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I had never read Ralph Peters and had never heard of him before Mr. Auster’s link. A superbly written column. I thank Mr. Auster for posting it.

After reading it, and digesting it, I am feeling the “anti-war” in me minimized for the pro-war side. It created some androgeny within me that I am not at all comfortable with. Perhaps I am not as “anti-war” as I thought I was.

The last sentence is a puzzler.

“Our men and women in uniform are dying for us each day. The least we can do is to make sure there’s enough of them.”

More cannon fodder, is that what Peters is calling for?

And Peters is obviously Pollyanish. I spent five years active (including time on the ground in Bosnia, the place to be while I was in), and I will tell you that the military reflects our society pretty closely, except that things go to extremes. I saw far more promiscuity doing my training and during deployments than I had seen at college, for example.

The integration of women in the armed services is a tremendous disgrace on our country. But no one opposes it anymore, or even imagines opposing it. It’s completely accepted. Not only the sexual fraternization in the ranks which is bad enough, but the fact that we are putting women in combat areas. I’d say about one in ten of the U.S. dead in Iraq whose names Koppel read on Nightline this week were women. We’re putting women where they they can be bombed, shot with rocket propelled grenades, and we’re proud of this, or we take it for granted. This is a great judgment over our country.

Also, when we remember that the number of seriously wounded in proportion to dead is very high in Iraq, we’re talking about a lot of young women who have lost arms and legs. And we’re delilberately putting them in a place where this can happen to them. I have no words to describe how wrong this is. I’ve been saying this for years. But no one cares. The most that “conservatives” say is that they’re against putting women in combat units. But putting women in units where they’re near combat is bad enough, and we’re _already_ doing that, but the conservatives don’t oppose that.

I heard that Bush initially interviewed Dan Coates for Secretary of Defense, and that Coates said he wanted to roll back the feminization of the military, and Bush didn’t like that, so he chose Rumsfeld. Don’t know if it’s true, but I read it.

And I’ll say this. If we as a country could do something so sick and anti-natural as to integrate women in the military and place women in combat areas and to view female military casualties as a normal thing, then we’re capable of _anything_, including the institution of homosexual marriage. It will go through in Massachusetts, it will go through elsewhere, and it will be accepted, and life will go on. And our country will have gone further into some awful soullessness and be deserving of some terrible judgment, but no one will care, it will all seem “normal” because the sky has not literally fallen on us.

As a friend said to me once, “Life goes on, but that doesn’t mean our culture hasn’t been destroyed.”

Let me second Mr. Auster’s cri-de-coeur above, and say that he is not alone. I spent a long time in the armed forces (four years as a Marine infantry officer, eleven actively as an Air Force Reserve fighter pilot - including combat time over Bosnia; I still hold a reserve AF commission although I am totally inactive right now). At every opportunity that presents itself, short of becoming the village bore, I inveigh against using women in the armed forces, and not only in combat roles. In retrospect, once the enormous symbolic barrier of allowing women into the service academies was breached (by the useful idiot Gerald Ford in 1975, although Richard Nixon had had no objections; the first coeds appeared at the academies in the summer of 1976: what a Bicentennial gift for the services!) uniformed women were on the straight road to combat assignments.

The evils are many. There is the degradation of readiness and combat power that results from artificially integrated units. Such units only achieve some degree of cohesion and esprit de corps by accommodating women’s sensitivities. These bowdlerized units will never be as effective as they could be as all-male units.

An example is the hapless motor transport unit that included the now-legendary Pfc. Lynch. In contrast, the Battle of the Bulge offers several examples of rear-echelon Army units that were forced to fight as infantry. They didn’t perform like elite riflemen, but they knew how to fight. I doubt our support units in Iraq do, which rather belies Ralph Peters’ claim that our troops today are the best we have ever had. Feminism (and affirmative action) has softened our forces and our servicemen, even in the infantry units from which women are still nominally excluded; PC pervades the armed forces. If I were forced into a tight spot and given the choice of taking with me a Marine rifle company from 1968 or one from 2004, I would not hesitate to take the Marines of ‘68.

The practical result is the worst of both worlds: men who are not as manly as they should be for their military duties, women who are coarsened by exposure to military ways, and senior officers and NCOs who do not resist feminization because of the risk to their careers. (Exhibit A is the interogatress in Iraq pointing and laughing at the naked Arab’s gonads. Exhibit B is Brigadier General Janis Karpinski.)

Ultimately it turns on the difference between men and women. It is not wrong to ask men leave home and family to fight in the legitimate defense of their nation (set aside my reservations about whether the Iraq invasion and occupation qualify). It is entirely wrong to disrupt any nation’s fabric by asking, or even allowing, women to do the same thing. Combat is never pleasant, never a good in itself, but at times it can ennoble men who fight in a just cause. It is very hard for me to see how combat can be ennobling for women (fictional characters such as Tolkien’s Eowyn notwithstanding).

