The Warrior Cult - Why Women Cannot be a Part

Hearth ^ | 1997 | Captain John F. Luddy, USMCR

[independentmind]

I was once asked by a friend to recommend his son for the U.S. Naval Academy. I asked in response, "Does your son want to be a professional killer?" "Well no, of course not. He wants to be a peacemaker." I replied, "Well, then tell him to enter a seminary."

John Silber, Straight Shooting, 1989

In 1983, when I was just beginning to fancy myself a man and was looking for a place to prove it, some well-known slogans offered and answer: "The Marines are looking for a few good men;" and "Maybe you can be one of us . . the few, the proud, the Marines." Another was even more direct: "We never promised you a rose garden." The message was clear: To join America's warrior elite would mean some harsh treatment much physical and perhaps emotional discomfort, and perhaps emotional discomfort, and no sympathy. I did not expect to be appreciated for my "diversity" I might bring to the Corps or to get much "sensitivity" in return. Like tens of thousands before me and thousands since, I was not to be disappointed. And, although it may seem hard for many of today's critics of the military, I didn't want it to be otherwise.

Much has changed in the past decade. When I was an officer candidate, the worst a drill instructor could say to you was: "Candidate, do you want to be an individual?" But in judging the quality of the force today, individual opportunities are becoming more important than the effectiveness of the group, and gender and racial representation are becoming more important than performance. Indeed, such exalted ideas as "diversity" and "sensitivity" are now among the Pentagon's foremost concerns. While the utility of these notions is questionable, even the most tranquil civilian environment, they are entirely incompatible with the military's main purpose: to transform a group of individuals into an efficient unit for the purpose o inflicting extreme and deliberate violence - in the words of one Army major, "to kill people and break things." Not long ago the Marines stopped calling for "a few good men," not because they, or for that matter the other Services, no longer need them, but because it is no longer politically correct to define the military service in masculine terms.

Accompanied by mandatory "sensitivity training" and considerable praise from some military leaders, notions that strike at the very core of military life have been advanced without some very basic questions being asked. How can the military accommodate women in an activity as thoroughly masculine as combat? How can it encourage diversity when, in achieving victory, individuals generally mean nothing but units almost always mean everything? And how can it foster sensitivity to care in an organization whose principal purpose requires developing the insensitivity to kill? As the military is feminized, diversified, and sensitized, these questions need answers. For if this misguided preoccupation with the individual continues, history will record the next decade as a time when the armed forces of history's greatest military power mastered all external threats, only to be vanquished by foes right here in America.

America's False Sense of Security

Insulated by wide oceans on two flanks and benign neighbors on the other two, most American's view their nation's defense through lenses of ignorance and apathy; this is largely a good thing, certainly far better than the familiarity with war of a Bosnian, Afghani, or even many western Europeans. Many Americans are slightly uncomfortable with the Armed Forces and fail to understand the fundamental differences between military life and their own. This creates fertile round for well-meaning, malicious, or simply foolish agendas.

Each period of relative peace - after both World Wars, the Korean War, Vietnam, and now the Cold War - has brought to the military both rapid dismantling and questionable experimentation. Today America - including the military, which generally knows better - must function without any clear external threat to focus its mind. Her global interests and the threats to them have not gone the way of the Cold War, but we Americans seem to have a hard time learning this lesson in any but the hardest way possible, as when Saddam Hussein teaches us. Until it does - and it always does eventually - the public is inclined to ignore the military and lose sight of the importance of the warrior's essential characteristics.

If the United States were the Netherlands, none of this would matter so much. But we're not. No other nation has the worldwide commitments we have. When a crisis erupts anywhere in the world, no one calls the Dutch to solve it. Other nations cannot afford to be so foolish. Israel, for instance, is surrounded by enemies and must place the combat effectiveness of its forces above all other considerations. Addressing the question of whether to place women in combat units, Israeli historian Dr. Martin van Crevald recently noted that, contrary to popular belief, the Israelis do nothing of the sort. He went on to observe:

We would not survive probably for five minutes if it weren't for our superb, well-trained, well-prepared combat-ready forces. Everything in the Israeli armed forces is geared towards that . . . To me, the very fact that this issue is being discussed and this meeting is being held simply shows that you really don't take the military very seriously.

The Demise of the American Warrior

Although diversity and sensitivity are indispensable ideals in a pluralistic society, the military must play by a very different set of rules because it has very different expectations of its members. American society tolerates a level of independent behavior that would cripple any military force. While the American military strives to reflect society's composition and values wherever possible, soldiers inevitably surrender many freedoms that civilians take for granted because, unlike civilians, they regularly face death just because they're told to. The military is not "just another part of society."

