I’ve got a lot of stories saved up to blog about, but like a lot of folks, have things to do besides blog. As such, I’ve got a large number of those news stories that are still worthy of comment, but not timely enough any more for full posts. So here goes with a few of those:
There’s no longer room at the inn at a Manhattan church that’s sheltering Occupy Wall Streeters after a holy vessel disappeared from the altar last week.
When the Rev. Bob Brashear prepared for Sunday services at West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he noticed parts of the bronze baptismal font were gone.
In a fire-and-brimstone message to occupiers later that day, he thundered, “It was like pissing on the 99 percent.”
In Brooklyn, at another church housing OWS protesters, an occupier urinated on a cross, according to Rabbi Chaim Gruber, who has angrily abandoned the OWS movement.
…
The artifact vanished just three weeks after a $2,400 Apple MacBook vanished from Brashear’s office. He told the occupiers that even when the 100-year-old Upper West Side church extended help to addicts during the 1980s drug scourge, no visitors touched its $12,500 sacramental instrument.
“Not even crackheads messed with that,” he said.
Occupy Wall Street: Piss-spraying desecrating thieves that are worse than crackheads.
‘This is a very private room,’ he said. The next thing I knew, he was standing in front of me, his face inches away, his eyes staring directly into mine.
He placed both hands on my shoulders and guided me toward the edge of the bed. I landed on my elbows, frozen halfway between sitting up and lying on my back.
Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and…
And if you don’t believe it, notice the video is from Stars and Stripes. And so is this story:
This week, 14 noncommissioned officers at Camp Zama took turns wearing the “pregnancy simulators” as they stretched, twisted and exercised during a three-day class that teaches them to serve as fitness instructors for pregnant soldiers and new mothers.
Army enlisted leaders all over the world are being ordered to take the Pregnancy Postpartum Physical Training Exercise Leaders Course, or PPPT, according to U.S. Army Medical Activity Japan health promotion educator Jana York.
Somewhere, there is a balance to be struck on gender issues between having a Democrat president exploit his position to overwhelm and overpower a 19 year-old girl and the PC-gone-totally-weirdo idea of strapping a “pregnancy simulator” on Army Sergeants.
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(Yes, technically field daying the folder would mean cleaning it into nothingness, but I’m just going to use it as a term to title & tag these clean-up posts.)
Hagel: Troops’ workplaces will be checked for ‘degrading’ images of women
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a close-up and comprehensive inspection of all military offices and workplaces worldwide to root out any “materials that create a degrading or offensive work environment.”
The extraordinary searches will be similar to those the Air Force conducted last year and prompted officers to scour troops’ desks and cubicles in search of photos, calendars, magazines, screen-savers, computer files and other items that might be considered degrading toward women.
The inspections will now target soldiers, sailors and Marines.
The workplace searches will be conducted by “component heads” before July 1, and Hagel expects each service to submit a report summarizing the findings.
The inspections were controversial and many airman complained that it felt like a “raid” and arbitrarily targeted materials such as fitness magazines and beer posters.
Air Force officials said the prevalence of those items may be correlated to sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace.
Hagel outlined several other measures aimed at cracking down on sexual assaults.
Americans should not decide their opinions about the Boston terror attacks until the government decides its own opinion, President Barack Obama told the nation late Friday night.
Really.
…when a tragedy like this happens … it’s important that we do this right,” he claimed. “That’s why we have investigations … That’s why we have courts. And that’s why…”
This is justification for the next line.
“…we take care not to rush to judgment — not about the motivations of these individuals; certainly not about entire groups of people,” Obama insisted.
The fact is, the Boston marathon bombers were islamic terrorists. There’s no denying reality, but there are people who still try. The White House, in order to deflect blame, has decided to tell the truth slowly to mitigate the damage.
Within the US, about one of twelve to one in six muslims (depending on subgroup, as seen above) believe suicide bombing is often/sometimes justified. In some other polls, there was a “never” option and a “rarely” option to differentiate between those who do support terrorism, but just so fervently as to say “often” or “sometimes”.
