The Second Obama Administration gathers steam. It should be quite a ride.
Plenty of surveys have been done over the years of the views of women in the military on this question. Enlisted women have been overwhelmingly against this change, although some of the most ambitious women officers see restrictions on women in combat as an impediment to promotion.
Since the early 1990s, the Pentagon has tried to put the kibosh on active duty personnel speaking frankly about sex role questions. We saw in the 2003 Saving Private Lynch fraud how hard the military wants to promote the myth of the buttkicking babe.
Fortunately, law professor Kingsley Browne assembled a huge amount of evidence in his 2007 book Co-ed Combat derived from both studies and, crucially, soldiers' anonymous online discussion groups to find out what was really going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I try to keep an eye out for dogs that don't bark. A pretty big dog at the moment is film director Kathryn Bigelow, who has made two movies about 21st Century combat, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. I watched both movies with an eye out for Bigelow's views on women in combat, and didn't see anything suggesting she thinks sending women into combat is a dandy idea. Indeed, the emphasis in Zero Dark Thirty on the huge amount of heavy gear contemporary American warriors lug into battle subtly suggests that the percentage of women who could shoulder a fair share of their platoon's burden is negligible.
But, so what? It's not like any of this matters in a practical sense. If more co-ed combat degrades American military performance, it's not like the Axis is going to win WWII, it's that a few more brave Americans will get killed in some inconclusive puttering around in Mali or wherever.
This kind of thing is like gay marriage: a symbolic war on the realities of biology.
Posts
79 comments:
Its over Steve, they won...
Bert says:
NOT SO FAR off from now the U.S Navy is going to have two of the Virginia class attack subs manned by all-female crews from top to bottom. IT IS going to happen. Starting with the commander and the nuclear reactor officers being trained and qualified now and then enlisted women as well. It will be one big sorority house under the sea. Since the number of trained women submariners will be in the several hundreds at the most, that selection process can be most meticulous. And you will not have the need for separate berths, heads [washrooms], not worry about women being captured or having the difficulty with the strength issue. This all seems to be do-able. And since the nuclear attack boats will no longer carry atomic weaponry that means no worry about that women in command of nukes at the emotional time of month. The enlisted women need at the most with regard to strength to be able to operate a heavy machine as they would a bulldozer or hydrulic lifts, etc.
So the trillion dollar killing machine controlled by people who hate me and want me to die will be less effective. Oh no!
From the comments in the NYT article on this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/us/pentagon-says-it-is-lifting-ban-on-women-in-combat.html
happykt
Austin
I served in the US Army from 90 to 93 -- when news came down that my battalion was probably going to be shipped to Kuwait from Germany. Quite promptly, 8 out of 16 women in the headquarters company, where I was serving in became pregnant (I was in the signal corps). When the actual war only lasted a few days, soon afterwards 6 out of 8 of those women had a 'miscarriage' after visiting Denmark or the Netherlands for a weekend holiday and only 2 went full term. A native Eskimo woman in my unit got super drunk every day after work in an effort to terminate her pregnancy. I constantly asked my female soldiers if they wanted to be in an infantry company to fight in Kuwait, and only one said yes. Thank goodness I'm out.
Jan. 23, 2013 at 4:52 p.m.REPLYYou recommended this5
Mogs302
Philadelphia PA
Your personal experience tells us nothing about women in combat. I hope you reported it to your superiors so that it could be entered into the statistical studies about women in combat.
Jan. 23, 2013 at 5:00 p.m.RECOMMEND
"...a symbolic war on the realities of biology." that says it all in a nutshell. - panjoomby
But, so what? It's not like any of this matters in a practical sense. If more co-ed combat degrades American military performance, it's not like the Axis is going to win WWII, it's that a few more brave Americans will get killed in some inconclusive puttering around in Mali or wherever.
This kind of thing is like gay marriage: a symbolic war on the realities of biology.
Right. The stakes are low and drones seem to be doing most of the work anyway.
" Enlisted women have been overwhelmingly against this change, although some of the most ambitious women officers see restrictions on women in combat as an impediment to promotion."
The first clause of this sentence nails it. It's fun to play at being a soldier, until the bullets start flying.
How is gay marriage a war on the realities of biology? If the government were paying for research on ways to impregnate gay men so they could experience motherhood, that would count as such a war. But gay marriage? Aren't the impediments to that more legal, than biological? I don't dispute that the gay marriage movement has elements of a war -- its proponents show more interest in expressing hostility toward conservatie Christians (among others) than in creating a gay culture that esteems and supports aging gay domestic types. But that isn't it more a war on political opponents than a war on the laws of biology?