America depends on the Armed Forces to serve as a defensive line behind which a society based on individual freedom and opportunity, diversity, and sensitivity can flourish. To man this line, we must transform young civilians into warriors. Diversity? In order to form effective units that can win wars as quickly and painlessly as possible, the civilian recruit's individual identity must be subjugated to the needs of the unit and the realities of the battlefield. Sensitivity? Because a warrior's principal purpose is killing people, mush of his sensitivity must be stripped away. Cohesion, unity, and single-minded commitment to the overriding course of combat effectiveness are the essential ingredients.

The call for sensitivity first came after Vietnam, when it was thought that the end of the draft made it necessary to enlist large numbers of women to meet manpower requirements. Practical factors, such as differences in physical strength and the restrictions on cohabitation as well as strong cultural resistance to deliberately requiring young women to kill and be killed, kept women in such support roles as clerks, logisticians, communicators, and nurses. The so-called combat arms, such as infantry, artillery, and tank units, whose sole purpose was to hunt down and kill the enemy, remained a male preserve. Thus a fundamental tension was created between what were effectively two different aspects of military life.

The fact that both aspects were equally important, and that the killers could not function without those in support positions, kept everyone fairly content as long as military service was viewed as a team effort. Trouble was, the same recruiting pressures that required the Services to seek women in the first place also forced them to change their sales pitch. Military service was no longer an act of selfless patriotism, typified by that famous "I Want You" poster of World War II. It became instead a means of personal growth and wider career opportunity, as in "Be All That You Can Be."

The difference between these two messages is vast. Once opportunity became the objective, "equal opportunity" could not be far behind. Soon the military was caught between the rock of selling itself to meet manpower levels and the hard place of telling women the being "all they could be" only went so far. Among a relative handful of career women officers and against the shrill cries of feminists on the outside, the wise and necessary distinction between combat and non combat roles was lost.

The warrior's existence is always harsh and often brutal and demands a willingness to share great suffering. To some this sound barbaric, especially after the Gulf War's pristine images of precision weapons controlled by computers usually at great distances from the enemy. But the inner spirit, which for centuries bound men together in the face of death and destruction, remains vitally necessary. At this most basic level, the profession of arms is inherently and undeniably masculine. And, since combat requires men on occasion to be downright beastly, warriors must possess an aspect of masculinity that women will and should find distasteful.

As Michael Levin writes in Feminism and Freedom, "Because the maintenance of order requires physical strength and aggressiveness, it has been a male task in every society that has ever existed." Combat veterans regularly attest to the primal masculine power necessary to overcome fear and win in battle: from Gettysburg to Omaha Beach, this spirit has often been the only means of overcoming the stark terror men have felt when facing almost certain death. If the brevity of the last war made us forget this, the brutality of a future one may make us remember.

The argument for opening combat assignments to women, now a major feminist objective, goes something like this: The military ought to set job standards and let the best person have the job. If battles were fought and won by individuals, this approach might work. But in spite of individual acts of heroism and leadership, combat is a team endeavor, where success depends entirely on the team's level of cohesion - the "male bonding" that some women like to belittle. The awful truth is that male bonding works, which explains why military leaders preparing for combat spend most of their time trying to develop it. Male bonding is what takes the hill. And male bonding just doesn't happen with women around.

The cohesion required throughout the military, and especially in combat, cannot develop in an environment of sexual tension. Along with disrupting the way men relate to each other, it is an inescapable fact that men and women have been programmed for millennia to view each other in ways that sometimes get in the way of good judgment and hat distract from a sense of shared purpose. Similarly, if we accept their persistent claim to be just lie everyone else, we must assume that young homosexual men will be as distracted in a barracks full of men as their heterosexual peers would be in a women's locker room. Neither 30 years of sexual revolution nor all the "sensitivity training" in the world will change this human reality. And what makes it so serious a problem in a combat unit is that the price of bad judgment is so much higher than in the civilian world - not embarrassment or a lawsuit or getting fired or losing a promotion but getting mutilated or killed. Sexuality distracts, distractions hamper good judgment, impaired judgment in combat gets people killed.

In Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military, Brian Mitchell describes the effect that women had on the Service academies when they were integrated in the 1970's. It foretells what women would bring to the necessarily intimate confines of a combat unit:

A new factor had entered the equation. A force more powerful than the call of duty, the pride of honor, or the bonds of comradeship so completely reversed the polarity of social relationships . . . that even when men contained themselves they could not rest indifferent to its presence . . . The men were charmed. They could never see the women as just cadets, and they could never treat the women as they treated other men . . . [The academies] were no longer the strange and cold conclaves of unsentimental militarism, where young men first learned the pain of separation, where love was delivered in sealed envelopes at distant intervals . . . where cadets could be prepared for lives of sacrificial hardship and deprivation, where they could learn leadership and gain confidence without the fearful disruption of suddenly running into someone with whom they were falling in or out of love.

Ultimately, the women-in-combat argument fails apart because of a profound paradox. The presence of women in their midst requires men training for war to be sensitive, even as women are expected to join them in becoming insensitive enough to bayonet people. Secretary of the Army Togo West recently declared that prohibitions against women in combat prevented them "from reaching their full potential." Surely no one who has ever seen combat could think this way. Given war's necessary brutality among women, the attempt to adapt women to the business of war is and ultimately futile endeavor, and assigning them to units that might reasonably become engaged in combat and training them for such emergency engagements are misuse of an important resource. Indeed, it is folly.

(Captain Luddy is a defense policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation. This article first appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette, December, 1994. It was reprinted with permission in hearth, Spring, 1995.)

[Robert Lomax]

PING

[neverdem]

Good find, unfortunately the Armed Forces now depend upon female volunteers.

[ASOC]

Hummmmm
My son did not join the military to "become a profesional killer" We did have discussions about the use of deadly force, ROE, what gets you put in jail and what might save your a$$ on the battle field. The Marines DO train with less than lethal arms - and still worship at the fet of Markmanship.

He will get out at some point and has indicated he wants to work in a police dept.

I perfer to call todays Marines - the 21st centery Samurai.
With all the baggage and histroy that word brings with it.

Sleep well tonight my friends, my son has your back covered.

[clintonh8r]

bookmark

[Bobibutu]

Thanks - I trust he is a peacemaker and one hell of a killing machine.

[Last Dakotan]

I blame the top military leaders thru the '90's who allowed the feminization of the military rather than risk their retirement ranks. God only knows how many good men will be killed over time by their selfishness and lack of courage.

[JoeSchem]

No liberal rag here, but --

Why, no wonder the Nazis, Japanese, and Commies beat us, their soldiers are so much tougher and insensitive than ours. Oh, and did you see how those tough-guy Talibans had us running with our tails between our legs in Afghanistan?

[mfulstone]

Captain Luddy is right. We may soon learn the hard way...

[Modernman]

"Does your son want to be a professional killer?" "Well no, of course not. He wants to be a peacemaker."

Where is it written that a soldier can't be both? After all, a powerful military IS the best way to ensure peace.

[BykrBayb]

My son's in the Navy.

Sleep well tonight my friend, my son has your son's back covered.

[BenR2]

Get women out of the military academies -- bump!

[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

Why, no wonder the Nazis, Japanese, and Commies beat us, their soldiers are so much tougher and insensitive than ours. Oh, and did you see how those tough-guy Talibans had us running with our tails between our legs in Afghanistan?

I think the Taliban was beat more by technology than anything else. Between Daisy Cutters, flying gunships, B52's, and soldiers equipped with extraordinary vision and communication equipment, the Medieval Afghanis fighting with 19th century equipment were far outclassed.

Although the Germans and the Japanese were a technological match for the Americans, they were trained with the mindset to die for their country. Patton and other great American military leaders trained our soldiers to think on their feet and make the other bastard die for his country.

This was all before we introduced women into combat roles. Today's women soldier has the benefit of advanced technology and the disproportionate numbers of men to women to tow the line. Lessen the technology and increase the proportion of women to men and we will definitely fall as the world's military power.

[Paul C. Jesup]

Funny how this article forgets to mention the amazons and the female warriors that were part of the mongolian hordes.

[Billthedrill]

Well, with respect, you can take this "cult" business way too far. And I don't think anyone in his or her right mind can speak literally of the "demise" of the American military - what it just did in Iraq will be studied for the next century. On the one hand, it is a sexually integrated military, not without the difficulties that any mix of the sexes will generate. On the other hand, the vast bulk of the combat troops are male.

The real warrior cults of the last century - the SS, the fanatical Japanese of the entire Pacific campaign - had in common one thing. They were beaten by ordinary citizens who surpassed them in savagery, in motivation, and in sheer killing capacity. And these "professional killers" came back home and went to school on the GI bill and bought houses and raised families.

