Posted on 02/22/2012 9:44:14 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
WASHINGTON D.C. - Calling for an evolution of policy, Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is asking for changes that would allow women to serve on the front-lines in military combat.
Brown's push comes on the heels of a Department of Defense report calling for changes to the 1994 Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule which barred women from certain roles in the military, including front-line ground-combat positions.
The report to Congress concluded that changes were needed so policy doesn't prevent enlisted female military members from rising to their potential. But Brown, in a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, said he believes changes need to go further to level the playing field for women in the military.
"As a 32-year member of the Massachusetts Army National Guard, I believe women should be able to serve in front line positions if they desire. I am mindful of the fact that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have claimed the lives of 140 women serving as Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and Airmen. Their service was honorable and reflective of the day-to-day reality of modern warfare and the contributions made by female service members," Brown wrote in the letter. "Closing these opportunities to women affect their ability to develop a career path in the military and advance to higher ranks. We have an obligation to expand the professional opportunities available to women, especially considering their sacrifices. Doing so in my view would improve military effectiveness, not detract from it."
The DOD report to Congress on women in the military is centered around a new vision statement calling for removal of "all barriers that would prevent Service members from rising to the highest level of responsibility that their talents and capabilities warrant."
Brown's likely Democratic opponent in the U.S. Senate Race in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, said in October that she believes women should be allowed to serve in front-line combat positions.
"I think women should be in combat positions," Warren said at a UMass Lowell debate on Oct. 4. "Frankly, I think that women are just as tough as men and we can make that work."
The revisions recommended in the DOD report would open up to women 13,139 positions in the U.S. Army, 371 in the U.S. Marine Corps and 60 in the Navy. The Air Force already allows women to serve in 99 percent of all positions and was minimally affected by the report's recommendations.
The report stated that significant time and research would precede any changes, a potential delay Brown aid is unacceptable.
"We should not waste time endlessly studying this issue and getting bogged down in bureaucratic red tape," Brown said in his letter. "Those deployed to Afghanistan serving on Female Engagement Teams in support of special operations forces illustrates that the Department can take a more aggressive approach to offering additional opportunities to our women in uniform."
Me too. It has been the most painful political thing for me, the betrayal. Well, not even that. I knew he wasn't a real conservative, but I forced myself to believe he was more than he was.
Since putting some energy into getting Scott Brown elected (both time and money) then seeing him do the things that he did, it brought me to the hard realization that being a little bit liberal is very much like being a little bit pregnant. Just like the progression of a pregnancy ends up (most of the time) in the birth of a child, the progression of liberalism is very much a one-way ratchet, in that every surrender to liberalism is ground lost, rarely to be regained.
In other words, I’ve come to the conclusion that you reach the same degree of liberalism by being a bit liberal as you do by being fully liberal.
Having people like Scott Brown in office will eventually bring you to the same destination as having someone like Elizabeth Warren.
It just takes you longer to get there.
This stuff makes me want to shout at the top of my lungs. Really, it does.
IT ISN'T ABOUT TOUGHNESS. IT IS ABOUT PHYSICAL CAPABILITY AND THE DYNAMIC OF MINGLING TWO SEXES.
I know plenty of tough women, capable women who I am proud to work with and for. But that is not the issue.
It is dipsticks like Warren, Brown, and most every liberal who cling to the dangerous fantasy that there is no difference between men and women.
They get all their ammunition from Hollywood, I'm sure.
All this scumbag cares about is himself and getting re-elected . No better than Kennedy , really . R means nothing anymore , for the most part .
Are there still two different sets of physical standards?
Keeping them out is of harms way is impossible.
PUTTING them in harms way is criminal.
I’m a veteran, too.
EVERY time a woman has had to perform rigorous physical tasks along side men, she’s failed. We (I) ended up humping her ruck and carrying her rifle.
Sure, some men fail.
Most, even ALL, women will fail when they physically compete alongside and with men.
But until the day they do this, no. Because I don't want my 180 lb. husband with 75 lb. of gear to have to rely on being carried to safety by someone who can't even do a standard push up or pull up. This is crap.
My husband's biggest issue with this is what happens when she can't handle the physical part, or the mental for that matter, and they are already in the midst of battle? What happens when she gets stuck and starts freaking but there is also one of his brothers hurt. Whom does he choose? Most men raised well will feel obligated to protect the women, which puts their male unit members at higher risk. What about the hygiene? In the field, they have to take some huge liberties with hygiene as it is. What happens when the woman is on her "time". It's different when you are in the field training and in the field for real. It's just bad all the way around.
