As the battle over women in military combat roles heats up to a pink fever, we are beginning to see the first signs of our government’s attempts to include women in combat without, of course, actually including women in combat.
You did know that was coming, didn’t you?
It was as inevitable as Leon Panetta strutting over his false proclamation that “”If members of our military can meet the qualifications for a job — and let me be clear, we are not reducing qualifications — then they should have the right to serve.”
It was a statement with all the sincerity of, “I did not have sex with that woman.”
First, and let me be clear, qualifications were reduced a long time ago. In fact, qualifications for women in the military have never been anything like equal. I served in the early to mid-1970s, and have vivid memories of watching women do push-ups with their knees resting on the ground and walking past the chin up bars, which most of them could not jump high enough to reach, as though they could not see them.
It’s pretty much the same today. In the Army, a perfect score on a PT test means men between the ages of 22 and 26 must complete 75 push-ups and a two-mile run in less than 13 minutes along with 80 sit-ups, while women of the same age must complete 46 push-ups, run two miles in less than 15 minutes and 36 seconds and complete 80 sit-ups. The minimum number of pushups for men is 39, for women it is 17, or less than half.
The different expectation in upper body strength, something that might be rather important in something like, say, combat, is the problem. And it is one that feminists and the politicians trying to please them are making haste to avoid or talk around as much as possible.
Politicians are bound to Obama’s vote-mongering sales pitch that “Women can do anything men can do, and do it better, and do it in heels,” even if it means pretending that the average female soldier can throw a 200 lb. wounded comrade across her shoulder and hike two miles back to base camp in camouflage stilettos.
That brings us to problem number one for this nightmare policy in the making. Women, on average, cannot be expected to meet the same physical demands as men. The Pentagon knows this, which is why they have always had different physical standards for women, and why they have been kept out of combat as much as possible. It is because of the completely rational concern that their failure to keep up with their peers will get people killed.
Still, here we are, pretending to prepare for lifting all bans and restrictions. A new and improved level of bullshit will be required. As if Obama himself were holding the cue cards, a December report from the Congressional Research Service provides the language.
[box icon=””]The use of the term “gender-neutral physical standards” raises questions depending on how it is defined. A plain reading of the term suggests that men and women would be required to meet the same physical standards in order to be similarly assigned. However, in the past, the Services have used this and similar terms to suggest that men and women must exert the same amount of energy in a particular task, regardless of the work that is actually accomplished by either. Hypothetically speaking, if a female soldier carries 70 pounds of equipment five miles and exerts the same effort as a male carrying 100 pounds of equipment the same distance, the differing standards could be viewed as ‘gender-neutral’ because both exerted the same amount of effort, with differing loads.[/box]
Yes, of course. And hypothetically speaking, a weaker person exerts the same amount of energy carrying less weight as a stronger person exerts carrying more weight. Thank Jesus and feminist governance our leaders have figured out a way to set gender-neutral different standards for men and women based on sex, in order to establish equality in the military.
What genius.
In all seriousness, there are two fundamental solutions here. One, any lifting of bans, or even the imaginary lifting of bans, needs to be accompanied by the lifting of the double standards in physical readiness between men and women in the military.
Should women be allowed to fight? Yes, they should. Absolutely, if they fully qualify to keep up with their male peers. If they want to dodge bullets for oil companies in order to have a better chance at promotions down the road, no one should get in their way.
I will also add a message to those who worry that male soldiers won’t be able to help themselves from taking stupid risks to hover over their female counterparts: Just shut it. If they can’t accept military training and do their job, it is no one’s fault but their own.
However, should women be allowed to get their fellow soldiers killed so President Obama can fulfill back room promises to gender ideologues? Not so much, I’m thinking.
The only other possible solution is segregated units. It is the only rational answer for those soldiers hypothetically exerting just as much energy to get less done than the soldier next to them, whoever they may be.
I think I have a better solution, though; one that will allow all of us to put this in its proper perspective.
Just relax. Very little is actually going to change.
As the Defense Department and every politician within a mile of a microphone has been incessantly spouting since Panetta’s “decision,” the battlefield in this conflict is a markedly different one from wars past. Women are already there fighting and dying…in numbers somewhat akin to short white guys in the NBA.
That is not to dismiss or demean the sacrifices of individual soldiers, but the fairy tale we have been sold — that the women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow representative of women’s equal participation in combat — is a very, very bad joke. It is insulting to male soldiers who do almost all the dying, and to the women who have given their lives. Watching politicians and feminists glom on to those deaths, as though they were a part of some grand cause célèbre, makes me want to vomit every time I hear it. Enough already.
When the bans that they actually lift are completed, those numbers won’t change much. As soldiers returning from Afghanistan already report, when a woman and a man go missing in the field, the woman will get priority.
Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, reported that Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told him the policy change would not have much of an effect on the sexual make-up of military units.
I do not believe this will be a broad opening of combat roles for women, because as [a] 2012 report indicated, there are ‘serious practical barriers which must be resolved so that the department can maximize the safety and privacy of all military members while maintaining military readiness.
That is political speak for “We haven’t yet, for the sake of equality, figured out what colors the roadside potty stands for the women are going to be.”
No matter what the Pentagon or our president tells you, for the most part women in the military will walk past the brunt of combat hardships like they were chin-up bars. Men will continue to do the lion’s share of the dying, and before it is over Hana Rosin will write a book about how women survive combat at higher numbers because they are better, smarter soldiers.
Of course, under that is the fact that number of military women who can meet the same exact physical standards demanded of men in combat is statistically insignificant. Be as pissed off as you want to, but you can’t prove me wrong.
One last thing we might want to consider in this fetid mass of stinking political tomfoolery is that for women, this is still a game of pick and choose. Or as one soldier from Corpus Christy, Texas recently commented on a local news website there:
The Pentagon is now going to “allow” women to serve in combat jobs. Apparently this is Obama’s payoff to the radical feminists who voted for him. But if they truly want equality, then women should be “required” to serve in those jobs, same as the men.
You didn’t think all of those men in the infantry, combat engineers, artillery, etc. volunteered for those jobs? Some did but for most, that was the only choice they were given when they enlisted. And, if they failed to meet the standards for those military specialties, they were discharged. If women are “allowed” to serve in those specialties and they fail to meet the standards, they are not discharged, [they are] simply given another job or sent back to their old job.
So, give women total equality, “require” them to take those jobs, without lowering the standards. And don’t allow the government to cover-up the aftermath — let the chips fall where they may.
But of course, as we all know, the chips never fall where they may when the deck is stacked and the dealer is on the take.
God Bless America.
