Posted on 04/11/2014 2:41:17 AM PDT by markomalley
Returning from Mass yesterday morning I turned on Radio 4 in the car. It was Women’s Hour and there was the presenter, Dame Jenni Murray, calmly discussing with other women the question of whether women should be allowed to serve in the front line in the forces or not. The question is topical because General Sir Peter Wall, head of the British army, stated earlier this week that the army should look “more normal to society”. He explained: “This isn’t just about getting more females into the 30% of roles that are combat trades but getting more of them into the army per se.” It seems he wants “every woman in the country to know the service is open to them and we need to make sure we get that message across.”
Is he crazy or am I crazy? Until now British women have been excluded from close-combat roles, which are, as Haroon Siddique describes it in the Guardian article referred to above, “officially designed as “roles that are primarily intended and designed with the purpose of requiring individuals on the ground to close with and kill the enemy.” In other words, hand to hand fighting in which you are trying to butcher your enemy face to face. Is this what the public at large, let alone women themselves, really want? Has Sir Peter Wall been so brainwashed by political correctness that he cannot see that hand to hand killing strikes at the very heart of what women are supposed to represent?
You don’t have to be a Christian – or indeed a Catholic, with a devotion to Our Lady and what she signifies in terms of maternal gentleness and graciousness – to know that men and women are different; that men have traditionally played a protective role towards women and, if the situation demands it, engaged in the ghastly business of warfare in order to protect their country, their hearth and their home. Killing people face to face doesn’t come naturally to men; they have to be trained to do it because occasionally, given our fallen state, war is a grim necessity. But it has always been accepted – until now – that although women can play excellent supportive roles as technicians, engineers, drivers, doctors, nurses or whatever (which demonstrate their courage and intelligence in other ways and which are in no way demeaning), it is inappropriate for them to actually fight alongside men. Apart from anything else it has been argued that seeing a wounded woman or a woman being brutally bested by an armed assailant, a man would naturally rush to her defence in a way that he wouldn’t instinctively do for a male comrade.
Yet Sir Peter Wall has no problem with this, even though an MOD review as late as 2010 stated that although “women were physically and psychologically capable of the job”, the effects of “gender-mixing” on team cohesion were unknown and could have “far-reaching and grave consequences.” I’ll say. Indeed, if it hasn’t happened before, how can it be known that women are “psychologically capable of the job”, let alone physically capable?
Significantly, the Woman’s Hour item focused on the possible physical problems that would arise: women, being built differently and with less muscle-power (I suppose one is still allowed to say this) might not be up to the arduous physical demands of long marches in appalling conditions while carrying heavy packs, let alone the extreme physical challenge of actual close combat. No-one asked, “Is it right that women should be licensed to kill alongside men?” It is often said that women are psychologically the stronger sex and this may well be true. But this is not stated in the context of the raw aggression needed to bayonet another human being; it is made in the context of the enormous demands over a long period of raising young children.
After his eagerness to follow the modern requirement of “equality” in everything, Sir Peter seemed to hedge his bets a bit when he added, “There will always be people who say the close battle is no place for female soldiers.” But he is not among them, apparently.
Laura Perrins, a mother of two young children and a barrister, has written a rightly sarcastic riposte to Wall: “Congratulations sisters. Soon you may get the right to kill another human being just the same as a man…If you are a woman, why waste your time being an army doctor or –God forbid – a nurse when you can be in there where the action is, bayoneting and throat slitting with the rest of them. This is what the suffragettes would have wanted! It should be noted that women soldiers already “serve on the front line with the artillery as medics, engineers, intelligence officers and fighter pilots…” But this is not good enough – they need to be in combat units also.”
Equality between the sexes in every aspect of life? It just doesn’t work. Get over it.
Unless you are a very old man who has been saying this since your youth, You are the one catching on, I never had to learn what I have always known.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand how you think I changed the subject, or what question I supposedly avoided answering by doing so. Please explain?