I posted the comment above when I meant to preview it. A few more thoughts:

It will not do to blame the ongoing degradation of the armed forces entirely on the Clinton administration, bad though it was about matters military. To greater and lesser degree, presidents have allowed the armed forces to be used as a social rat lab at least since World War II. The trend grew markedly worse under President Johnson, and the social decline has been marked since, except for (an ultimately illusory) revival during the Reagan years. The services already endure sexual and racial social engineering at the cost of readiness. Now President Bush, who has done nothing to reverse the disasters of the Clinton years, is using the armed forces as a quickie citizenship program for foreigners, including illegal aliens. Since the new mercenaries are almost all of preferred racial groups, they will only exacerbate affirmative action at the expense of white Americans (they will probably be preferred over native non-whites as well!). Our armed forces will get worse before they get better. We must hope they are not called upon to fight anyone more competent than Arabs until an administration that is serious about defense has had a chance to restore the services’ military culture. Men fight, not machines. It is the people and their culture that matter, far more than their weapons.

Unfortunately, when the military comes up among friends and acquaintances where we live (few of whom are veterans, most of whom are Republicans and almost all of whom are church-going), most find my reservations hard to understand. On one level they vaguely appreciate what a revolution putting women in combat is (curiously, most have heard and believe the lie that the Israelis conscript women for combat roles). On another, they vaguely think it is only fair to let women fly fighter planes, sail warships… To them, more women in the military isn’t very different from having more lady doctors and lawyers. No problem. Very depressing.

Peters’ column was disappointing. He was a very incisive critic when he was on active duty. Being in the pay of the warmongering New York Post seems to have dulled his critical faculties. HRS

I have run into the same thing Mr. Sutherland has among certain of my friends. I tell them that women in combat is insanity. They think I have made the most ridiculous statement they have ever heard.

One man says, “These women basketball players could whip a lot of men.” I reply that a men’s basketball team would slaughter a women’s team. He wouldn’t hear of it, and kept using the example of female athletes as a reason that women could function as combat soldiers. When I engage in debates on this subject with my liberal friends, they laugh constantly. Next time I see him, I’ll ask if women being KIA is funny.

Finally, I too would take a company of the 1968 Marines at Khe Sanh and Hue over a 2004 company in a tight spot. Our feminized military hasn’t yet fought a ferocious,un-feminized, well-equipped enemy. Perhaps our leaders don’t think we will have to. Mr. Cheney, by the way, when GHWB’s Defense Secretary was as big a proponent of feminization as anyone has been.

The horrifying callousness and moral blindness shown by Mr. Sutherland’s and David’s acquaintances are the pure and perfect end result of the American ideology, the reduction of all humanity to an “equal” nexus of preferences and rights. Their indifference to the horror of putting women in combat situations, and their indifference to the suicidal threat of allowing cultural aliens to enter our country en masse, are two expressions of a single idea.

The substanial numbers of women killed in the current war, along with the complete lack of outrage on the part of the stupefied electorate, have removed any practical barrier for women to bu fully included in front-line combat units. I’m sure this was the plan all along, of course.

I’m also struck by the continued acceptance of the myth of women being included in Israeli combat units. As I understand it, it was an experiment that was quickly abandoned when it proved to be an utter failure.Three decades of controlling the public schools have enabled the left to implement their agenda in a way that the Marxist revolutionaries of earlier decades only dreamed of. Note the continued lack of action on the gay marriage issue, and the continued lack of action against the lawless officials who performed such “marriages” a few months ago.

The Israelis have conscripted women, but historically they did so for support units only, expressly to make men available for line units in an Israel Defence Force that has a small population to draw on. That part of the “Israelis draft women…” story gets left out of the feminista arguments. I think, after a court decision of course, that the Israel Air Force has been compelled to let women into pilot training. Stupid beyond belief, but in a country founded and run by secularist Jewish socialists, I suppose political folly is only to be expected. HRS

I would like to thank Lawrence Auster and Howard Sutherland for expressing my thoughts and feelings about this madness far better than I could!
I regret to have to say that for a short time early in the 1948 war, the Israelis did use women in front-line combat, but quickly ceased doing so. The supposed justification for this was that it was “discovered” that Arabs would not surrender to women soldiers, but Israelis have told me that this is just an excuse,that the real reason was that the Israeli men were disgusted and just couldn’t take it. The recent resumption of trends in the same direction is undoubtedly due to the influence of the insanity common in other Western democracies; Israel, unfortunately, is not completely immune to such things, though I think that in some respects its people may have retained their morale and sanity a bit better than the rest..