Free Republic

U. S. Marine Capt. Katie Petronio was a dynamo upon graduation from Bowdoin College in 2007. Standing 5 feet 3 inches, she could squat 200 pounds, and she seemed as ready for a combat role as many men were. But just five years later, her body had figuratively started crumbling under the stress of service in Iraq and Afghanistan as a combat engineer officer. Her spine had compressed her nerves to the point of causing neuropathy. Her thigh muscles started to atrophy. She lost 17 pounds and was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, which led to infertility. The experience prompted...

Ash Carter’s announcement December of 2015 demonstrated the Obama’s Administration attachment to a political ideology fueled by arrogance and premeditated ignorance. His direction of any long period of study and vigorous debate has been among those mutually supportive creatures that have metastasized throughout the military to serve a social agenda bringing future needless devastation. Most of the points I highlight about women in combat arose first when the decision was made to do away with DADT. A lot of good men are going to have to die in years to come to cover up this disaster. This tragedy of women...

Since 2014, three U.S. service members have been killed in the war against ISIS in Iraq. Earlier this week, the Pentagon confirmed Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV was killed during operations with peshmerga fighters. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter specifically referred to the loss of life as a combat death. Despite Americans being killed on the battlefield with ISIS, the White House has maintained U.S. troops are simply acting as advisors in a dangerous region but are not involved in combat. "What I think is true is that Iraq and Syria are dangerous places and our men and women in...

Imagine your seventeen-year-old daughter fighting for her life in hand-to-hand combat with battle-hardened enemy soldiers. How long would she survive? Two minutes? One minute? There is a resurgent movement to push female military personnel into ever more intimate contact with hostile forces. The few arguments mustered in support of doing this focus narrowly on manpower issues or misplaced feminist vanity. In all the literature on this subject that I have collected over several years, not once have I found a proponent of women in combat who would speak honestly about the consequences of thrusting our daughters into man-against-woman festivals of...

The U.S. Army on Friday announced it has approved the first 22 women to be commissioned as infantry and armor officers after new rules issued last month opened all combat roles to female service members. The move is a major milestone on the road to fully integrating women into combat jobs. The Army is taking a leadership first position by first placing female soldiers in leadership roles in combat roles that were not previously open to them, then allowing those women to train and mentor female enlisted combat soldiers. The 22 women are near completion of their officer training and...

On April 1st, the combat exemption for women in the U.S. military was lifted. This means women can and will be involuntarily assigned to infantry and ground units. This also means that brutal and horrific violence against women is now legal as long as it comes from the hands of the enemy. The American public is largely removed from the military and we didn’t even hear a whimper from the fathers and mothers of America that their daughter on active duty now can potentially be assigned to a combat unit. It’s called orders. Choice is gone. This isn’t about women...

Navy Petty Officer Lentoyi White, 26, feared she’d be dismissed from the service after twice failing the Navy’s body composition assessment (BCA), which measures body fat percentage. But in January, the Navy loosened its body fat restrictions for both men and women, giving White and thousands of other sailors another chance to stay in the Navy. “I am very grateful for a second chance with this new policy,” said White, a single mother with a 5-year-old daughter. White has gone from 212 pounds to 188 and is optimistic she’ll pass this spring under the new standards. Under the Navy’s previous...

Forcing military women into dangerous combat roles traditionally assigned to men is so potentially disastrous that the next president should waste no time reversing this wrong-headed Obama administration edict, a military advocate recently told Congress. Of course, parachuting women into combat roles is what happens when fevered left-wing utopianism takes over the Pentagon. Radicals on the Left are animated by a morbid obsession with equality, not by results or even by helping people. To them rigid adherence to politically correct fantasies trumps all other concerns. If soldiers die as a result of nutty policies, left-wingers rationalize that --damn the torpedoes!--...

Like clockwork, whenever anyone at National Review — including the editors — writes in opposition to opening all combat jobs to women or (even worse) drafting women into ground combat, there is predictable hue and cry from the Left. “But Israel! You conservatives couldn’t possibly be criticizing Israel, could you?” Perhaps the worst example comes from New York magazine, where writer Eric Levitz accuses NR of “anti-Jewish propaganda” and painting Israelis as “savagely cruel primitives” because our editors had the audacity to rightly label the proposal to draft mothers and daughters into ground combat “barbaric.”