The big deal is that once women soldiers start getting captured, tortured, raped, and shot by those asymmetric warriors who haven't brushed up on chivalry or the Geneva Convention, the natural revulsion (that is, to those who still subscribe to the word "natural") to this will create all kinds of war fog, redirection, drama, and complications that weren't there before. Then begins the drama of the feminists who don't know whether to hold their tongues in the interest of not spoiling this grand moment of empowerment.
Maybe this will reduce the enlistment of women, freeing up more spots for men.
This will dilute the effectiveness of our military .... which is a good thing. Less adventures abroad.
However, we will always have the 100% male meat-eaters (special operations) for small scale wog-bashing and rescue attempts.
I have a daughter in the Army headed for Afghanistan. Her sergeant told her not to worry, she won't be going into the field as its too dangerous for women. Not because the Taliban target women specifically but because their fellow US soldiers will rape them.
There's obviously a disparate impact taking place here. Fairness dictates that casualties be evenly distributed; for every male casualty there should be a female one. Because of past practices whereby males did almost all the suffering perhaps there should be some affirmative program put in place to rectify this and ensure that this imbalance be rectified. Patriotic female Obama voters must now step up to the plate.
"elvisd said...
The big deal is that once women soldiers start getting captured, tortured, raped, and shot ..."
... and impregnated. Sending women into combat is sort of like blithely sending your king to the middle of the chessboard to ambl around capturing other pieces. (Chess would better fit the Darwinian realities of premodern warfare -- the Yanomamo, the Illiad, Genghis Khan -- if the sexes of king and queen were switched.)
'Special Forces' get exempted from a lot of PC crap. So the military separates into 'Special Forces' and a uniformed militia- remember, vets preference is almost as big a help getting a government job as slipping 2,000$ to a state senator.
Half the Air Force Academy is going into drones. Half. Expect General Dilbert for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in ten years. This is a GOOD THING. War zones are nasty and corrupting and I'd rather trust Skynet than some Boy Scout who never thought he'd enjoy committing torture, mass murder and rape until he spent two weeks marching on a broken ankle in filth while his friends were killed and maimed around him.
Meanwhile, Al Qaeda's treatment of our captured girl soldiers will provide good theatrical scenery for liberals doing their Candid Friend riffs on US policy.
Here is an article from May 2003, by Kirsten Scharnberg, of the Chicago Tribune recounting her experiences as an embed with an Army infantry unit during the start of that disastrous foreign policy mistake otherwise known as the Iraq War. She actually admits to having to have the infantrymen carry her equipment in addition to theirs so that she could keep up with them as they trudged through the desert with full loads.
Excerpts:
I had made a pact with myself that no matter how tired I was or how physically strenuous a mission became, I would never let one of the soldiers lug my rucksack or equipment for me. I wanted them to see me as completely capable of pulling my own weight, as a traveling companion who was not a liability but an equal. One night, hating myself, I broke that rule.
...
The decision nagged at me for days. Not only had I not been able to pull my own weight, I also had potentially put that young soldier at risk. What if he had not been able to aim his weapon effectively had we been ambushed in that wooded expanse of territory approaching Najaf? What if he had fallen on the rough terrain and misfired his weapon, injuring someone?
...
I had run a marathon not long before the war and worked out almost every day. I grew up on an Iowa farm where manual labor was part of the bargain. But I had been bested by a car battery, and when I handed my load to that soldier, I admitted that I never could have cut it in the infantry.
@ Anonymous said...
How is gay marriage a war on the realities of biology?
Try to follow me here... I know, logic is involved, so I'll go slow.
If two women were trapped on a desert island, could they conceive a child?
If two men were trapped on an desert island, could they conceive a child?
If a man and a woman were trapped on a desert island, could they conceive a child?
If you answered 'yes' to only one of the posits above, you live in reality. If you hemmed and hawed even a little bit about "Well, sex isn't ALL about procreation... derp derp derp," then you're a liberal and can be safely ignored.
For any other rationalization of the male/female physiological process is in fact a war on biological reality.
Get it?
So will women have to register for the draft then? A lot of men will storm the Bastille over the idea of their wives and 18-year-old daughters being snatched up against their will and sent over to some future Vietnam to be raped and slaughtered in a jungle.
@Anonymous 2:06PM
Completely shifted my perspective. That's pretty damn good..
This announcement coming on the same day as our whiny female Secretary of State's appearance before Congress makes for quite a coincidence.
The future looks bright!
When the Russian tanks roll westward what defense for you and me; women so manly they needn't take BC
Want to know why women as combat infantry is a sad, stupid idea?
Tune into FOX's 'Cops' program, watch how, when it comes to the need for height, weight, and brute strength to subdue belligerent suspects, the women officers are almost never in on such action - witness how the women officers hold back and let their massive, stronger male counterparts handle the rough stuff. Oh, yes, you'll see a woman officer join in a vigorous affray with a lone suspect, but only if there's at least one larger, stronger male officer doing most of the hard work of such a struggle.