The number of pro-suicide bombing muslims jumps to around 13%. So more than one in eight muslims are ultimately pro-suicide bombing within the US.
The problem is that government for the last few years (or even decades) has chosen never to make a judgement, based on two flawed ideologies. The Bush administration, run by squishy neocons, went to great pains to call Islam the “religion of peace” and not offend the easily offended. The Obama government, run by leftist ideologues, has focused on what they think is the enemy – the domestic right that opposes their leftist changes in government, and their destruction of the Constitution. To the left, which is in power, people like you and me are the enemy because our focus on the American virtues of liberty represents opposition to their fundamentally anti-American worldview. By contrast, islamic ideology to them, as an enemy of traditional US virtues and the West that they view as an “oppressor” in the world, is an ally.
And as you’re reading this on your own time (if you’re not, tell the Major I’d like four cups of tea sent up, please), you’re being introduced to data that goes against the media and party line – so even if you are on the left, you’ll probably find yourself considered a “right-wing extremist” soon enough. Consider what happened to Eric Allen Bell – a leftist filmmaker who used to write for fanatically leftist DailyKos and Michael Moore but ended up doing his own research and had his open-minded sensibilities challenged by reality. He found it’s very hard to be a universal hippy believer in human rights on the left and simultaneously maintain blind lefty support of an ideology that actively oppresses gays and women.
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If you take all this into account, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, swims like a duck and flies like a duck, then Obama tells you not to rush to judgement, it could be a giraffe.
I looked for the story, but Huffpo, in the face of mocking reality, had finally started to change it – but “no clues” is visible in the Google cache version.
Now it provides “few clues”, as though it still perplexes them.
The only two women to participate in the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course (IOC) failed ongoing tests to determine which infantry positions should be available to women …
The two women both volunteered to participate in the IOC. Two other women had previously volunteered in September but also failed.
Looks like the standards still exist to some degree. 12 men and 2 women out of the most recent class washed out.
Just like I said the first time, it’s still a social experiment that doesn’t belong. It’s a task very, few men can do. The desire to have women in combat has already resulted in lawsuits against reality, and it will result in further dropped standards and both women and men who aren’t up to the task being sent into situations that set them up for failure.
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has lifted the military’s ban on women serving in combat, a move that will allow women into hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando units, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday.
Over at HotAir, they have a writer, Sentry, who echoes all of my criticisms of this stupid move by Panetta and the PC idiots in the Pentagon. And the writer is a PT stud female Marine.
I’m a female veteran. I deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq. When I was active duty, I was 5’6, 130 pounds, and scored nearly perfect on my PFTs. I naturally have a lot more upper body strength than the average woman: not only can I do pull-ups, I can meet the male standard. I would love to have been in the infantry. And I still think it will be an unmitigated disaster to incorporate women into combat roles. I am not interested in risking men’s lives so I can live my selfish dream.
We’re not just talking about watering down the standards to include the politically correct number of women into the unit. This isn’t an issue of “if a woman can meet the male standard, she should be able to go into combat.” The number of women that can meet the male standard will be miniscule–I’d have a decent shot according to my PFTs, but dragging a 190-pound man in full gear for 100 yards would DESTROY me–and that miniscule number that can physically make the grade AND has the desire to go into combat will be facing an impossible situation that will ruin the combat effectiveness of the unit. First, the close quarters of combat units make for a complete lack of privacy and EVERYTHING is exposed, to include intimate details of bodily functions. Second, until we succeed in completely reprogramming every man in the military to treat women just like men, those men are going to protect a woman at the expense of the mission. Third, women have physical limitations that no amount of training or conditioning can overcome. Fourth, until the media in this country is ready to treat a captured/raped/tortured/mutilated female soldier just like a man, women will be targeted by the enemy without fail and without mercy.
Everyone wants to point to the IDF as a model for gender integration in the military. No, the IDF does not put women on the front lines. They ran into the same wall the US is about to smack into: very few women can meet the standards required to serve there. The few integrated units in the IDF suffered three times the casualties of the all-male units because the Israeli men, just like almost every other group of men on the planet, try to protect the women even at the expense of the mission. Political correctness doesn’t trump thousands of years of evolution and societal norms. Do we really WANT to deprogram that instinct from men?
