let's say a few can. That takes us back 
to the weakest man vs. the strongest woman. What standard would these 
few meet? The lowest among the men? Even if they fell among men of 
medium strength, consider the prohibitive cost of selecting these 
Amazonian anomalies from among general population. And finding them 
assumes they want to be found.



A friend of mine, a former Green Beret, suggests an experiment: Let's 
train two squads, one all women, the other all men, to peak physical 
and combat-ready condition. Then drop them in the woods for a war game 
and see who wins.



Point is, women get by in the military only because of men. As one 
Internet wag observed, the equipment one man carries into combat is 
nearly as heavy, perhaps heavier, than Jessica Lynch. Lynch and women 
her size do not have the strength to carry a fallen 200-pound comrade 
out of harm's way. Forgetting about combat, some women aircraft 
mechanics need men to lift their toolboxes. Without men, the armed 
forces would collapse, and the more women the military enlists, the 
weaker it becomes.



As one commissioner remarked in exasperation: "Women are not little 
men, and men are not big women."



The Moral Question



That leaves the moral and social questions, which commission member and 
Vietnam War hero Ron Ray addressed with this remark: "The question 
isn't whether women can do, it's whether they should do it."



Women should only be used in combat, Ray argued, if national survival 
demands it; i.e., when the Indians are circling the ranch and the men 
are dead and wounded. Even then, using women would be a last resort. It 
would not become a policy. Such an emergency isn't likely to happen 
here unless Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guards make a 
spectacular comeback and march into Jonah Goldberg's and Sean Hannity's 
neighborhoods. In that case, we know all the women will be fighting.



The kidding aside, the moral and social argument is one of "rights" vs. 
what is right. The feminists claim combat service is a "right." 
Nonsense.



A battlefield is not a boardroom, a courtroom or an operating room, and 
the contrary notion is hyperegalitarianism rooted in feminist fantasies 
that women "will have made it" when they have commanded troops in 
battle. Women do not have a "right" to serve. Military service for 
volunteers is a privilege; for draftees, it is a duty. No one has a 
"right" to serve, a civilian idea equivalent to having the "right" to 
be a doctor or lawyer that has no place in the military, whose 
principal purpose is to kill the enemy and destroy his capacity to 
fight.



In "Crimson Tide," Gene Hackman's submarine skipper explained the 
point: The armed forces defend democracy, they do not practice it.



So much for "rights." Now, as to whether women in combat is right:



At one commission hearing, Col. John Ripley, one of the most famous 
Marines who fought in Vietnam, explained combat for the largely 
civilian audience. A good picture of real combat, he said, is walking 
down a path to find your best friend nailed to a tree, or his private 
parts in his mouth. The feminists and military women in the audience 
gnashed their teeth.



Then again, they don't understand that until Bill Clinton's war 
minister Les Aspin changed it, the law excluding women from combat was 
always considered a privileged exemption, not sex discrimination. It 
was the thoughtful recognition that women should be spared the carnage 
and cruelty of war.



Why?



Because turning a woman into the kind of person who views such gore 
without blinking an eye, or who participates in the wanton killing war 
requires, is a step down to pagan barbarism and cultural suicide. In 
some sense, given what we've seen in the Gulf, we've already taken that 
step. But the feminists won't quit until they get women into ground 
combat units. As recent events prove, no one seems to care what all 
this means not only culturally but also psychologically.



It will require training men and women to regard the brutalization of 
women, and a woman's brutalization of others, as normal and acceptable. 
To train the men properly, a woman commissioner observed, we must erase 
everything their mothers taught them about chivalry; i.e., that a real 
man protects a woman from harm. Instead, they must be trained to brain 
a woman with a pugil stick in training. This truth raises two paradoxes.



On one hand, to completely desensitize the men, such training would be 
required. But the feminists don't want that because women can't meet 
the same standards as men; they won't survive it. Yet how are these 
women to survive combat if they cannot survive real, not gender-normed, 
basic training? The men would have to protect them. Successfully 
integrating women in combat means this: A soldier must ignore the 
screams of a woman POW being tortured and raped.



On the other hand, while the feminists never stop the finger-wagging 
about "domestic abuse," they importune us to inure men to the wartime 
abuse of women. Again, to some degree, we're already there. The capture 
and torture of Jessica Lynch and Shoshana Johnson, the single mother, 
was just another day in the war. But then again, the society that sent 
these young women to war is the same one that has steroidally-fortified 
men and women bashing each other senseless in television's faux 
wrestling, which presents the illusion that women really can fight 
against men, as well as preposterous movies about women Navy SEALS, or 
women who receive the Medal of Honor while the men cower in fear.



Lastly, assigning women to combat, or even combat support units like 
the 507th, purposely subjects them to trials and tribulations for which 
nature has not prepared them. Such assignments endanger not only the 
women but also the men around them, who will redirect their attention 
 from fighting toward protecting or helping the women. Men will do that 
because they are men, because regardless of feminist propaganda, good 
parents teach their sons about chivalry and honor. The Steinem brigade 
doesn't like it, but it's true nonetheless. Thus, men will die 
unnecessarily. That is immoral and unjust, as is ordering married men 
and women to live in close quarters where they are tempted to adultery. 
Some observers even question the legality of orders sending women into 
combat. But that is a debate for another day.



Ray's point? Civilized Christians don't send women and mothers to fight 
the wars. Chronicles editor Tom Fleming has observed that our nation 
has become anti-Christian. The saga of Pfc. Lynch and other military 
women proves him right.



The Final Answer



Back to that draft.



Don't be surprised if women are required to register. Legally speaking, 
the draft exemption for women is tied to their exemption from combat. 
Now women serve in aerial and naval action. And given the proximity to 
combat of women in "maintenance" and other units, it won't be long 
before the politicians, and bemedaled generals in the Army and Marines, 
hoist the white flag and put women in ground combat. Then, some young 
man will file the inevitable "equal protection" lawsuit and the 
exemption will fall, its legal rationale having been dropped.



Oddly enough, the silly clamor for women in combat assumes most 
military women want combat assignments. The commission found that they 
don't. Only a few aging feminists do, and of course, they won't be 
subject to the combat assignments or the draft. When you join the 
military, you join voluntarily, but you go where they need you. When 
women get their "right" to fight, they won't have the "right" to 
refuse. And why would they? After that, again, comes the draft for 
women.



The answer to the many folks who suggest conscripting women is this: 
Real Americans don't send women to war. Neither do real men. A genuine 
Christian wouldn't contemplate it. The story of Jessica Lynch reveals 
an awful truth: All three are in short supply, particularly among 
American political and military leaders.



April 11, 2007


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