I think you're describing a typical bell curve there. If the quality being graphed is "fitness for combat" (given a numerical score based on combining individual parameters), disproportionately more men will end up on the right side of the curve (the fit side), while women will populate the left (unfit) side. Men and women will be found in the middle area where the two peaks overlap.
Combat hospitals and many other support functions are located in combat zones. Women are there, and subject to the same dangers as men.
Oops, I missed this in my other reply (which you probably haven't seen yet).
Of course I don't understand men. That is because men have alien brains which are resistant to all attempts at understanding. DUH!
Re-read your post #3. Very little of it addresses the question of men instinctively coming to the aid of women.
Just for the record, men are hardwired to protect the helpless, the women and children. Nothing alien about that, nor can much be done to change that instinctive reaction.
That is completely silly and inaccurate.
It is why I can name all the American military women who died as a result of the enemy, in Vietnam, and their rank, off the top of my head.
Lt. Sharon Lane, hit in the neck with a piece of mortar shrapnel in a commando attack on a hospital.
Because I wasn't talking about that. I was commenting to someone who said that men will instinctively help women, but not other men. I do not think that is true at all. I think that men will help another person in need, regardless of the person's gender.
The gym on post is named after a female pilot who lost her life in Afghanistan. I have provided assistance to the family of a young 22 year old mother who died from an enemy attack in Afghanistan. Just Google “women who died in combat”—women have died in every war. In Afghanistan and Iraq, over 130 women have died in combat.
It will be women and children first, which why women in combat put all of our troops at greater risk (even women) than if it stays at all men.
I just don't see a lot of women going into combat, even without restrictions. Unless they are forced into combat roles, they will likely avoid them, for the same reasons women avoid physically demanding jobs like construction. We tend to be small and do not have the muscle mass that men do.
You obviously have common sense. Not all people do, including women who think they should be in the military.
Working in a hospital, is hardly combat, they don't have anything in common at all.
Now you reveal that you were pushing a political agenda when you started with your sill claim.
By the way, I named the only female American military to die from enemy actin, in Vietnam.
The left has an anti-American, anti-military agenda, in pushing females onto the military.
Now you reveal that you were pushing a political agenda when you started with your sill claim.
I fail to understand how a simple statement of fact constitutes "pushing a political agenda." The fact is that 143 women have died on deployment during the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of them as a direct consequence of enemy action. Women *do* work in combat zones and have always been present in and near combat zones.
As I said before, there is no reason to think that women are less able than men to withstand the psychological pressures of combat. However, we tend to be small and not very muscular; we would have difficulty with the physical aspects of combat roles.
How you switched from our discussion on your silly hospital claim to suddenly now about female military personnel in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, is interesting to see.
If you wanted to push liberal politics about females in the military, why didn’t you just say so?
If you don’t then why change the subject?
Let's revisit my "silly hospital claim": Combat hospitals and many other support functions are located in combat zones. Women are there, and subject to the same dangers as men.
I do not see where I have changed any subject, nor do I understand how statements of fact constitute pushing any kind of agenda. The fact is, women do deploy, and when they deploy, they are subject to the same dangers as men. Today's military does not operate the same way as the Vietnam era military.
===================================== To: exDemMom
I think that, psychologically, women are just as capable of handling combat as men. After all, women already work in areas that bring them very close to combat; in the capacity of doctors and nurses, they routinely deal with combat-caused injuries and psychological problems.
Working in a hospital, is hardly combat, they don't have anything in common at all.
17 posted on 4/11/2014 11:14:08 AM by ansel12
You realize that I am not talking about a facility like Walter Reed, don't you? I'm talking about the field hospitals, set up where they are subjected to IEDs, suicide bombers, etc. The only "protection" those facilities have are the red crosses painted on the walls. While medical personnel are not fighters, they do get killed in the line of duty, including from enemy action.
This is *not* the Vietnam era any more.
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