The answer, Sentry, is yes. They want to deprogram that instinct, because to a stupid, petty, foolish human with female attributes who lives in political worlds of cocktail parties and in the ivory towers and ivy halls of academia, chivalry and chauvanism are the same. Any acknowledgement that women and men are different not just biologically but physiologically and simply by nature; would mean that such things can be judged.
Remember “How Modern Liberals Think”?
The leftist philosophy opposes the objective judgement that women simply are inferior to men in their capacity for war.
Though I’ve said it before, it bears repeating that doesn’t mean there’s any judgement of a woman’s character or civic virtue due to physical, physiological, or other limitations.
Doesn’t mean you don’t have the character or virtue to stand up for your nation. Does mean you’re going to be a liability if you want to go to BUDS.
The leftist philosophy has an ulterior motive, though. It also supports the idea that an “empowered” woman will, to be very blunt here, put out to an inferior man. A sniveling, cowardly toad academic, or a womanizing rapist politician who has his state police procure conquests for him – these are the kind of “men” whose actual character is no longer called into question when their behavior is viewed as normal, and when men and women are to be treated as “equals”. They subjugate women by destroying the privilege that women used to enjoy as part of their nature; all while decrying it as “chauvanism”, “antiquated”, “anti-feminist”, or other such nonsense, and claiming that those who would put women on a pedestal are in fact engaging in a “war on women”. (Contrast GirlWritesWhat’s comments about bonobos.)
A woman may well find that society (depending on region) has stigmatized her virtues as a provider and protector of life, traditions and values that she sticks to in order to give better chances for success at providing and protecting life. Why is “women’s rights” synonymous with destruction of infants today, rather than protection of infants, children, and all life? Why is “women’s rights” about a woman being denigrated to the point that she is just a few “parts”? Is she a mother or a “breeder”? What is really being supported with these ideas?
One could dissect the destructive nature of leftist philosophy that denigrates women – and also denigrates men’s roles – but that’s a broader (no pun intended) topic than could be looked at in any single blog post.
If you want a very intelligent analysis of modern feminism and the leftist philosophy that denigrates both women and men, consider Girl Writes What (you could start with this most recent video and go from there if you’re not familiar with her very intelligent critique of the modern feminist movement). You’ll note her own analysis has changed as she went on, but it’s all a series of very fascinating opinions and reasoning. Her look at it is from a fairly utilitarianist point of view (at least as it seems to me).
I’ll finish this section with this quote from Thomas Sowell:
“For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.“
Many things are done for a reason, and throwing women into combat because it feels good to some limousine liberals who will never see the two-way range is a violent idiocy, stupidly rejecting billions of years worth of human lives that said no.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s first female combat pilot yesterday defended the Pentagon’s decision to allow women on the front lines of war, dismissing an argument that the genders shouldn’t be blended into the same battle environment.
“So that’s like saying Pee Wee Herman is OK to be in combat but Serena and Venus Williams are not going to meet the standard,” Air Force Col. Martha McSally said on “Fox News Sunday.”
I know not all Air Force pilots are imbeciles, but this one is. If they were all three to try out, Paul Reubens has to meet the same standard as all of the current men. If standards at boot camp are held, he doesn’t go. If he fails an indoc for a unit, he doesn’t go. Serena and Venus maybe could meet one physical standard, but they’re exceptions that prove the rule. Also, tennis is not combat. Tennis does not last for 10 months in cramped, nasty conditions with poor sanitary facilities and if you lose at tennis, you don’t end up in the hands of jihadis who will behead you after mutilating your body.\
But there’s another dimension to this – how simply out-of-touch the comparison is.
Guess what, Colonel? Paul Reubens is 5’10″. He ain’t exactly a small guy. He’s also 60, and more an example of how she confused Reubens’ character name with him actually being small, as well as naming someone who was popular decades ago. Why not compare Billy Barty to Allison Hayes?
Or someone more modern like Verne Troyer and Carmen Electra?
Or how about a more apt comparison of wannabe badass couch-jumper Tom Cruise to the much more badass Claudia Black?