Women in non-combatant military billets is no less sad and stupid. For one reason, what the French call vive la différence: women get pregnant. And a military career is most definitely not one in which anyone, man or woman, can "have it all."
But, not to worry, because once the military will have collected enough stats on the performance of future women infantry soldiers, the Pentagon will spin the inevitable "Gee, we told you so" results to conform with the blank-slater, egalitarian political propaganda, and you will see plenty of women soldiers getting a lot of hi-wattage publicity when the Pentagon will have doled out to them a "correct" or "population percentage-representative" ration of decorations and promotions.
Drones? These have their place, but like all the novel weapons that have debuted and been hailed as panaceas - explosives, the machine gun, air-to-air missiles
(as replacement for the "obsolete" aircraft gun), even the A-bomb - drones never can and never will render obsolete the disciplined, hard-boiled infantryman who takes and holds ground.
My apologies to Philip Larkin for mangling his ditty.
You should link to an article about the first two women to attempt Officer's Candidate School . . . Both failed. This was recently, I believe.
"But, so what? It's not like any of this matters in a practical sense."
Spot on. To expound, we simply don't win wars anymore, and the only servicemen who will really suffer for this will be white grunts at the pointy end of the spear.
The post about the woman embed is instructive. I was absolutely smoked crawling under the length of my house the other day, and it's elevated 4-5' high, so I only had to duck a dozen pipes/ducts/etc. I can only imagine the total exertion of a long high crawl/low crawl/buddy team rush that a close-quarter infantry assault requires, and I try and stay somewhat fit in my early dotage...
>Try to follow me here... I know, logic is involved, so I'll
>go slow....
>If two women were trapped on a desert island, could
>they conceive a child?
>If two men were trapped on an desert island, could
>they conceive a child?
>If a man and a woman were trapped on a desert island,
>could they conceive a child?
>If you answered 'yes' to only one of the posits
>above, you live in reality. If you hemmed and hawed
>even a little bit about "Well, sex isn't ALL about
>procreation... derp derp derp," then you're a liberal
>and can be safely ignored.
Mr. feral1404,
It is true, I am only still learning about biology, not just from you, but also from the medical school I attend. I actually can't tell if you disagree with the hemers and hawers who point out that sex doesn't necessarily involve procreation. Of course a feral animal can be forgiven assuming sexual relationships involve procreation. After all, that's kind of relationship that gives us the great masses of feral creatures in the first place, Mr. feral1404. But do explain how your desert island scenario answers my question: How is gay marriage a war on the realities of biology? Try to be even slower and more logical this time, and don't get sidetracked by wondering if you ought to ignore me because I might be a liberal derp derp hem. Darn, gave myself away.
Somewhere Antonio Gramsci is smiling.
How is gay marriage a war on the realities of biology? If the government were paying for research on ways to impregnate gay men so they could experience motherhood, that would count as such a war. But gay marriage? Aren't the impediments to that more legal, than biological?
There are some dumb lefties commenting here.
It is true, I am only still learning about biology, not just from you, but also from the medical school I attend. I actually can't tell if you disagree with the hemers and hawers who point out that sex doesn't necessarily involve procreation. Of course a feral animal can be forgiven assuming sexual relationships involve procreation. After all, that's kind of relationship that gives us the great masses of feral creatures in the first place
I wonder where our anonymous lefty med student thinks the great masses of human creatures came from. Perhaps they just fell out of a tree?
How is gay marriage a war on the realities of biology?
What do you think "marriage" is all about, Lefty Med Student? Two (or more than two) people getting their freak on? You won't accept that "gay marriage" is an assault on nature because you won't accept that marriage has any meaning.
Eh, Great Power war is over. Worst thing that happens is a few broads take an RPG riding in the back of a humvee during a lightning advance through Iran or a mortar hanging around in some African base while drones and the boys in SF do the bush-wacking. The only people pretending there are going to be significant numbers of women leading movement to contact are in DC.
Army wants more women in publicly visible leadership positions. Infantry is where you get your ticket punched. Little will change. Women will continue banging/being sexually assaulted by superiors but now they'll be nominally under an infantry command while doing so.
A quick edit to my 1/23/13, 5:24 PM comment:
Where I said, "A feral animal can be forgiven assuming sexual relationships involve procreation," I meant, "a feral animal can be forgiven assuming sexual relationships ONLY involve procreation."
"Mr. feral1404,
It is true, I am only still learning about biology..."
Yep, quickly assessed by your response to be a snarky liberal derp safely to be ignored.
The answer, dear Anonymous, is that of course sexual congress does not always necessarily involve procreation, but exclusively partaking in same-sex relations can NEVER result in procreation. Never partaking in sexual congress with the intent to procreate necessarily and quite successfully ends your particular genetic line... and lessens your contribution to a varied population.
