Posted on 01/26/2004 7:26:20 PM PST by 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."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.John Silber, Straight Shooting, 1989
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.)
Women=cows to make babies.
Men=cannon fodder to be wasted on the battlefield with no value or right to live on this earth.
Think about it from a genetic standpoint: would you really want to risk strong young women in combat?
You seem to be missing the point, if they are willing to go and can handle the same level of train as men, sure, let them go.
Nice trick question. If they join the military, then they will must likely be willing to do the upper body exercises.
Ahh another trick question. Women join the military for the same reason men do, to becomes soldiers.
You haven't spent a day in uniform, much less time in a combat unit.
Ahh, the 'you a not a soldier, therefore you don't have a right to an opinion' statement. It must mean you are running out of things to say.
While there are exceptional women of sufficient strength and stamina to keep up with the men, you can't set military policy on the basis of a few.
That's why the military has had to "dumb down" the physical tests for the women. Requiring women to pass the men's PT (particularly upper body strength) would filter out so many that it would be impracticable. And the lack of testosterone makes it very difficult for women to increase upper body strength (unless you start taking those little pills, and that was something I never did.)
I'm a fortyish matron with a collection of sports injuries, but I can still do my day's work loading firewood or digging holes. I was fortunate in inheriting a powerful (if small) frame and unusual strength from my dad. When I was in college, I played three sports, ran my two miles every morning, lifted weights, and fancied myself in splendid shape. And I was - for a woman. But put me up against any of the guys on our fencing team or crew, and I fell behind despite my best efforts. Made me mad, but it taught me a simple basic truth. (And that's why they have girl's competitions, otherwise we'd hardly ever get to play.)
If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, you might consider the lessons that sports teach us about women's physical performance in extreme conditions.
But you can let those few women in if they can HANDLE the job of being a soldier.
I was trying to explain that the number of women who CAN keep up is SO small that it would not be worth the trouble and expense of adapting all the details of military life to accommodate women in the field.
My few teammates and I (the school had recently gone co-ed, so in many cases we practiced with the boys) were the tops in terms of physical skills, dedication, and "try" - and we STILL came up short. If we couldn't do it, there are so few who could that they will go into professional sports rather than the military.
About the only thing I could consistently beat the boys at was equestrian sports - because that's skill and balance not brute strength (in fact strength can be counterproductive). Oddly enough, I'm still riding today.
That is BS. Check your history books and read the posts on this thread. And I really don’t respect those who underestimate the potential of people, no matter what their gender.
My few teammates and I (the school had recently gone co-ed, so in many cases we practiced with the boys) were the tops in terms of physical skills, dedication, and "try" - and we STILL came up short. If we couldn't do it, there are so few who could that they will go into professional sports rather than the military.
A ancient (Greek or Roman) philosopher once stated that you could not honestly compare the physique of a athlete with that of a soldier because a athlete is trained in a control environment, while the soldier is trained in an open environment and their builds are much different.
Risk takering can be more things that the military. For example, would you ban women from skydiving or bungee jumping, or driving a car, because I can point out how those actions are FAR MORE riskier than joining today's modern military.
I have a question for you, do you consider the feminist movement to make men into third class citizens a social norm?
Risk taking can be more things that the military. For example, would you ban women from skydiving or bungee jumping, or driving a car, because I can point out how those actions are FAR MORE riskier than joining today's modern military.
I have a question for you, do you consider the feminist movement to make men into third class citizens a social norm?
I think that you will find parallel ethics among the Asian peoples who have maintained high levels of culture through the centuries. But just what is the point! You cannot be serious in wanting to surrender the refinements of our finest cultures. Just as it was in the division of labor, that the foundations for economic progress were laid, so it is in the clearly defined roles of the sexes, that the refinements that enhance the quality of life and the continuity of culture, are derived.
As for the purely pragmatic considerations of the moment? You might look again at how well the South fought in the unpleasant conflict of the 1860s, considering that they were outnumbered and underequipped. Theirs was the more truly chivalric ethic, and it showed in their performance. (Not that our brave Ohio boys who made the ultimate difference in the War, would have considered it tolerable to have their girl friends, wives or sisters on the lines beside them.)
To allow women to be more refined; to enhance our social amenities, etc., has always been one of the primary motives, not only for Western men to fight for societies they deemed worthy of preserving, but to go out and work long hours, etc., in peaceable pursuits.
The Feminist impact will recede, very rapidly, once most of us stop treating it as a serious intellectual movement. It isn't. It is just a reflection of the Socialist egalitarian value system shining on our sexuality, and makes no more sense than any other Socialist or egalitarian notion. The whole movement is a denial of nature.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
You are mistakenly thinking of Confucianism, which held women to be lower than animals.
But just what is the point!
If someone is willing and able to fight, no matter what their gender, LET THEM!! By the way, if you have read my posts on this fourm, you would know that I am for UNIFORM AND EQUAL TRAINING STANDARDS FOR BOTH MEN AND WOMEN IN THE MILITARY!!
The Feminist impact will recede, very rapidly, once most of us stop treating it as a serious intellectual movement.
The movement may die, but it's effects will stay around for the next century because that movement has burned three generations of men. The chivalric ethic is dead in this country, and good riddands.
It sounds as though you are speaking in anger, from the perspective of personal hurt--not the best perspective from which to form opinions on issues that go to the most vital questions, as to the future of your society.
But Feminism has been far more deleterious to women than to men. Feminism is really a war by the less feminine upon the more feminine women--really a war on femininity. By seeking to compete with men in all the areas where men have the advantage, they are deliberately surrendering part of the chance to excel in those areas where women have the natural advantage. The whole thing is a form of insanity, probably based upon the Feminist's sense of her inferiority in any meaningful comparison with the truly feminine woman; but certainly part of the general Leftist assault on reality.
Again, I urge all to read The Feminist Absurdity.
William Flax
The leftist social engineering experiment continues. .....to the deteriment of us all.
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