Occupy a Moslem country, put women in combat

Bush has said he opposes any re-organization of the Army that would result in abandoning the so-called “collocation” rule, which prohibits sexually integrated support units from being combined with all-male combat battalions. But the Army apparently has not given up on the idea. According to the Washington Times:

One argument inside the Army for discarding the “collocation” rule, despite the president’s opposition, is that in Iraq women are already closer to combat than in any previous war. Battle lines have merged and every unit, whether front-line combat or rear-line support, is targeted by Iraqi insurgents. More than 25 women soldiers have been killed in action in Iraq.

Here’s the internal logic of what is happening here: (a) Women are barred from serving in ground combat units. (b) If we put the U.S. Army in a country where there is a terrorist guerrilla movement that targets all our troops, then all our units, including support units with women, will be under fire, not just the all-male combat units. (c) Since women are already under fire, the rules against women serving in combat units are moot and should be dropped.

It’s known that war leads to social revolutions, but this is a revolution that no one could have anticipated in advance: that if we send our Army into a foreign war against mass murdering Arab terrorists, then, because of the very savagery of our opponents who kill all people without distinctions of sex, we will ultimately conclude that we also should drop any remaining distinctions of sex, and so put women in combat.

But still, those Army planners couldn’t have come to such a perverse conclusion without their prior agenda of advancing the integration of women in the military. For one thing, the existing rules already place women in a dangerous theater such as Iraq, and sometimes in close promixity to combat battalions, neither of which a civilized country would ever do (unless driven by absolute military necessity). The presence of women in the general theater and in support units—both facts resulting from the feminist agenda—makes female casualties inevitable and also creates bureaucratic pressures to drop what now seem like artificial distinctions between all-male units and integrated support units. Nevertheless, the death of women in combat is an atrocity to be avoided, not an experiment to be normalized. The fact that 25 female soldiers have been killed in Iraq does not logically lead to the conclusion that we should place women more in danger than they already are. Only a soulless ideologue committed to the feminization of the army would conclude that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 13, 2005 02:12 PM | Send