I do think actual physical combat is, for a number of physiological and psychological reasons, predominantly the function of the male of the species, however vicious and effective the female can be under the right circumstances. So what? There are millions of people more physically and psychologically attuned to killing than I was, but I considered it (then, and I still do) within the duties and obligations of citizenship to lay my life on the line when the country required it. I do not think it wise to deny that right, privilege, or obligation to half of our population.

[usmcobra]

At least I'm old enough to remember when The Marines were refered to as America's peacekeepers.

[KangarooJacqui]

Funny how this article forgets to mention the amazons and the female warriors that were part of the mongolian hordes.

Or the apparently rather fearsome Soviet all-women frontline units used during World War 2, for that matter.

[Paul C. Jesup]

Learn something everyday. Thanks.

[henderson field]

It takes more than technology to win a war. In the early '40s, America had just come out of its agricultural phase and a very high percentage of families were gun-owning. Many of the military recruits were marksmen before they entered the service. In some families whether you had meat on the table or not depended on it. By contrast, the Germans and Japanese were not gun-owning societies. There are many, many instances of U.S. soldiers winning battles in the face of overwhelming odds. Now why do you think that was? One bullet, one kill.

[AlaskaErik]

Good find, unfortunately the Armed Forces now depend upon female volunteers.

There is nothing wrong with women in the military. They provide a valuable contribution a support capacity. The problem is when femi-nazis want to put them in combat units. That is sheer folly.

[BluH2o]

Or the apparently rather fearsome Soviet all-women frontline units used during World War 2, for that matter.

Speaking as a former Marine, with some knowledge of WWII military history, Russian women served primarily in support functions in combat on the front lines. I don't disagree Soviet women, at least from pictures I've seen, are fearsome looking ... former Russian President Nikita Kruschev, as a commissar on the front lines in WWII, actually looked good in comparison.

[GladesGuru]

A bit of history, Joe.

We didn't have women in combat, or really in the military in any significant ways except rear echelon support like nurses in WW II or the Korean War or Viet Nam.

And might I ask you to remember that cute little blonde who men rescued after she was captured in battle with a jammed gun she was unable to clear after a jam? As I hear, she was helplessly praying when they grabbed her.

[GladesGuru]

Amazon's????????????????????????

More myths, like women can cut it in combat, even if they can't throw the grenade far enough to not kill themselves with it.

As cute lil' Maggie said "GET REAL!"

[LoneRangerMassachusetts]

There are many, many instances of U.S. soldiers winning battles in the face of overwhelming odds. Now why do you think that was? One bullet, one kill.

The answer is two reasons. 1) Fire power. There are battles in the Pacific where Americans took horrendous losses against the Japanese in taking the islands. The reason the Americans were able to push forward was because of the overwhelming support from our Navy that was not available to the Japanese. The Army looks at having a 10 to 1 ratio to advance against a dug in opponent. You need this ratio to achieve overwhelming firepower.

2) American Pragmatism in management. The American military prides itself on having its soldiers act resourcefully when the battle does not go according to plan. Patton was a thorn in the side of the bureaucrats who ran the Army. He made practical use of opportunities that arose.

When I was in the army 30 years ago, I met a fellow from Kentucky with coke bottle glasses. He used to hunt squirrels. He was the best shot in the platoon. It did not impress the Army all that much. Their belief was attaining suppressing firepower was the key to taking the battlefield. Big explosions and lots of bullets followed by maneuvers was the tactics and strategy of the day. Sharp shooting was a specialized job for snipers and there were not many of them.

[Paul C. Jesup]

More myths, like women can cut it in combat, even if they can't throw the grenade far enough to not kill themselves with it.

The 'she throws like a girl' arguement is the best that you can come up with. Now that's pathatic.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

You have obviously never been to a girl's softball game.

[Jeff Gordon]

I was just beginning to fancy myself a man and was looking for a place to prove it...

Well, Mr. Luddy, you have failed miserably in reaching that goal and you don't even know why.

[KangarooJacqui]

Okay, how about these ladies...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1065954/posts (ah dang, copy and paste into browser if that wasn't a proper link... my html sucks)

[Cronos]

I perfer to call todays Marines - the 21st centery Samurai.

I wouldn't. The Samurai were not much more than the enforcers of the Shinto Military Junta. Our Marines are NOT part of a military run government.

