Posted on 11/01/2001 5:18:39 PM PST by Pokey78
THE former president Bill Clinton's policies of allowing women soldiers into combat zones are being halted as part of a fundamental rethink by the Bush administration about the culture and purposes of the armed forces.
Opponents of boosting the role of women in the front line have been appointed to influential positions in the Pentagon and a move to open up a reconnaissance unit linked to special forces is likely to be reversed.
But the primary factor influencing the Pentagon is the need to fight a war against terrorism in response to September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks.
Peacetime considerations such as the desirability of gender balance and the avoidance of casualties have been subordinated to the more pressing concern of defending America against a deadly and determined foe.
The Defence Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (Dacowits) is already being marginalised at the Pentagon as senior planners seek to maximise the killing potential of the armed forces. "That's all changing," one Pentagon official told the magazine US News and World Report when asked about women going into combat zones. Another said front-line units "won't involve women".
Traditional fighting skills, rather than the values stressed by the US military's notorious Consideration of Others (Coo) programme, are back in vogue as America engages in probably its biggest conflict since the Second World War.
American women serve in front-line ships and as jet pilots but not in submarines or with combat ground units.
Anita Blair, the new deputy assistant secretary of the US Navy, is an opponent of allowing women to serve in submarines, a key Dacowits aim, and is an advocate of separating the sexes during training.
She is on record as saying: "Defence funding should first be spent on training, equipment, better pay - things that will improve the nation's defence and not just the job opportunities of a tiny number of women."
Sarah White, a former master sergeant in the US air force reserve, has been appointed deputy assistant secretary of the army for force management, manpower and resources.
An opponent of women in combat, she once described the move, introduced by Mr Clinton in 1993, as "a radical departure from where mainstream America believes that good men protect women and that women enjoy being protected by men".
She is against women flying combat aircraft.
"We have to remember that even if you are at a high altitude in an airplane at a distance from the enemy, if you crash, then you automatically become an infantry or special forces-type of person," she said.
"It is your mission then to survive, to escape and to evade, and you have to have all of the skills and the capabilities as the men throughout history have had. And clearly women don't have those as a rule."
Some Pentagon officials are fearful of the American public reaction if a female pilot were shot down over Afghanistan. The only female pilot publicised so far is "Mumbles", a British-educated 26-year-old with an F14 Tomcat squadron based on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.
First, the sight of women shot up and in pieces(that is what happens when people get shot by combat weapons) was demoralizing to the male members of the unit. To the point that they were only able to field 40% of the available strength of the integrated units because the men wouldn't allow the women to go on missions.
The Israelis still use women in the armed forces, but not for combat.
It's worse than that--the very use of women (mothers!) in combat roles changes the whole equation in bad ways. You can only work up so much dudgeon about women being killed in the world trade center when we are sending women over to Afghanistan to kill or be killed. It changes the whole moral basis of things in the direction of crying havoc.
To do that, not because you think you have to, but because Bill Clinton felt like it is just simply pitiful. The Israelis tried it, and found that the Arabs simply would never surrender to a woman, fighting to the death in preference. We have plenty of men to fight, we don't have to eek out our personnel requirements by ringing in the rare combat-proficient woman and we certainly are ill-advised to dilute our training standards to do so.
:o)
Take all American women who are within five years of menopause - train us for a few weeks, outfit us with automatic weapons, grenades, gas masks, moisturizer with SPF15, Prozac, hormones, chocolate, and canned tuna - drop us (parachuted, preferably) across the landscape of Afghanistan, and let us do what comes naturally.
Think about it. Our anger quotient alone, even when doing standard stuff like grocery shopping and paying bills, is formidable enough to make even armed men in turbans tremble.
We've had our children, we would gladly suffer or die to protect them and their future. We'd like to get away from our husbands, if they haven't left us already. And for those of us who are single, the prospect of finding a good man with whom to share life is about as likely as being struck by lightning.
We have nothing to lose.
We've survived the water diet, the protein diet, the carbohydrate diet, and the grapefruit diet in gyms and saunas across America and never lost a pound. We can easily survive months in the hostile terrain of Afghanistan with no food at all!
We've spent years tracking down our husbands or lovers in bars, hardware stores, or sporting events...finding bin Laden in some cave will be no problem.
Uniting all the warring tribes of Afghanistan in a new government? Oh, please ... we've planned the seating arrangements for in-laws and extended families at Thanksgiving dinners for years ... we understand tribal warfare.
Between us, we've divorced enough husbands to know every trick there is for how they hide, launder, or cover up bank accounts and money sources. We know how to find that money and we know how to seize it ... with or without the government's help!
Let us go and fight. The Taliban hates women. Imagine their terror as we crawl like ants with hot-flashes over their godforsaken terrain!
Got this on my e-mail. A little too anti-male for me, but the spirit is good.
Not one woman in 10000 could keep up. Maybe 1 in 1000000....and I'm not sure of that.
God help us if it ever comes to that. Women's IQs, like a pack of dogs, plummets when you get a bunch of them together. They're so self-oriented it's disgusting. Give me a chest-pounding, testosterone-filled, aggressive bunch of guys for my military....that's what wins wars.
That is funny.
Thank you for showing us all how much respect you really have for women.
I was thinking about the issue of women in combat while there, and decided to count the number of injured Marines. There were 21 men and 15 women. That means that women were aprox 4.5 times as likely to be injured in training as men.
I can assure you that training doesn't come close to the real thing. Bottom line: Women cannot physically withstand the rigours of combat.
There is no 'right' to serve in the military. The military routinely discriminates in determining who is fit to serve and where they serve, and they do this for good reason. Saying that women should be allowed to fight (in a combat role) is like saying the military should be forced to accept people with disqualifying medical conditions and put them into combat.
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