[Retain Mike]

All of it is so true. Following in the letter I send to papers and commentators each December. This idiocy has metastasized throughout the Armed Forces for nine years now. There should be little of value left.

The of Tragedy Social Engineering Combat

Obama’s defense department announcement on December 3, 2015 meant regimental combat teams and special forces units became bureaucratic toys for those imagining equal opportunity and affirmative action could coexist with warriors enduring the brutality imperative for victory.

Combat operations require the most severe restrictions on human emotions and behaviors to foster the uniquely understood high morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion. Human sexual diversity of any variety cannot intrude into this authoritarian meritocracy where only those displaying the greatest savagely can win.

At the point of collision, our troops face situations requiring exceptional physical capabilities and unbelievably sacrificial, primitive, and intimate relations. They continuously face extraordinary stress punctuated by killing other humans within inherently chaotic and brittle environments.

Of special consideration should be an understanding national defense through personal combat becomes the ultimate Olympics. Therefore, much less excuse obtains for merging men with women into this hideous ordeal than exists for combining the athletic competitions every four years. Certainly, the controversy over transgender females competing in women’s Olympics makes that point obvious.

Institutional memories no longer exist for fighting ferocious, shrewd enemies such as Germans, Japanese, Chinese, and North Vietnamese, who utilized a full array of modern weapons. As this tragedy unfolds remember the quote that, “Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf”.

[Chainmail]

To be effective, a combat unit needs to be trained as a team under an experienced and trusted leader. Their leader has to be where the troops are, to face danger with them. Their leaders cannot show preferences - each soldier/Marine has to know that if they draw the short straw, it's just the luck of the draw - nobody is staying back because the CO has an attachment to someone else - or a grudge against you. If you are chosen to lead an assault over open ground, with a better-than-even chance that you won't get to the other side - you have to know that your being picked was fair.

As everyone knows, women on average are smaller and carry less in combat. They wear out earlier, they are emotionally more fragile than men and will suffer long-term psychological damage, if they survive.

But the worst effect on a combat team's cohesion and morale will combining young men and young women together. They will form couples (or worse) and their allegiance/attachments will be to their partners not to the unit. Worse, sexual attraction is almost never linear: PFC A will want Corporal B - but Corporal B wants Sgt C, and so on. Then you'll have the rest of the unit without a partner and resentment will be augmented with rifles.

The question is: do we want to win wars or just earn spots in combat infantry units, just because you think you might like it (Trust me - you won't).

In my outfit, Echo Company 2/1 in Vietnam, everybody got hit, some as many as three times. It was damn dangerous. Infantry combat is to kill the enemy, or be killed while trying to kill the enemy. It seems that our leadership has forgotten that fact.