Tom Cruise wasn’t tall enough to get into the picture even when he wore elevator shoes, so you’ll just have to pretend you can see him.
The Air Force Colonel doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She is not a subject matter expert on groundpounders any more than a “leg” is going to know about Immelmans or the Thach Weave. Air Force pilots do not endure the same conditions that infantry or any other land or sea combat unit does.
As a last note, for some unfathomable reason, unplanned pregnancies are very high in the military. What’s usually ignored (outside of those who deal with women in the military) is that it’s a free pass out of a deployment. A young woman who’s already given special treatment in the military environment (anyone who says they aren’t doesn’t have a clue) has an easy out. On top of this, there are financial incentives as well as personal incentives. The military, in effect, has enabled the use of the female agency against it. A female servicemember can’t be hit with malingering because they created a medical condition that prevents deployment.
Two female soldiers asked a federal judge to throw out the U.S. military’s restrictions on women in combat, claiming the policy violates their constitutional rights.
U.S. Army reservists Jane Baldwin and Ellen Haring, in a lawsuit filed today in Washington, said policies excluding them from assignments “solely because they are women” violate their right to equal protection guaranteed by the Constitution’s 5th Amendment. The complaint names Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Army Secretary John McHugh as defendants.
“This limitation on plaintiffs’ careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits,” the women said in the complaint filed by Christopher Sipes of Covington & Burling LLP in Washington.
As expected, there are women and lawyers suing to fight reality.
I’m just ballparking there – some items weigh more or less. The Interceptor with SAPI plates always felt like 25, but I’m sure that’s just because it crushes the breath out of you, too. Grunts also strap stuff more stuff to their vests than armor crews. Plus there’s 782 gear/FLIC to wear. Kneepads are worn because it hurts when you put 300 pounds plus down on hard ground. It’s almost like resting, except you know you have to stand again, and it hurts on the way up.
This limitation on plaintiffs’ careers restricts their current and future earnings, their potential for promotion and advancement, and their future retirement benefits
Reality places limitations on the plaintiff’s ability to survive combat, their potential existence, and the possibility of them receiving any future promotions other than posthumous, and giving their retirement benefits to anyone but their family as life insurance. Lawsuits will not make the rigors of combat easy. It will force trainers and instructors to place objectively inferior women and men into infantry situations they should never be placed in just to make some cocktail party political general and leftist politician happy.
More stupidity:
“The linear battlefield no longer exists,” the women said in the complaint, describing as “arbitrary and irrational” the combat restrictions for women.
“Woman are currently engaged in direct combat, even when it is not part of their formally assigned role,” the reservists said. Furthermore, the Army has “deliberately circumvented” its own policies by “attaching” women to ground combat units.
“There is no practical difference, in terms of the work that servicewomen do, between ‘assigning’ women to a ground combat unit and ‘attaching’ women to a ground combat unit,” the women said in the complaint.
There is a huge difference between a motor-T truck driver chick being attached to a combat unit and the same chick being crushed with 150 pounds of gear as an M240 gunner, or the A-gunner, who gets to carry his own rifle, plus extra barrels and ammunition for the M240. There is a huge difference between a radio maintenance chick who carries the crypto unit to update a vehicle’s radio and an armor crewman who has to break track.
This is just an MLRS track. Assuming it uses Bradley tracks, those blocks are something like 25 pounds each, times 82-85 per side. Lots of weight. Knocking the pins out takes a sledge and a special tool, and knocking the pins out from underneath the vehicle requires swinging a sledge in the prone sideways. It’s very hard work.
Knocking out torsion bars is done with a post driver level with the ground. It’s another thing that’s incredibly difficult (and the body motion required to pound something out at waist-level would probably result in EEO complaints anyway.) With actual tanks, the track blocks weigh something like 60 pounds each, the shells the loader moves weigh 50something pounds and have to be manipulated inside the vehicle. And that’s not even getting into towing and how much tank bars weigh.