Fiorina: Marine Corp leaders should decide on jobs open to women Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said in Greenville Thursday that Marine Corps leaders should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to let women join ground-combat units without political interference from above. The Obama administration and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus are pushing to open all military jobs to women, despite a Marine Corps study of women in combat that found all-male units performed significantly better than mixed-gender units on tactical tests and that women were injured more than twice as often as men. Asked about the issue...

Army and Marine Corps leaders swapped pledges with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday not to cave to political pressure and relax ground combat skill requirements so that more women will qualify to serve in infantry, armor and special forces units. Certainty that such pressure will come, and the need to resist to protect combat effectiveness, was expressed both by senators and witnesses during the first congressional hearing held to review how Army and Marine Corps plan to open all ground combat jobs to women. No senator on the committee suggested Congress should block the Dec. 3...

The first woman in Tennessee and the fourth in the nation to enlist as a combat engineer in the Army went AWOL last month and is now considered a deserter, according to a military spokesperson. Erika Lopez made headlines in July when she enlisted for a role that could put her on the front lines of battle, just after the U.S. Army lifted its ban on women in combat roles. Ms. Lopez was in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, by September but was placed on convalescent leave by the end of the year, according to a local CBS...

Imagine your seventeen-year-old daughter fighting for her life in hand-to-hand combat with battle-hardened enemy soldiers. How long would she survive? Two minutes? One minute? There is a resurgent movement to push female military personnel into ever more intimate contact with hostile forces. The few arguments mustered in support of doing this focus narrowly on manpower issues or misplaced feminist vanity. In all the literature on this subject that I have collected over several years, not once have I found a proponent of women in combat who would speak honestly about the consequences of thrusting our daughters into man-against-woman festivals of...

Two Generals in the military have come forward to say that women should now have to register for the draft, as the Defense Department has opened up combat jobs to women. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley agreed that the current policy, which requires only males register for the Selective Service System, should be changed after restrictions that barred women from trying out for combat jobs were lifted last year. "Every American who's physically qualified should register for the draft," said Neller at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday. "I think...

Sen. Ted Cruz said he would reconsider opening all ground combat positions to women if elected the next commander in chief. Cruz promised to take another look at the administration's decision late last year to open all positions to women. The administration's move ignored a request from the Marine Corps to keep some frontline combat positions male-only after some studies showed women were more likely to be injured and perform worse. "The Marine Corps request [for exceptions] must be reconsidered," Cruz wrote in response to a Center for Military Readiness survey released Sunday. "As long as the requirements are fair...

<p>Former Marines in Congress, including a liberal Democrat, are on the offensive against Navy Secretary's Ray Mabus' sweeping edicts to the Corps on women in combat.</p> <p>Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former Marine officer in Afghanistan and Iraq, accused Mr. Mabus on Tuesday of "destroying the martial fabric of the Marine Corps."</p>

The Pentagon faces major challenges ahead in 2016 as it works to make good on a pledge to open all U.S. military combat jobs to women. The toughest part of the integration, which President Obama and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter have made a priority in their final year in office, will be overcoming deep-seated opposition among many male special forces commandos. "They feel what makes them special is being all male, and somehow integrating women is going to make them less special and less adept," said Megan MacKenzie, author of "Beyond the Band of Brothers: the US Military and the...

Jacksonville, FL -Big questions are surfacing about the capabilities of a new Navy ship that will play an integral role in the future of Naval Station Mayport.

Don’t confuse most military women with the tiny feminist cabal comprised of a few officers and a lot of political groups who’ve been pushing for complete integration of the combat arms. There is a vindictive refrain accompanying Ashton Carter’s recent dictat that the combat arms be opened to women without exception. “You women asked for this,” some seem to be saying, “now suck it up.” No, most military women did not ask for it, but the few times they’ve been asked, their voices have been ignored in favor of a teeny tiny group dishonestly claiming, “This is equality.” Some 92.5%...

WASHINGTON -- It is apparently a little-known fact in the Obama administration that girls are weaker than boys and that grown women are weaker than grown men. Moreover, women training for combat positions suffer physical injuries at twice the rate of men, and they suffer significantly higher rates of mental disorders such as depression and anxiety after exposure to combat. Of course, you probably knew this by simple observation or by reading the sports page and noting that women's athletic records are significantly lower than men's records. But then, you are not in the Obama administration. The administration is being...