Get the women off the battlefields.
With some exceptions, women in combat jeopardize the lives of the other soldiers. This is all part and parcel of the great socialist takeover of America.
Ah! Scott Brown, the darling of the Republican renaissance; the champion of conservatism; the “one” who would ride up the steps to the capital on a white horse; the one who drove the republican women crazy with lust while posing nude.
What a loser.
I do not hear a drumbeat of demand from the female enlisted ranks for combat slots. In fact, I see a lot of wangling to get out of long combat deployments by exercising the “female option” — pregnancy. Under current rules, you cannot remain deployed or in a combat zone when you are pregnant. When you start showing, you're transferred out to another unit until the child is born. [Once the child is born, the “parent” remains in the military and gets special administrative consideration for their family situation.] But, no one replaces the missing pregnant member and those left behind have to do the work that person used to do.
Let's get back to the crucial point of actually putting women into the combat arms (not combat support) — and that traditionally in the Army and Marines means armor, infantry, and artillery. If there are any organizations were toughness and literal physical strength are paramount, it would be these. Sorry, but 2/3 of women do not have the sheer upper body strength to compete. This is a fact of biology and gender, not because I am a male chauvinist bigot.
But, there's another set of reasons why we shouldn't put women into direct combat roles and that comes from examining the historical fact.
Fact: Only two countries on the planet have ever fielded all-women or mixed men-women units in direct combat — Russia (1941-1945) and Israel (1948-1949). Neither do it today (although they do give women combat training, no women are assigned direct combat roles). Why?
This is why.
1. The all-female or mixed male-female units took disproportionately MORE casualties than all-male units.
2. Males instinctively tried to protect females and suffered more casualties.
3. Females felt they had to take more risks to be considered equals and suffered more casualties.
4. Female casualties were devastating to morale of both female AND male combatants.
5. All-female and mixed male-female units were forced to work harder due to physical strength differences between the sexes.
Let's look at item 5 because that's where the cheating becomes paramount. In order for women to compete with men, the PRT (Physical Readiness Tests — or whatever the name is) have to be pro-rated DOWN to allow the women to pass. [The Canadian Forces are one of the few militaries that allow women to compete for infantry slots and only three women have either passed or keep trying. Why? Because the Canadian Forces do NOT pro-rate the PRT by gender. You either pass the Standard PRT for all, or you don't. The PRT is neutral and it fails both sexes equally that cannot measure up.]
So how does the cheating on the PRT affect the service members? The PRT is used to discharge those males who do not live up to its arbitrary numbers and also as a way to fast-track promotions for minorities based on sex and race. That is only one of the dirty little secrets no one talks about when increasing roles and missions for females in the Armed Forces raises its ugly head.
Patented Jim Noble response:
Scott Brown’s core constituency is unenrolled (”independent”) pro-abortion women. If he keeps them happy, he gets re-elected. If the Democrats keep nominating icy white b****es, he will be a Senator forever.
His supposed Tea Party base is a myth, the Massachusetts Tea Party could meet in a phone booth.
Jesus ,I’m glad someone understands politics.
Half the time it is not what is real in politics it is what is said and where you say it.
Scott Brown has to run against a woman in the most liberal state in the country that makes Nancy Pelosi look like Barry Goldwater.
He has to take this issue away from Lez Warren or if he opposes it Warren and the Boston Globe will trounce him on the issue In Ma. where he has to win reelection with Obama on the same ballot in Ma.
Give the guy a break will ya.
One of my husband’s Company Commanders was a very strong, physically fit, bike riding, clean living, West Point graduating female. Her MOS was Military Intelligence. She was very intelligent, as well. The poster child for all the people who want women pushed closer to combat.(My husband is a Combat Engineer, but when he was a Drill Sgt, his CO was a woman.)
We often discuss females in combat. We met while I was forward deployed with an Armor unit during Desert Storm. Lots of women have been forward deployed.
My husband’s very competent, very physically strong CO, though competent and stronger than many women in America, was still not as strong as our 15 year old son is. I hate to break it to the rest of the adults here that think somewhere in America a bunch of women are evolving into some kind of roboFemaleSoldier...but it’s not happening. Tomboy? Ok, I was a tomboy,but I wasn’t ever as strong as the men around me. We had a female in our unit nicknamed “Big Mama.” She was a big mama, I mean muscular. She had broad shoulders and was physically fit. She was one of the first and only women to play on a male football team in her home state of Maine, and showed us the pics. Big Mama is still serving honorably in our Military, and has deployed many times.