It’s a simple statement and one that, until recently, nearly every civilized culture seemed to accept as a truism. For reasons as multitudinous as they are apparent and profound, in time of war men have shouldered arms and marched to the clash of legions or the sound of the guns. Women as a rule have not. Even in those scattered and wretched societies whose women prowled the battlefields to torture the wounded and desecrate the dead, no woman was thrown into offensive action against the massed ranks of the enemy. Show me an exception and I’ll show you savages.
I’ll note that the exceptions aren’t necessarily savages. They’re also last-ditch forces, partisans, and nations surrounded on all sides by genocidal enemies.
Of course, IDF girls aren’t as known for looking like this:
As they’re known for this:
And make no mistake, the tough-looking chick in the top picture still looks like the four in towels below underneath. She’s probably 5’8″ and 150 pounds or so if she’s big. And still, she’s not going to carry another 150 pound load-out. She’s not going to tack up and hump for miles and miles. She’s not going to carry a mortar base plate or a Javelin for 10 hours, or load 155 shells or change a final drive (a gear in tracked vehicles that weighs slightly more than Mount Rushmore). She’s not going to drag another troop who weighs 250 pounds loaded out of the line of fire.
Soldier’s Load goes on:
Most service members will admit that conditioning hikes are grueling exercises in physical and mental endurance. I personally despised them, especially when it was my turn to shoulder a 25 pound machine gun or a 45 pound, .50-caliber receiver. Each hike took all of my effort and physical fitness to complete. Unsurprisingly, during my time at The Basic School no female lieutenant completed a hike of greater than 6 miles with the rest of the 180 or so male lieutenants. Not one. And that’s with the male lieutenants carrying all of the radios and heavy weapons.
His whole post is very articulate, and worth reading here. He also hits on cultural, physiological, and other reasons that have been touched on here.
But this will be decided in the courts, and in the halls of government bureaucracies now run by leftist politicians who are out to make their political points and, as Evan Sayet says, elevate failed, evil, and wrong at every turn. Standards will be dropped, instructors who maintain the old standards will be accused of sex discrimination and driven out (never mind that reality discriminates), and the institutions will become weaker, and people will die for what some politically correct academic lawyer nitwit got into his addled little brain to impose on institutions that are light years away from his fantasy world. Women will die, men will die, conflicts will be lost, morality will be displaced, and the few who choose to nobly serve will suffer for the institutions made by the academic leftists.
It was clear that nobody’s opinion was being solicited. The message came from the Chief of Staff of the Army, and the order seems to have come from echelons above him: Ranger School will admit women within a few months. And the women will pass, whatever it takes.
Female officers have complained that the lack of the school credential disadvantages them for promotions and commands, and in an election year their complaints have found champions among the political appointees in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In a Department whose highest priority is the Secretary’s million-dollar Gulfstream commute, and that has lost interest in two ongoing wars and a dozen other flashpoints where soldiers risk their lives daily, a stroke of a pen can upend a 60-year-old course that embodies a tradition with roots in the 18th Century.
And it just did.
The Ranger Training Brigade has been told to roll the welcome mat and the first class could be 03/13 but will definitely be 05/13 at the latest. Each class in the remainder of FY 13 will receive five to eight women, and the treatment, mentoring, nurturing and ultimate success of those female candidates will be intensively managed by the Chief of Staff and the Sergeant Major of the Army, not to mention civilian appointees. The male candidates in the same courses are not of interest to the command, as long as they don’t interfere with or criticize the women. Even the timing of the feminized classes was established for political reasons: to ensure that a fait accompli of female Ranger attendees, if not graduates is presented to the incoming SecDef and Secretary of the Army if, as the current leaders think likely, their patron is defeated in November. They did not want to put women in class 1/13, which starts in October, to prevent Congress from intervening before the elections, but 2/13 is an outside possibility.
Totally not a surprise.
More info here:
Almost immediately lower-ranking generals and colonels went to work on the implementation. Here’s some of what they’ve worked out:
The initial group will be a hand-selected pilot class.
They will all be West Pointers from the Class of 2012.
They will attend the Infantry Basic Officers’ Leadership Course and Ranger School.