[independentmind]

There are millions of people more physically and psychologically attuned to killing than I was, but I considered it (then, and I still do) within the duties and obligations of citizenship to lay my life on the line when the country required it. I do not think it wise to deny that right, privilege, or obligation to half of our population.

I don't feel that I have the "right, privilege, or obligation" to lay my life down on a battlefield for my country. My father, who was on officer in the Navy in WWII and who spent two years in the South Pacific and who lost half of his college friends by the time he was 25, would not have wanted it any other way.

[archy]

Funny how this article forgets to mention the amazons and the female warriors that were part of the mongolian hordes.

Or the apparently rather fearsome Soviet all-women frontline units used during World War 2, for that matter.

Even before WWII, as far back as the first Russian women's battalion led by Lieutenant Marie Baktscharow, in 1917. The most particularly notorious WWII/*Great Patriotic War* Russian womens' batallion was led by Maria *Yashka* Botchkareva and was known as the *Battalion of Death*.

Not to mention Russian female snipers like Ludmilla Pavlichenko, who impressed more than 300 German soldiers with her skill with her SVT-40 Tokarev sniper's rifle. Neither was she a particular rarity in the Russian ranks.

Likewise, the Russian women pilots of the 588th regiment of night bombers was so successful that the Germans labelled them nachthexen [night witches]. The Polikarpov Po-2 biplane planes they flew carried a payload of only two bombs, totalling a weight of less than one ton, and most of them were not equipped with any guns. Two of the most famous soviet women of the 588th, Nadya Popova and Katya Ryabova, raided the Germans eighteen times in a single night. The majority of the women who survived war had flown nearly a thousand missions apiece, and by the end of the war twenty-nine female pilots had earned the title *Hero of the Soviet Union.* 23 of those medals went to the nachthexen.

Katya Ryabova and Nadya Popova of the 588th Regiment.

The Indian National Army also had an all-women regiment called the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, both during WW2 and involved in active combat in Burma, as well as in wresting Indian independence from Great Britain following WWII.

[driftless]

I agree with your post , but I just want to nitpick. Japan fought the war with probably the worst overall weapons of any WW II combatant. They didn't even have a decent submachine gun or service pistol, and much of their materiel was shoddily made especially towards the end of the war.

What they did have was unbelievable fighting spirit which author William Manchester, who was a Marine in the Pacific during the war, grudgingly admitted in his book about the Marines and his combat experiences in the Pacific war "Goodbye Darkness". He still hated the Japanese thirty years after the war for the way they fought, but he added, that in the end, fanaticism cannot be distinguished from heroism.

However in the end our superior strategy, technology, and firepower, (and unlimited quantities of the latter) plus exceptionally well-trained Marines, GIs, and sailors overcame the Japanese.

[GladesGuru]

Paul,

Please refer back to the original post of mine which you erroniously attempted to answer. The problem isn't 'throws like a girl' - the problem is not enough strength to get the grenade far enough away to avoid injury or death to "her" or her fellow soldiers.

The issue was raised by the military because of a good reason - the grenade is supposed to kill the enemy - understand?

And the average female can't throw it far enough - again, understand? And, as a closing shot, ever considered the difficulty of an underhand toss from cover, from a prone position, etc?

Please try to drop the Klintoon era social engineering "talking points" and GET REAL!

Summary: Grenades MUST be well distant from the thrower of the grenade when the grenade explodes.

[Little Ray]

We are Athens, not Sparta; Republican Rome, not Imperial Rome. There is no place for a warrior "cult" in the US Military, except maybe in Special Forces. Our troops are citizen soldiers, not knights, mamelukes or samurai.

That said, I do not like women in the military. Women who do serve in the military should have to pass the same tests as the men.

[Paul C. Jesup]

Please refer back to the original post of mine which you erroniously attempted to answer. The problem isn't 'throws like a girl' - the problem is not enough strength to get the grenade far enough away to avoid injury or death to "her" or her fellow soldiers.

And how far is enough?

Also, most of the time when it is in an open field, mortars work better. Plus, in urban it is not also distance, but also what type of cover you are using.

Straw man arguments get you little respect on FR.

[Paul C. Jesup]

That said, I do not like women in the military. Women who do serve in the military should have to pass the same tests as the men.

But if we make the standards equal, which I am for, you will have no reason to complain about those women who PASS those equal standards.

[Centurion2000]

It did not impress the Army all that much

That is why we have Marines. Everyone is an infantryman first.

