U.S. applies non-discriminatory principle to submarine crews
A place beyond madness, arrived at by the strictly logical application of a principle that no one in a respected position in modern society disputes.
Howard Sutherland writes:
AP’s Anne Gearan reports that the Navy is about to let women serve aboard submarines, the last type of naval ship off-limits to them. But despite the Defense Department’s protestations that there are no significant differences between men and women and its insistence on the obvious lie that making military units—even combat ones—coed has no negative effect on readiness and fighting ability, an unnamed Defense Department official off-handedly admits to AP that “numerous physical changes to submarines would have to be made” to accommodate the chicks.
The anonymous functionary also proclaims that lady graduates of the Naval Academy Class of 2010 “could be among the first Navy women to take submarine posts.” Take is certainly the right verb, as those assignments can only be in lieu of male officers, who are better suited to the rigors of submarine duty in the first place and for whom no “physical changes to submarines” need be made.
Unintentionally, however, Gearan also shows her fundamental—and media-typical—ignorance of the armed forces. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the American military knows that the inmates of the Naval Academy are midshipmen (midshippersons in today’s spayed military?), not “cadets” as Gearan styles them. Cadets, again as anybody with even a nodding acquaintance with things GI knows, are institutionalized at West Point and Colorado Springs, not Annapolis!
The fall of this last bastion of the Navy (SEALs perhaps excepted) as a male—and effective—fighting force will leave the Marine Corps as the sole holdout, although wavering, in the naval service. It is an outrage, and stupid beyond belief into the bargain. The problems plaguing coed crews aboard naval surface ships are exhaustively documented, if strenously denied by eunuch admirals and leftist bureaucrats. How can anyone imagine they will not be even more acute in the hermetically sealed hothouses that coed submarines will be?
But this feminist depth-charging of our submarines is just the latest military capitulation to the feminized liberal zeitgeist. Since at least the 1960s, and exacerbated by the idiotic personnel management of the Vietnam War, the U.S. armed forces institutionally have moved away from being unapologetic fighting forces in the direction of becoming welfare/employment agencies for federal welfare clients (minorities, green-card foreigners, and today even illegal aliens) and preferred groups (all the foregoing along with women and, now, homosexuals and Moslems). In the early ’70s it was opening flight schools to women. In the mid-’70s, making service academies coed. In the ’80s, widespread assignment of women to naval ships. In the ’90s, the gutting of the combat exemption, leading to the bizarre spectacle of such things as women “fighter pilots” and warship officers. Also in the ’90s, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” made the military a happy haven for all but the most flagrant homosexuals. Now this perversity is so accepted that most Americans don’t balk when single mother soldierettes deploy repeatedly to such seats of the American national interest as Afghanistan and Iraq, leaving their little children behind. We are even conditioned to take in our stride the new phenomenon of combat-mutilated women GIs. (Mutilated civilian women in war is, alas, ages old. It is women as volunteer war-fighters, at least when a nation is not in extremis, that is new.)
All of this social engineering has been to the detriment of combat readiness. Our combat success in Desert Storm is misleading in this respect—it was anomalous and happened before the worst of the perversions (women-in-combat, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”) were foisted on the forces. The harm that results from reshaping the military in ways that would please Herbert Marcuse and the rest of the Frankfurt School is utterly unimportant to those who oversee the armed forces. One of the disastrous developments of my lifetime is that the belief that PC and diversity trump readiness now thoroughly pervades the senior flag and general officers as well. Look no further than Army Chief of Staff Gen. Casey’s public reaction to the Fort Hood massacre.
Surely restoring some sanity to our armed forces could be a good issue for real conservative politicians to pursue. Has anyone heard of any genuine opposition to this insanity on the part of any Representative or Senator, Republican or Democrat? I have not. HRS
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 24, 2010 02:13 PM | Send