And such a viewpoint can be considered warlike - even genocidal; certainly suicidal when viewed through the prism of biological reality.
'the medical school I attend.' Learning about biology does not mean you can intuit what said biological processes mean in the grander scheme: Indeed you did give yourself away...
The point is obviously to render the military ineffective, and to further emphasize to White, Christian men that they're not wanted. Take their weapons and strongly discourage them from getting any military training and you have a pacified populace.
The fact that the women and gays and blacks can't cut it (either physically for the former or intellectually for the latter) is irrelevant for social experimentation purposes.
My husband is convinced D'won plans to unionize the military. Since it's their country now (a la Auster), I don't particularly care. I've opted out of it all. We're applying for passports and taking steps to get dual citizenship based on my husband's ancestry. Let it burn, or sink, or whatever.
Apparently mixed-sex units were a problem for the Soviets in the war.
"The repeated intercourse with women partisans resulted in sveral cases of pregnancy. These women are a nuisance to the regiment. Shoot them!"
N.K.V.D. Order of May 11 1943.
Source: Hitler's defeat in Russia.
General Anders. p. 211.
The U.S. military isn't likely to fight any wars that matter any time soon, except possibly a war against it's own citizens.
As such, this is a good thing because it will degrade their performance.
Sheer idiocy. What kind of man wants to see women in combat? What kind of society agrees to allow them to be there?
I remember in HS when, near the end of every school year in June, they made the boys have PE with the girls for a week or two. I hated it. Not because I hated girls. But because I was athletic and competitive. So I looked forward to PE. But the girls didn't seem to care. They didn't try. They had little athleticism -- no quickness, no strength. There were very, very few exceptions.
Maybe these physical -- and also somewhat mental -- qualities are, or would not be, as important in modern combat. But I personally would not want to take the chance in order to find out.
Lefty Med Sudent here:
>I wonder where our anonymous lefty med student thinks
>the great masses of human creatures came from.
>Perhaps they just fell out of a tree?
--Anonymous
I was remarking on the origins of great masses feral creatures, not humans in general. Some animals are feral, that is, existing in a state of nature, or wild. I was thinking feral1404 might be a feral human, maybe taken in by wolf when he was a child, but not raised by the parents who begat and conceived him. That's why he wouldn't necessarily be familiar with normal family life that often accompanies marriage. (Where I said, "A feral animal can be forgiven assuming sexual relationships involve procreation," I meant, "a feral animal can be forgiven assuming sexual relationships ONLY involve procreation.)
>You won't accept that "gay marriage" is an assault
>on nature because you won't accept that marriage has
>any meaning.
--Anonymous
Marriage means many things. One meaning is a Christian meaning. According to some (I am one who believes this), in the eyes of God, a marriage is only real if it involves heterosexual sex. I don't even think what is called gay sex counts as sex in the eyes of God, and it has nothing to do with Christian marriage. For that matter, what is called gay sex isn't necessarily sex according to biological definitions of sex either. (I hope I am still credentialed as a liberal.) The other meaning of marriage is a legal one, and legal marriage is whatever the law says it is. The contemporary political issue about gay marriage centers on the legal meaning of marriage, not what I hold to be the Christian meaning, and there are no biological barriers to letting gay folks have the status of being married.
>And such a viewpoint can be considered warlike - even
>genocidal; certainly suicidal when viewed through the
>prism of biological reality.
-feral1404
This is a logical point, but probably not a useful one. I don't think the population is in decline, and I don't think most of Steve's readers would view population decline as a threat.
>but exclusively partaking in same-sex relations can
> NEVER result in procreation.
-feral1404
This will blow your mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis
Guys -- it is all gone. Hold on to what you can.
Neil Young: "Powderfinger"
Look out, Mama,
there's a white boat
comin' up the river
With a big red beacon,
and a flag,
and a man on the rail
I think you'd better call John,
'Cause it don't
look like they're here
to deliver the mail
And it's less than a mile away
I hope they didn't come to stay
It's got numbers on the side
and a gun
And it's makin' big waves.
Daddy's gone,
my brother's out hunting
in the mountains
Big John's been drinking
since the river took Emmy-Lou
So the powers that be
left me here
to do the thinkin'
And I just turned twenty-two
I was wonderin' what to do
And the closer they got,
The more those feelings grew.
Daddy's rifle in my hand
felt reassurin'
He told me,
Red means run, son,
numbers add up to nothin'
But when the first shot
hit the docks I saw it comin'
Raised my rifle to my eye
Never stopped to wonder why.
Then I saw black,
And my face splashed in the sky.
Shelter me from the powder
and the finger
Cover me with the thought
that pulled the trigger
Think of me
as one you'd never figured
Would fade away so young
With so much left undone
Remember me to my love,
I know I'll miss her.
"Anonymous said...