But Big Mama, with all her muscles and football playing toughness, is not as strong as a man. Men who go outside the wire in a war wear so much gear, for hours at a time. Some male Soldiers can’t take it, and get “fired” from their job. Then another, tougher Soldier gets put into the slot and burns his body up doing hours of physically exhausting, dangerous work. That again, 99.9% of women cannot do.
If you have a female family member that serves, please don’t get indignant and try to say she is doing what a man does. She might be doing her job very well, as many women do in our Military. But women with Combat Arms units, even if capable, are usually intimately involved with many men. Our last duty station, a brand new female PFC got involved with an older Soldier, who got her pregnant and dumped her. She tried to kill herself while pregnant. One or two women, working among hundreds of men? Could that work ANYWHERE in the world? Yet in the high stake, high stress combat units, it’s gonna work?
LOL!
Scott Brown is a RINO idiot, but he’s lightyears better than Elizabeth Warren, the Shining Path guerilla.
I live in MA. I know. She makes Odumbo look conservative.
Look this is just foolishness. Yes some women could drag a guy off the battlefield. But the fact is that very large percentages of women in the military right now couldn't drag a 100 pound pack off the battlefield. Men and women are physically different, from upper body strength to size to aerobic capacity. Vive le difference'!
Most Massachusetts men have Scott Browns picture in their wallet.
Very good post. My wife is an Army vet and so am I. A long time ago. She laughs at the notion of her or our daughters serving as infantry because she knows that what I did and can still do at 60 physically is well beyond what she could manage as a young soldier in tip top shape. She served honorably and did what she could do but understands, as Scott Brown does not, that doing what one can do does not mean one can do everything.
A great point that's simply too obvious to ignore.
If it's all about equality, then why is it that women are held to a different physical standard then men? When I went through USNA, there were different physical and academic standards for men. The disparity in the physical standards was the most obvious: a lower wall on the O-course for women, for example, or the passing times for the Halsey Hack - a time that would give a man a "D" would be an "A" for a woman, etc. Even the academic standards were different, though these weren't as apparent . . . but they'd struggle to keep a woman whose academic performance was sub-par a lot harder than they would for a man whose performance was sub-par. Saw it happen.
That said, there were women there who could abide by the male standards in terms of physicality: these were the, um, manly women who threw shot on the track team, say.
That said (2), even if a woman was capable of the same performance as a man, you take normal, red-blooded young men and women and put them together in tight quarters and intimate settings, and nature will take its course. You have to be prepared for the consequences of that.
Cut it out.
No. Your gut feelings are as they should be.
There is a nature of man and nature of woman. Men have adapted to roles as well as women—to create the most effective way to live together and have “flourishing” offspring. That design is under attack as all Natural Law Theory by Marxism—that wants to abolish all biological ties. This means redesign the natures of women and men.
To put women in combat teaches them the opposite of what their natures were designed for—the nurturing and care for human beings. This training removes their natural instincts—in a Marxist way—redesigns females to go against nature.
Same with putting males and females together in battle—to destroy man’s natural protectiveness of the weaker sex—woman. That natural desire to protect and care for—to give the woman the ability to nurture their offspring—is essential to normal, healthy development of children. They need the emotional love of a mother for years so they are able to trust and love.
Destroy the Natural Family—the Marxists main goal with destroying Christianity because that religion is the best for strong families and unity.
They remove mothers and fathers from babies and those children grow up to fill prisons and gangs and commit suicide, etc. That is the type of people Marxists want—useful idiots that are dependent because of lack of love they have no self-esteem—no desire for individualism and the abilty for long term healthy attachments—which only comes from a secure childhood with both a loving father and mother. All psychology shows the damage to children who have no loving mother in the home—or who has been removed in early development-—it is severe mental instability and they will grow up not to trust and be loyal. They become what they learn.
Women put into battle is reeducation camp—to learn to kill and destroy their concept of men as protectors. It is part of redesigning man by atheists. I was a Tom boy and never wanted to go to battle—although I played with guns, etc as a child. I wanted to have babies and a man who would be a great role model for my children—one who would cherish me staying home and caring for out offspring-—the way God designed.
Does that mean all women should want that-—no—but the idea that there is no difference between men and women is a lie—and Natural Laws are supposed to be the basis of all our Just Laws-—there is no egalitarianism in the Constitution—that is Stalin’s ideology. That idea to disregard Nature is anathema to the Founders and the intent of our Judicial system.
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