Conservatives’ acceptance of women in the armed forces

(Note: due to computer and human error there were two versions of this entry posted, with different comments. I think I have now put all the comments into this post.)

Clark Coleman writes:

The attached e-mail from the Family Research Council is the first time in a long while that I have seen mainstream conservatives tackle the issue of women in combat. The neocons want to ignore it, as they do all tough social issues these days, so it is nice to see someone mention it, anyway.

May 12, 2008
No Sign of Retreat on Women in Combat
By Tony Perkins, Family Research Council

While many families were celebrating Mother’s Day with their loved ones yesterday, thousands of women were miles away from home, serving their country on active duty. While the life of any deployed soldier is tough, the growing number of female recruits means even greater sacrifices on the home front, as many cope with long tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The physical demands are high, and it appears that the chance of being put in combat situations is even higher. In 1994, the Clinton-era Defense Department scrapped a rule that protected women from being assigned to front-line positions. By law of Congress, women are supposedly still protected from being assigned to combat roles. Unfortunately, the law protecting female soldiers has gradually been chipped away by Pentagon bureaucrats who are engaging in social experiments on a massive scale. As an editorial in USA Today suggests, the reality of the risks women are facing in Iraq does not match the restrictive policy in the law. Unfortunately, the paper wants to scrap the law rather than reform the reality. This exposes women to unacceptable dangers. As our friend Allan Carlson has said, “We’ve let an ideological drive to achieve perfect equality get in the way of common sense. No other nation has ever put so many women in or near combat, and children are paying the price.” Women have historically played a vital role in America’s military, and they should continue to serve where appropriate—but not in combat. We encourage the Bush administration to revise these guidelines to better protect our nation’s daughters, wives, and mothers.

LA replies:

Yes, given the absence of any debate at all, Perkins’s newsletter at least shows that the mainstream conservatives aren’t completely dead. But what else does it show? What does Perkins’s position add up to? Ending the present policy of putting women in near-combat situations that often turn into real combat situations, and preventing any change that would put women in actual combat units. That would leave the system where it was in the mid 1990s, with women integrated in the service academies, in basic training, and in every military unit other than combat or near-combat units; with women serving as fighter pilots; with grotesque female “generals,” including “Brigadier General” Janis Karpinski (see her photo) who was the commander of the Abu Ghraib prison (the Coalition commander Gen. Sanchez knew she was not up to the job, but he left her there any way because she was a woman); with women serving on Navy ships which are floating “meet markets” and factories of out-of-wedlock births whose care and upbringing then becomes the responsibility of the military; and with, as I’ve put it before, the obscenity of diminutive, pretty females standing and marching in formation next to men, something so inappropriate, so unnatural for the women, and so humiliating to the men—who are supposedly being trained as soldiers—that I don’t know how anyone could stand it for a second. Yet all of America now regards this as normal, and no one questions it. It is as powerful an example as I could imagine of what I call the radical mainstream, meaning that the American elite and ordinary, regular Americans treat the inconceivably radical and extreme as normal and acceptable. Another word for it is Kafkaesque.

In any case, FRC is simply taking the standard, weak conservative position we’ve been hearing forever, which fails to challenge the principle of the current system.

The only meaningful conservative position would be to demand the complete end of the integration of women in regular military units—the system that came into existence back in the 1970s.

- end of initial entry -

Howard Sutherland writes:

It is good to see mainstream think-tankers notice this social atrocity. They have been studiously ignoring it ever since September 11, 2001, at least.

But you are right, the FRC won’t propose anything serious to end it. Instead, Tony Perkins (thought he was in the movies) rolls out the standard liberal boilerplate about the invaluable contribution the gals have made to defending us: “Women have historically played a vital role in America’s military, and they should continue to serve where appropriate—but not in combat.” I agree with “not in combat,” but that’s just about all.

The only vital role I can think of that women have played in America’s military is as nurses, where many have served heroically doing something women are inherently better at than men. If the U.S. armed forces’ commitments were re-aligned with reality and the American national interest, there would be no need to ask any women to serve—and I question whether there really is any need to do so, even under this demented commander-in-chief and his proliferation of extraneous overseas commitments, other than as nurses in hospitals.

The Army has abused the combat proximity rules to edge women into ground combat. I think the Army, which is as institutionally PC as the rest of the federal government, is doing it deliberately to create facts-on-the-ground to use as propaganda for forcing an end to all combat exclusions. The only way to rein in politically liberalized generals is to forbid the Army to assign women to units that deploy to the field, period. Another argument, in fact, for employing women in the military only as nurses in hospitals. The Air Force and Navy gave up as soon as Clinton became president, and now there are token women in flying squadrons and more than token women aboard warships (although I think submarines are still immune, for the moment).

The only way we will end this problem is to end the service of women as uniformed military members, except for nurses in hospitals (and maybe even there; perhaps civilian nurses could do the job—I don’t know). That would require two things.