Eh, Great Power war is over."
Evidently it is for us. Unfortunately we may one day be faced with adversaries who will think differently, and who will find our military decisions useful to them. We may not be interested in Great Power war, but it may yet be interested in us.
This kind of thing is like gay marriage: a symbolic war on the realities of biology.
No one cares a whit about an abstract "war on biology." What these things have in common is that they undermine the group strength of the diverse white American men. It is tribal warfare against white Americans.
The Israelis had a bad experience with women in combat. The men tend to be protective, and any casualty created guaranteed atrocities, as the men in the pressure cooker of combat viewed all, including enemy civilians, as guilty of killing "their" women and responded with true evo-bio Darwinian ferocity. As if some old men and kids, women had personally killed their wife or girlfriend.
Women in combat = guaranteed atrocities.
Here's where you're wrong Steve. You're predicting the future of combat based on the Cold War Duopoly. What happens WHEN not IF Iran gets the bomb? Answer: Pakistan builds more for Saudi, probably build to order for the other Emirates, Egypt buys them from North Korea, it proliferates.
The absence of Hegemonic control is not peace, but anarchy. And degrading Military Capability tends to have catastrophic costs seen only later. You wondered how Rome lasted so long? Military strength period, nothing more and less.
Drones equalize to an extent America's air power, anti-satellite our comm advantage, conventional army strength is still vital because new enemies always pop up (because its human nature).
My biggest beef with the Buchanon Paleos (including Mencken, even though my late father loved the guy) is their unwillingness to concede human nature and the need to be eternally vigilant. If being rich is always better than being poor, so too is being strong better than being weak.
The fact that the women and gays and blacks can't cut it (either physically for the former or intellectually for the latter) is irrelevant for social experimentation purposes.
Oh, it's not an experiment. It is a strategy.
"I remember in HS when, near the end of every school year in June, they made the boys have PE with the girls for a week or two. I hated it. Not because I hated girls. But because I was athletic and competitive. So I looked forward to PE. But the girls didn't seem to care. They didn't try. They had little athleticism -- no quickness, no strength. There were very, very few exceptions."
Rings true to my experience as well. During middle school I was made fun of by my fellow females for actually running laps when we were supposed to at P.E. There was this weird unspoken social convention of walking if you could get away with it.
Anyone here think allowing women in combat would have made or will make a difference in the career choices of Chelsea Clinton, the Gore girls, the Bush girls, or the Obama girls?
Neither do I. The rich and powerful don't send their kids into combat. And nowadays being powerful means that you either are or eventually will be rich (see: Gore, Clinton, Rahm, etc.).
The day this policy is reversed will mark the day tens of millions of Americans wake up to the reality that much of Leftism is a crock of shit. I now hope we stay in Afghanistan for the rest of Obama's turn.
For high status women (Patsy Schroder deserves special mention here)it's like Mel Brooks' old line "What"s the difference between comedy and tragedy? Comedy is when you slip on a banana peel and break both your legs.Tragedy is when I get a paper cut" The difference between high status military women getting 1 star and two stars is a matter of grave national importance, on the other hand if stevie grunt lives or dies, meh whatever.
What happens WHEN not IF Iran gets the bomb?
That's always what it comes down to with whisqui. He is more interested in Israel than in the US. The wheels are coming off in the US. The demographics are not going our way, we've offshored our manufacturing, our budget is busted, and our policitcal discourse is dysfunctional. Yet to him Iran is the biggest threat.
The biggest threat to whom whisqui, to whom?
My biggest beef with the Buchanan Paleos (including Mencken, even though my late father loved the guy) is their unwillingness to concede human nature and the need to be eternally vigilant. If being rich is always better than being poor, so too is being strong better than being weak.
Balderdash. Your beef with them is quite simple. They do not sufficiently support Israel. Period. Buchanan and the paleos know that our strength starts at home. Which is why they were against open immigration and free trade. The neocons all supported those policies which are now destroying the US from within.
while i never mistook FOX News for being some beacon of deep philosophical conservatism, i was annoyed watching a video of their morning show interview with a woman against this change where the segment captions were "We Are Not All Created Equal!" and "Get over Equality"
honestly, the fact that something as moronic as this has to be discussed in a hyper-logical fashion, that natural gender distinctions and instincts can (and have to) be wired out of people, is pretty damn sad.
Tonight on this topic of women in combat a friend e-mailed me, and he asked: "If we were to storm Omaha Beach again would you want half of the soldiers to be women?" I replied:
"Yes. The enemy half."
Tune into FOX's 'Cops' program, watch how, when it comes to the need for height, weight, and brute strength to subdue belligerent suspects, the women officers are almost never in on such action - witness how the women officers hold back and let their massive, stronger male counterparts handle the rough stuff. Oh, yes, you'll see a woman officer join in a vigorous affray with a lone suspect, but only if there's at least one larger, stronger male officer doing most of the hard work of such a struggle."
