I believe discussions about women in combat should also consider Napoleon’s maxim that the moral is to the physical as three to one. Too often operations demand unpredictably and unimaginably exhausting brutality to achieve victory. Therefore, only the most severe restrictions on human behaviors and interactions can foster the required high morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion required.
Combat forms personnel into rigid, task oriented units. They then descend into a squalid cacophony of shrieking, cursing, sobbing, crashing dissonance to orchestrate the killing of other humans without hate or joy. These people continuously face extraordinary mental stress, and survive by acquiring the wisdom of wild animals that live in the moment without schedules for eating and sleeping. Resorting to war for national defense entails the ultimate Olympics of conflict occurring at the bleeding edge of existence where the unbelievable must become the possible. The many who think they are prepared physically are then overcome by those who are also psychologically annealed as individuals and as a unit.
Human sexuality should never intrude into this alternate reality demanding trained killers subject to totalitarian leadership. There is no opportunity for imagined compatibility with the social alchemy popular in civilian life.
This tragedy of women in combat provides another reason I now council men to never enter the armed forces. Social engineering that amalgamates feminist ideals everywhere has now become the over arching imperative to which all operational capabilities must submit.
Very well said. My emphasis for a very important point. All too many people do not understand that the liberties we have sworn to defend are largely sacrificed by those who do the defending. Freedom is defended by MEN who do not experience freedom. Our present political leaders either do not understand this paradox ... or understand it all too well (and have evil intentions).
War is an ugly, brutal business whose purpose is the efficient destruction of lives and things. All that matters is defeating the enemy and extinguishing it as a threat. Its a matter of survival of the fittest and strongest, not a social experiment or an exploration of such high minded issues as equality, fairness and inclusion. To be distracted from the singular objective of warfare is to risk defeat, subjugation and deprivation. War is not about proving theories of human relationships; it is an existential contest to which all other issues are secondary.