First, American military commitments would need to be confined to those that are necessary in our national interest. I think defending America, as opposed to everybody in NATO, South Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq … , could be done with a far smaller force with its center of gravity on the Mexican border, not in the Middle East.

Second, Americans would need to recover a sufficiently traditional sense of social order to regain the instinctive abhorrence our ancestors would have had for a society that is comfortable sending its women to fight its wars.

The first idea has some support in American politics. As far as I can tell the second has none whatever. That is our real problem.

M. Jose writes:

And it doesn’t help at all that our military is so overstretched—it’s likely that in a lot of cases women are taking over men’s work because there is a shortage of men to do the job. Not that you are wrong about the problems with the “equality” drive, but we have also created a reality where we cannot afford to lose any soldiers or to restrict their duties, which is not a good thing.

Mark Jaws writes:

I am actually going to surprise you and promote the use of women in the Army, an institution I served for 20 years.

First, as a retired intelligence officer, I can honestly say that women do indeed contribute immensely to our intelligence effort, particularly as translators and voice intercept operators. Second, as a graduate of Officer Candidate School, I met a few women who could run 2 miles in under 12 minutes, do 90 pushups within 2 minutes, and had sufficient upper body strength to do good pull-ups. They are few and far between, but they exist. Third, with training women can shoot just as well as men can. And finally, contrary to what is being said here, women are not serving in front line, combat units in Iraq, but rather in mostly combat support (e.g., intelligence) or combat service support units such as ordnance, quartermaster, and administration. The so-called “War in Iraq” is not a war, but rather a peacekeeping operation, and as such, every soldier is a target, particularly while riding in convoys. That is where women are becoming casualties. They are not serving in infantry units, which go on patrol and kick down doors to nab bad guys.

LA replies:

First, the only useful function performed by women that Mark Jaws has pointed to is translators and voice intercept operators, and that kind of job does not require that the women be integrated in regular military units. I imagine that the WACS and WAVES did things like that too.

Second, I did not say they are serving in combat units, but in situations where inevitably they often find themselves in combat.

(Note: I thought I had posted a reply making these points to Mark this morning, along with some other comments, but they have disappeared, and I had to re-draft my comment. Gremlins in my computer?)

Howard Sutherland writes:

Mark Jaws says that in his Army service he

“met a few women who could run two miles in under 12 minutes, do 90 pushups within two minutes, and had sufficient upper body strength to do good pull-ups. They are few and far between, but they exist. Third, with training women can shoot just as well as men can.”

I don’t doubt it, but the fact that some few and far between women have good upper-body strength and some can be trained to shoot is beside the point of this discussion. I have a lady cousin in Texas who is a dead shot with a shotgun and a rifle—an accomplished hunter. (Harry Whittington would have been far safer with her by his side than Dick Cheney. Actually Harry has hunted with her many times, and has no scars to show for it.) But that says nothing about her inherent military abilities. She has none and wants none, as she would be the first to tell you.

Even if all the women in the armed forces were fully as physically fit as the men, and just as good marksmen on average as men (very far from being the truth, as Mr. Jaws says), their presence is detrimental to the camaraderie and intensity any combat unit needs to be effective. Moral concerns aside, women’s mere presence is an unnecessary distraction from the mission and unit cohesion.

Technically it is true that women in Iraq are not assigned to combat units. In the Marine Corps, and I suspect the Army is much the same, the only units actually called “combat” are infantry units. Women aren’t assigned to the infantry in either service—yet. But in the Army they are assigned to artillery units, for example, as well as engineers, logistical and other support units. Artillery, even though it directly engages the enemy with deadly force, is classified as “combat support,” as is aviation. So there is definitional sleight-of-hand here. My understanding of the surviving combat exclusions is that the Army is supposed to deploy women in such a way as to minimize the risk of their being exposed to direct combat. As Mr. Jaws says, that’s difficult to do under present circumstances in Iraq—as long as we insist on deploying women there in the first place. I think those pushing for greater “gender integration” in the Army are well aware of that and want women to be drawn into combat situations so they can present that to Congress as the new “reality” we must just adapt to by eliminating what few combat exclusions remain.

But the moral concern is still the paramount one. No healthy society—at least no society not actually being invaded by a foreign occupier—can willingly contemplate requiring women to defend it. Even in the case of invasion, asking women to join in the actual fighting should be truly an in extremis last resort.

In fact, the United States is being invaded. By millions of mestizos from points south, Moslems from everywhere, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Africans, West Africans, East Europeans and on and on—all with the willing collusion of our own government, the very same government squandering our men and money in the Middle East instead of protecting the States from invasion, as the Constitution actually requires. So I don’t see how we can say our military women (men, too) mired in Bush’s Mesopotamian morass and in Afghanistan are defending America in any meaningful sense anyway.

Bring the women home, give them honorable discharges, and let them be women.

Come to think of it, bring the men home too—and deploy them to the Mexican border! HRS

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 12, 2008 11:37 PM | Send