The Spartans once boasted that for hundreds of years their women hadn’t seen enemy campfires. Now many consider it a bragging point to say that America’s women will be thrust from the frying pan and into the fire.
In an unprecedented move, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced Thursday that combat roles in all units will now be open to women. As the Washington Post reports:
Women will now be eligible to join the Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces and other Special Operations Units. It also opens the Marine Corps infantry, a battle-hardened force that many service officials had openly advocated keeping closed to female service members.
“There will be no exceptions,” Carter said.
… Carter’s announcement caps three years of experimentation at the Pentagon and breakthroughs for women in the armed services.
… Carter said the important factor in him opening all jobs to women was to give the military access to every American who can add strength to it.
Yet critics say this is just a case of politically correct military brass spinning the facts to fit an agenda. Treating this, the Center for Military Readiness (CMR) just issued a report entitled “U.S. Marine Corps Research Findings: Where Is the Case for Co-Ed Ground Combat?” Data from the report, wrote WND.com in a statement of the painfully obvious, “revealed the Marines have documented evidence that women are different from men.”
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The report cites a highly decorated Marine veteran who participated in a group called the “2015 Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force” (GCEITF). After pointing out that the Marines chose their best women and most “progressive” men for the unit and that everyone wanted the experiment to succeed, the Marine officer wrote, relates the CMR:
“This was as stacked a unit [we] could get with the best Marines to give it a 100 percent success rate if we possibly could. End result? … [The data showed women] are slower on all accounts in almost every technical and tactical aspect and physically weaker in every aspect across the range of military operations….”
The statement continued, “Make no mistake. In this realm, you want your fastest, most fit, most physical and most lethal person you can possibly put on the battlefield to overwhelm the enemy’s ability to counter what you are throwing at them and in every test case, that person has turned out to be a man. There is nothing gender biased about this; it is what it is.
You will never see a female Quarterback in the NFL, there will never be a female center on any NHL team and you will never see a female batting in the number 4 spot for the New York Yankees. It is what it is. ”
For sure, while we live in a “girl power” time of masculinized TV heroines who mow down male villains like grass, the intersex physical performance gap is profound. To provide just one metric, note that the mile record for 15-year-old boys is better than the women’s world record.
The CMR also points out that female soldiers suffer almost twice as many injuries as their male counterparts. And this phenomenon is well established. To provide another example, girls suffer significantly more athletics-related injuries than boys despite generally participating in less dangerous sports.
In contrast to these and other arguments against women in combat, the argument for it boils down to a slogan: “Equality!” Yet few note the double standard. As retired Air Force colonel Dale Hill points out writing at American Thinker today, “After Secretary Carter’s pronouncement, and since women can now fill all combat jobs, all the young women in this country should be required to register with the Selective Service System, just as the men ages 18-25 are required to do.” As Hill said of the double standard, “When you want the privilege of serving this great nation, you can’t choose to serve in only certain ways. You can volunteer for certain roles, but you have to be prepared to serve where the nation needs you, despite the sacrifice you might have to make.”
Hill advocates universal draft registration apparently to make a point: To use a twist on what Abraham Lincoln said about law, the best way to eliminate a bad social code is to enforce it strictly. For “equality” ever proves to be more ploy than principle, used merely as a tactic for tearing down traditional inequality and replacing it with a new-order inequality.
Defense Secretary Carter also claims that to be in the new roles, women will have to “qualify and meet the standards.” As Fox News reported, “Equal opportunity, he said, will not mean equal participation in some specialty jobs. But he added that combat effectiveness is still the main goal, and there will be no quotas for women in any posts.”
Yet critics say this is mere posturing. As American Thinker’s Mike Phelps pointed out in August, the Army has already scrambled “to find ways to distribute combat loads creatively among squad members so females can be spared humping one hundred pound rucksacks.” And while earlier this year two women became the first females to graduate from the Army’s grueling Ranger School, many suspect they didn’t do so on their own merits.
Such suspicion is well founded. Note that decades ago already, police departments started discarding their exams and replacing them with dumbed-down versions in order to pave the way for women to join the forces. This was done in the name of the principle of “disparate impact,” which states that if different groups perform differently on a test, that test is by definition unjustly discriminatory and must be scrapped. So height requirements had to go, along with other physical standards up to which women couldn’t measure.
Disparate impact has been enforced by bureaucracies and rubber-stamped by the courts. As an example, last year Barack Obama’s DOJ filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) for treating women equally. The PSP’s entrance exam is easy as it is, but, since women still fail it at a higher rate, it doesn’t satisfy the social engineers.
Give this mentality and environment, critics conclude that the Pentagon powers-that-be will assuredly subordinate equality of opportunity to equality of outcome. Note that we live in a society in which many people have been convinced it’s morally wrong to suggest that one group (if it’s politically favored, anyway) is inferior to another in a given sphere. It’s inconceivable that this ingrained and reflexive willingness to pay homage to the false gods of equality wouldn’t infect the military, and the obsession with placing women in combat is proof it already has. And a complete or near complete failure of women to qualify for, let’s say, the Navy Seals, would be an object lesson in the reality of group differences. It would be a refutation of the leftist “equality” agenda, and that cannot be allowed.
So now we’ll see equality, or at least what’s billed as such, on the battlefield — that is, until we finally run into a formidable foe that just cares about winning.