[Centurion2000]

bump

[IGOTMINE]

Not gonna go there...Won't do it....Wouldn't be prudent...

[Ohioan]

The most important aspect of this debate simply cannot be equalized by any standard. There is a fundamental psycholgoical factor involved, which goes to the very core of the human experience. There is nothing more important than our perception of our sexuality and the sex roles that flow from it. All life, in turn, flows from that reality.

It is in a sense of being men, and fulfilling their role in relation to all that they love, that men sometimes achieve the heroism of "above and beyond the call of duty."

No one has ever doubted that in given situations, where it was unavoidable, women could fight with more courage than most men. That was proven on our frontier, on the South African frontier, and on the frontiers of other settler peoples, here and there; as well as in desperate situations, where established societies were being overrun, etc..

But the ideal is inherent in the Chivalric ethic, that men protect the women and children. That is one of the central threads of Western Civilization--and I suppose of most other civilizations, as well. The Amazon has always been a curiosity.

For more on the over-riding importance of traditional sex roles, see The Feminist Absurdity. The attack on our sexuality, of course, is just a part of the larger and more encompassing Socialist Egalitarian attack upon every aspect of traditional Society.

William Flax

[IGOTMINE]

Yes. No doubt that women that train hard at throwing a softball would do well with a grenade.

But the AVERAGE American girl in basic training can't throw them beyond the weapon's effective casualty radius.

[Paul C. Jesup]

But the AVERAGE American girl in basic training can't throw them beyond the weapon's effective casualty radius.

Simple, given these women upper-body strenght exercises. That should solve the problem.

[Paul C. Jesup]

The 'chivalric ethic' has only be around for a 1000 years, since the first book on King Arthur, and it has been most a western type concept.

The rest of the world knows better, from the Amazons, to Genghis Khan's female soldiers, to the female Russian warriors in both WWI and WWII (look up a few posts on this thread), to eastern Asian gurilla soldiers.

They all understood that if a person is able is willing to fight and is able too; let them, no matter what their gender.

The 'chivalric ethic' is our weakness, not our strenght, and the feminist have almost kill it off with the younger generations.

[Paul C. Jesup]

The 'chivalric ethic' has only be around for a 1000 years, since the first book on King Arthur, and it has been most a western type concept.

The rest of the world knows better, from the Amazons, to Genghis Khan's female soldiers, to the female Russian warriors in both WWI and WWII (look up a few posts on this thread), to eastern Asian gurilla soldiers.

They all understood that if a person is willing to fight and is able too; let them, no matter what their gender.

The 'chivalric ethic' is our weakness, not our strenght, and the feminist have almost kill it off with the younger generations.

[BykrBayb]

Sicko!

lol

[ASOC]

Was durning the first Shogunate or second?.....what comes to mind is as they are viewed as professional warriors
- a seperate class within the culture of our time.

See the book: American Samurai: The 1st Marine Division, 1941-1951
Craig M. Cameron
or
Warrior Culture of the U. S. Marines
by Marion F. Sturkey

I believe it is said best as - The US Marines, your best friend or your worst nightmare - you choose.

[Billthedrill]

I don't feel that I have the "right, privilege, or obligation" to lay my life down on a battlefield for my country.

That is certainly your option, and I respect it. Quite a number of men felt, and feel, the same way. Those of us who did not, men and women, sometimes found, and find, ourselves in some very nasty places indeed.

For those women who do feel that obligation I have nothing but regard. Even if all you do in your time in is to peel potatoes in the galley of an oil tanker, you have set yourself to a higher standard than an ordinary citizen. And when any vet looks at any other vet, he or she knows it. If there is a "warrior cult" in this country, that's it.

[IGOTMINE]

What is they don't want to gain that much upper body strength?

Isn't so simple, is it?

[Little Ray]

Yup. Knuckle dragging Neanderthal reactionary that I am, I certainly do have objections.
Women, esp. women of child bearing age, are just too, valuable, too important to the species, to put in harm's way. Men are expendable, women are not; It is just the way the species is designed.
Think about it from a genetic standpoint: would you really want to risk strong young women in combat? Women should be used in combat only in the most dire of circumstances.
And if circumstances are that dire, it is sometimes called a "clue."

[American_Centurion]

This is the technology Captain Luddy was refering to. All the other technology helps us achieve wars, but it all falls back to being prepared to prosecute warfare in the "classical" sense.

[American_Centurion]

Correction: ...achieve wars...

Should read ...win wars...

/pulling head out of ....