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A lot of lib's pet projects have never gone away - they just been hibernating, and if Hillary is elected, they'll all rise from the dead. One is women in combat in the military. Succinct comment on this from Robert Bork's 1995 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.
[When women are integrated into service academies] The inevitable result is that training standards are lowered, and then the facts are then ferociously denied. Also, David Horowitz offers specifics: “Gender norming” is now the rule—women are measured against other women, rather than against men who outperform them. Even though West Point officially says there have been no negative effects from the admission of women, the sworn courtroom testimony of a West Point official says that women cannot perform nearly as well as men and that the men’s training program has, for that reason, been downgraded. For example, men are no longer required to run carrying heavy weapons because women are unable to do that. Even if a man is willing to lead women in combat, even the thought that it might not be suitable is sufficient to end your career. This happened with Lt. Commander Kenneth Carkhuff who was recommended for early promotion due to his “unlimited potential … destined for command and beyond,” but after a private conversation with his superior officer that his religious views made him doubtful about putting women in combat, though those views also required him to lead women into combat if ordered to by his superiors, he was discharged. Due to such threats as the above, career officers do not speak about the performance of women in combat positions, because to do so puts them at great risk of discharge—especially if they mention anything regarding women not performing as well as the men. This is an extremely dangerous policy and will result in the loss of lives and possibly wars. In physical fitness tests, very few women could do even one pull-up, so the Air Force Academy gave credit for the amount of time they could hang on the bar. Female cadets averaged almost four times as many visits to the medical clinic as male cadets. At West Point, the female cadets’ injury rate in field training was fourteen times that of men, and 61 percent of women failed the complete physical test, compared to 4.8 percent of men. During Army basic training, women broke down in tears, particularly on the rifle range. The pregnancy problem. Navy ships have had to be recalled from missions because of the pregnancy of female sailors. A male and a female sailor on the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, both married to others, videotaped themselves having sex in a remote part of the ship. There had been thirty-eight pregnancies since the crew went aboard the Eisenhower, fourteen of them after the ship was deployed. Only someone who has never been with troops could not anticipate this result or fail to realize that it will be a major problem forever. The troops in question are very young, at an age when their hormones are, to put it mildly, fiercely insistent. Effects on morale can be particularly adverse. The presence of women among male troops weakens combat readiness. All-male units in the field experience bonding that enhances unit cohesion and effectiveness. When women are introduced, men stop relating to each other and begin trying to attract the women. Men can quickly become on less-than-friendly terms with a mini-war over a woman. Nor can morale be improved when accusations of harassment are always a threat. An accusation of sexual harassment by the woman, even if unproven, would severally damage the man’s service career, and both the man and the woman are acutely aware of the fact. The Israelis, Soviets, and Germans, when in desperate need of front-line troops, placed women in combat, but later barred them. Male troops forgot their tactical objectives in order to protect the women from harm of capture, knowing what the enemy would do to the female prisoners of war. This made combat units less effective and exposed the men to even greater risks. Our military seems quite aware of such dangers, but, because of the feminists, it would be politically dangerous to respond as the Israelis did by taking women out of harm’s way. Instead, the American solution is to try to stifle the natural reactions of men. The Air Force, for example, established a mock prisoner of war camp to desensitize male recruits so they won’t react like men when women prisoners scream under torture. There is a considerable anomaly here. The military is training men to be more sensitive to women in order to prevent sexual harassment and also training men to be insensitive to women being raped and sodomized or screaming under torture. ( Therefore, it is clear that mindless feminist ideology is inflicting enormous damage on the readiness and fighting capability of the armed forces of the United States. Every other career is open to women. There is no reason why access to combat roles, for which they are not suited, has to be open as well. But political intimidation by radical feminists is so powerful that there seems little prospect that the continuing feminization of the U.S. military can be reversed. At least not until some engagements are lost, or won at unacceptably high costs, and women and the men who tried to protect them being coming back in great numbers in body bags. |
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Not entirely true, Java. While the Army still bars women from the pure combat units -- infantry, armor -- they have been edging closer and closer. They now can serve in combat support units like artillery, for instance. And on a ship, of course, everything is a combat role. And in certain special cases, women can serve in purely combat positions. For instance, there are female fighter pilots as well as women piloting attack helicopters.
As for Blade's claims based on a 1995 polemic, all I can say is that when I was in the military, men's training wasn't ever relaxed because women had trouble meeting the requirements. Even in ROTC. When you did patrol training, someone had to carry the M60 -- whether you were walking, running or crawling. The physical requirements for a given MOS should be the same for men and women. But the requirements themselves should be examined to ensure they accurately reflect the demands of the MOS. Rear-area troops should be able to fire a rifle accurately and know basic infantry tactics in case they need to defend themselves. But they don't need to be able to haul mortars or march 20 miles with a full ruck.
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Without knowing the source of Bork's claim, how about "the Air Force Academy isn't the military"? Or "It's not 1995"? For example, pullups aren't even part of the military's physical fitness requirements. I don't know if they ever were.
As well, in ROTC (or service academies) you have to pass a fitness test in order to join, but cadets aren't expected to pass the active-duty standards right away. When I was in ROTC, they expected you to be able to pass by your junior year -- in other words, long before you actually entered active service. Here's what the Army requires of its soldiers. The other services have similar requirements: http://www.usarec.army.mil/hq/apa/rc/apft.htm A 21-year-old male must do 35 pushups in two minutes, 47 situps in two minutes and run two miles in 16:36 to pass. A 21-year-old female must do 13 pushups in two minutes, 47 situps in two minutes and run two miles in 17:30. There are also weight standards: http://www.usarec.army.mil/hq/apa/rc/weight.htm Those are *minimum* standards. There are plenty of incentives to exceed them. Failure to meet the minimum standards can result in restrictions, dietary and exercise requirements and, if they remain uncorrected, discharge. It also harms your career.
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Funny story about the APFT: In ROTC, one of our female cadets had real problems with the pushup portion of the test. Not because she was a weakling, but because she was so chesty that she had great difficulty getting low enough to "break the plane" with her arms and have a given pushup count. She'd usually just barely pass that part -- but she'd break you over her leg if you teased her about it.
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http://www.cmrlink.org/
This is an organization run by Elaine Donnelly. She knows this subject cold, her site is loaded with facts. |
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