Ive read in an Ann Coulter column some years ago a statistic where white female cops are mostly likely to discharge their weapon on a suspect as they panic easily and dont have the body strenghth/skill to subdue him.
Black male cops were least likely to fire.
All in all, women are very useful as detectives as they are more likely to delve deeper into motives and can read a suspects face like an open book better than man.Not a WHOLE lot better mind you as men can be trained to tell say when a suspect is laying(the direction where the eye moves etc) but women already have a running start when it comes to this stuff.
Its probably best they work with a beefy male partner who handle the rough stuff.
Anyone here think allowing women in combat would have made or will make a difference in the career choices of Chelsea Clinton, the Gore girls, the Bush girls, or the Obama girls?
Neither do I. The rich and powerful don't send their kids into combat. And nowadays being powerful means that you either are or eventually will be rich (see: Gore, Clinton, Rahm, etc.)."
When a societys elite does not see it fit for its own children to serve in wars which they cheer for, that society is in trouble.
To be fair, Sarah Palin,John McCain and Joe Bidens sons all served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think the last offspring of President who served in combat while was Ike's son in Korea.
Steve, would you consider correcting Whiskey's deliberate misspelling of Buchanan's name before you make his posts visible? Either that or refuse to approve any of his posts that contain this 'error', and announce that this is what you are doing. Whatever he's trying to achieve, maybe it's time to stop helping him.
I can understand the dispute over which mental attitudes and abilities are innate (if any), and which are biological (if any).
But how wilfully clueless does a person have to be to not see physical differences between the sexes? Women can't fight in combat. Full stop.
interesting to see what jim webb says about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb
considering he wrote this:
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/jim-webb-women-cant-fight/
maybe stuff like this is the reason he decided to retire. one of the few remaining good guy democrats who just plain had enough of obama and the cultural marxists.
"The Israelis had a bad experience with women in combat."
israel, which has a lot of real world experience with:
1) using walls to keep people out
2) using women in war
has examined the same issues as the US, and has gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
This kind of thing is like gay marriage: a symbolic war on the realities of biology.
What kind of man wants to see women in combat? What kind of society agrees to allow them to be there?
We live in marxist super state (the Euro-American elite). that's what most people don't 'get'.
Not just contemporary American soldiers who carry a lot. The Roman lefionary was once referred to as "Marius' mule" Marius being the guy who wrote the regulations on what they should be outfitted with.
Knights in armour and WW1 soldiers also both carried about 80 lbs as well. It seems to be the maximum you can still move with.
This may change as exoskeletons like the HULC suit become common and then turn inro Stoarship Trooper suits, which could allow women in combat. However
Heinlein did make all the troopers in that book male - and all the pilots female.
one thing which steve sometimes talks about is how the military "successfully" integrated africans.
well, sort of. in reality it had to lower the standards for them too. it wasn't a seamless transition. the US military established, and maintains, an extensive affirmative action program for africans. they are routinely promoted beyond their ability and rarely because they were putting in a good performance.
the problem is the africans are not that smart. sorry, but it's true. so if the military promoted by performance and ability, few africans would rise to the higher ranks. to keep morale high and racial tensions low, it artificially promotes them.
meanwhile, africans mainly choose support and logistical positions in the military. preferring to hang back at the base and stack boxes, cook the food, turn the wrenches, and do other jobs where they can avoid being shot at. of course this is not true of all of them but this is the overwhelming trend. mexicans and puerto ricans do a lot more of the actual fighting.
so the idea that the military seamlessly integrated africans who immediately became key cogs in the US army, navy, and airforce, is not really true. mostly what happened is the military ended up with a bunch of support people who were less capable. the euro american men who do most of the trigger pullling, combat flying, and so forth, are well aware of the general trends here.
with women it is even worse because all standards are deliberately lowered, even the physical ones. then they get to hang back at the base, do their support job, get pregnant if they don't feel like working anymore, and so on and so forth.
none of this is seamless. as usual, euro american men pick up the slack.
"The White House has appointed Sue Fulton to the Board of Visitors for the U. S. Military Academy, or West Point. Sue Fulton, who graduated in 1980, with the first West Point class to include women, went on become a founding member of OutServe, an association serving homosexual military personnel, and she is co-founder and director of Knights Out, an organization of homosexual West Point graduates. Dr. Janice Crouse discusses this appointment of the first openly homosexual to the Academy's board and its implications for the future of our military"
lol. served a few years in germany stacking boxes. now will tell guys like me that we're not wanted, and get ready for big changes at west point.
every day i think we can't get more insane and every day we do....
Lefty Med Student said:
>> legal marriage is whatever the law says it is.
At least you're being honest. Gay "marriage" is not a fight for "marriage equality" or "equal rights." It's a wholesale redefinition of marriage.
After all, gay men already have the right to marry women, just as straight men do. That's what marriage is.
But not many Americans would be on board for changing the definition of marriage. So leftist choose the route of arguing for "rights" and "equality" to push same-sex "marriage."
They know from the experience of blacks and women that therein lies the path to success.
Whenever a leftist waves the bloody shirt of "equal rights," the response ought to be "You don't want equality; you want a redefinition of marriage."
That's the essence of the gay "marriage" project, and the push wouldn't make much progress if its essence were known.
Whiskey said:
What happens when Iran gets the bomb....
Iran is not now, never has, and never will be a threat to the USA. It is only a possible threat to Israel and its hegemony across the middle east. If it were not for the 'Scots-Irish' lobby in this country like yourself, who rule us, this would worry America about as much as it does Mexico.
Israel has managed to survive actual wars with women in combat. It's a useful natural experiment - what percentage of Israeli infantry are women? What percentage of infantry casualties are women? Does the presence of women cause problems in combat? How does the Israeli military cope with whatever problems might occur?
What this is really about: increasing promotion opportunities for career female military personnel. Combat arms branches are bigger, and where there are more Indians there are more chiefs. This is true during peacetime as well.
It's telling that this decision has been announced after the US deployment in Iraq has ended and a year before the deployment in Afghanistan is scheduled to end -- and you can bet this won't be implemented before we pull out of Afghanistan. The Army and Marines will need time to "study" this, and to train up new "infantrywomen", etc.
Instead of fighting this, though, the GOP should do what I often recommend: let Dem voters eat their own dog food. Call for bringing back the draft -- and this time, make it coed.
As stated above the real reason behind this is to allow female officers who are generally of the "Queer" persuasion to get promotions that rae denied to them because women cant serve in combat roles.The Secretary of Stae is Hillary Clinton. Theres obviously a queer-ladies network operating in the Obama administration.Look at Homeland security. Their needs come before the needs of some low-level working class icky guy!!Fitting that we have women fighters,as we have a woman president!
Can you explain the necessity of conceiving a child on that desert island of yours?
"What this is really about: increasing promotion opportunities for career female military personnel."
correct.
except they'll try to get out of actual combat any way they can. heck, even the military will try to move them out of the path of direct combat once the shooting starts. then after the last bullet flies, they'll get the combat pay, and the "shot at the enemy and got shot at as well" thing on their resume, for later promotions.
a couple lesbians will clumsily load artillery shells 10 miles away from the enemy, or drive a tank in circles 5 miles out of front line action, or march in 2 hours after action with the mop up infantry wave, and that's about it. they'll be like the unathletic kids on the local youth sports team which has guaranteed participation. the coach will put them in the game with 2 minutes remaining and the game already decided, just to fulfill that participation promise and make sure there are no angry parents shouting "Why didn't Jimmy get to play?"
unfortunately i disagree with the special forces guys i see talking around the web today. the green berets, rangers, airborne, delta, and SEALs absolutely, positively will eventually lower their standards to allow a few women to make it through the qualification. the political pressure for there to be that "historic" first female whatever will be crushing, simply pulverizing. they will cave, eventually. it might take a few years but it will happen.
they aren't going to get a choice. if they don't allow that to happen they will be relieved, and replaced with a career minded officer who will allow it to happen. if robert gates had staunchly denied to cooperate with making the US military a homosexual military, he simply would have been replaced with somebody who would.
The baffling thing with the push for putting women in infantry combat is that the problem with it is so obvious--men are a whole lot bigger and stronger than women, so in jobs where that matters, women don't do all that well. This is observable to anyone who goes to a gym or watches any high school sports. It has no deeper moral significance than bigger and stronger people can carry more stuff and move faster with it than smaller and weaker people. Similar things apply to firemen, for the same reason--even a very strong, athletic woman can seldom lift as much as a reasonably fit, average man. That doesn't matter for being a doctor or pilot or chemist, but it matters a whole lot for being a firefighter or an infantryman.
I don't see the connection with gay marriage at all. That's an acknowledgement of reality--there are gay couples,and have been forever, and the question is how the law ought to deal with them, particularly with problems that arise when (say) they have kids together (lots of lesbian couples have kids) and then split up, or buy a house together and then one of them dies. Existing marriage law may not be a perfect fit for these situations, but it's probably not all thatfar off.
To Randomizer said...
I agree 100%. Gay marriage has nothing to do with "equality" or "civil rights". The gay community and their leftist, cultural Marxists enablers have been very clever in how they have falsely framed and presented the argument to the American sheeple.
Maybe the U.S. is running low on cannon fodder and needs more troops?
In the fall of 1944 the USA had over 11,000,000 men in its military deployed in Europe. But only 2,000,000 of these were in its 90 divisions at the front lines. And only 700,000 of these were combat soldiers or tank crews. The tail-tooth ratio wasn't even one in fifteen. The German and Soviet armies were almost exactly the opposite in structure.
"The baffling thing with the push for putting women in infantry combat is that the problem with it is so obvious"
you would find the plight of forest services instructive:
"Despite the extra physical drilling the agency granted the new hires, Shaw’s bull** detector went off immediately. He instinctively knew that very few of them would develop the strength and stamina necessary to haul a fifty-foot length of fire hose up a slope. For the next several years it became routine for him to order his female crew members back down the hill to stand by, while he and his two firemen held off the blaze until one or more other engine units arrived."
http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2012/06/how-feminism-wrecked-the-u-s-forest-service/
methinks it's high time we had testosterone equality
"The baffling thing with the push for putting women in infantry combat is that the problem with it is so obvious--men are a whole lot bigger and stronger than women, so in jobs where that matters, women don't do all that well. This is observable to anyone who goes to a gym or watches any high school sports."
Unfortunately, the fact that something is observable doesn't mean that people always allow themselves to observe it.
@Steve Sailer
"This kind of thing is like gay marriage: a symbolic war on the realities of biology."
It has nothing to do with biology!
The problem is that you are a conservative, and you have the view that marriage is a contract between a man and a woman for the rearing of small children. That is, marriage to you is about the formation of families, which you see as the building block of "Society".
But that is not how I see marriage. I see it as na union between two people who love each other and want to join their lives. Anf it makes no difference whether they arer of opposites sexes or the same sex.
You fear that gay marriage will rsult in the collapse of the institution of marriage, which will result in lots of out-of-wedlock births and the colapse of Society. This fear is irrational.
First, there is no evidence that straight people will stop getting married if gays are alowed to get married. Secondly, parents are LEGALLY bound to support their kids until they are 18, so even if grating gays the right to get married would lead to more out-of-wedlock births, the kids would still be taken care of. Also, tere is no evidence that kids need to be reared by a man and a woman to grow up to be moral. My parentes divorced when I was 5, and I grew up to be successful and ethical. There are individuals raised in whole famlies who grow up to be serial killers.
Conservatives cannot be rational when it comes to the issue of marriage. Just because marriage has remained unchaged since the late Paleolithic era or at least since the early Neolithic era does not mean that changing it's definition would have terrible consequences.
Marriage to me is about LOVE between INDIVIDUALS and not a legal chains between a man and a woman to ensure that children will get taken care of. People who have kids should be legally bound to support them anyway. Denying gays the same RESPECT that is given to heterosexuals based on irational fears is stupid.
Can you explain the necessity of conceiving a child on that desert island of yours?
Ever notice how many leftards totally miss the utility of analogies and hypotheticals and other abstract constructs, and feel compelled to announce the fact?
Nick, the fundamental problem is that we don't want to live the way you want to live, under the rules that you want.
Obviously the reverse is true, as well, but if you're like most of your ilk, there is one fundamental difference: you want to force us to live your way, and won't abide us leaving, whereas the reverse is not true; we'd rather go our own way, and have you do the same.
That's the problem with your ilk; you're control freaks who can't abide white people separating themselves from you, so eventually you're going to force a nasty confrontation.
Eventually we're going to have to force "live and let live" on your kind. It's inevitable.
It isn't about "homosexual marriage," or the obvious fact that marriage is and always has been a contract between a man and a woman.
It's about your ilk's inability to recognize anyone else's right to decide matters for themselves.
The IDF only has 16,000 infantrymen on active conscript service at any given moment.
There is ONE infantry battalion ("Karakal", which is a medium-sized feral cat in which the female and the male are very similarly built) that has significant (80%) female members.
The physical/mental medical profile required to get into Karakal is 15% lower than to get into a normal infantry battalion.
The original thinking of the brass was that they didn't want anything like Karakal. They got over-ruled.
In real life, there has turned out to be enough billets for alert, but not-highly-capable, border guarders, to keep Karakal employed.
In real life, when the border of Egypt started to get nasty (as in real dirty hand-to-hand encounters with Gazan & Jihadi armed-to-the-teeth infiltrators) some months ago, they pulled Karakal out of the front and sent in the Golani brigade. Karakal units are still there a few hundred meters back, as a re-inforcement force.
In Israel, you get better current benefits (eg: free public transportation, easier access to weapons permits [= later job as a armed guard]) and better veteran's preferences if you hold an ID from a combatant's unit. Women want those benefits as much as men do. It is not a freebie: the Karakal girls have to sign on for an additional 1 year of active-obligated-conscript service than their desk-worker ("jobnik") sisters.
(lots of lesbian couples have kids) and then split up
200% more than their non-lesbian Danish sisters.
Post a Comment