And they will pass. While the mask the public sees will say “there has been no change in the standards,” these are the first Ranger School students in the sixty-plus-year history of the school who start off knowing that whatever they do, they can’t fail. If they stumble, the suits and stars will be there to catch them, and to crush anyone who made note of it.
In my opinion, I do not believe women should serve as combat soldiers. I know they are fully able to do so. I know they would acquit themselves spectacularly well. But I can’t deny that I value the special place of women in society as a protected gender.
I can’t deny my core feeling that women–by virtue of their anatomy and physiology and whatever God-given ability to nurture they possess–would be impacted more negatively by mortal combat than men.
I can’t deny that I think it would bleed out some wonderful chivalrous quality in men were we to collectively send women to the front lines to bleed out as Marines shot up taking hills.
I can’t deny that, were my wife or I to have to leave our children to defend this nation in hand-to-hand combat, that I would hold myself in the most vile contempt for letting my wife be the one to go.
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It is the truth making itself evident: When I was told as a boy to never hit a girl, it seemed entirely obvious to me. A given. What sort of boy would strike a female, anyhow? A liberated boy?
See, we’ve discovered that, contrary to what we w the Chief of Staff did not send a written operations order to Ft. Benning, which used to be the Infantry Center and School, and is now the infantry-ectomied Maneuver Center of Excellence. (Hey, didn’t GM start badging their cars with the “GM Mark of Excellence” during the period that the cars started rusting on dealer lots, Vega pistons seizing in alloy cylinders, and Corvairs flipping like a family of acrobats? Yeah, they did. Does this mean that self-bestowed recognitions of “Excellence” are often a mark of institutional flailing and self-deception? You be the judge). The Chief of Staff phoned MG Robert B. Brown to give him the women in Ranger School (and not just Ranger School) FRAGO verbally — no incriminating paperwork that way, just MG Brown’s notes, which are certainly deniable on GEN Odierno’s end of the phone.
Now that’s a stand-up guy. It’s not like he’s betting his Ranger tab! (Heck, it’s not like he has one to bet).
Him not having a Ranger tab makes perfect sense. He didn’t earn it, he doesn’t now its value, so it has no value to him at all. To him, it’s a status symbol and a check in the box for officers to achieve. So giving it away probably isn’t a big deal. You’d think with the recognizable decorations that he does have, he’d have a clue. But apparently not.
Another clue in GEN Odierno’s statement to the press is his frequent and seemingly reflexive recourse to buzz words that come not from the Army’s own very plush lexicon of bullshit, which has a buzzword for everything a general could possibly need and thousands of unnecessary ones besides, but from politics and specifically the Obama campaign. You can’t listen to the general for long without hearing “progressive,” “progress,” and specifically, about women in Ranger school (and in the other shoe we’re still about to drop) “the progressive way forward.” This is not to say that the General has any politics of his own at all, he has been properly reticent on that score as anyone in uniform should be. It merely indicates that he knows the words and concepts that induce Pavlovian responses in his bosses.
So welcome to the new dawn, building a Novy Sovietskiy Chelovek, military style: an interchangeable unit without obsolete individual differences like sex. It is not an experiment, because the experiment’s Stakhanovite success has been decreed ab initio. It worked great last time. No word on whether implementation will measured according to five-year plans.
Oh well, one of the nation’s most storied units is about to be destroyed by political correctness and the desire by progressive leftists to make the world into what they think it should be, ignoring completely what it is. And the people that die for the cocktail party generals’ and politicians’ hubris are meaningless to them anyway, probably reactionary counterrevolutionaries who needed to be liquidated. Omelettes, eggs, all that. As long as the bureaucrats rule, they will dictate what reality will be, regardless of what reality has to say about it.
The Army is addressing the specifics of the plan to allow female soldiers to join infantry battalions and – associated with that move – to make the prestigious Ranger School co-ed, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said Wednesday.
The Army’s top leader said he wants to give women every opportunity to succeed in infantry battalions since the military reversed the policy barring them from infantry duty earlier this year.
Odierno noted that nine out of ten senior infantry officers have graduated from Ranger school and wear the Ranger tab on their uniforms. Not allowing women to earn their own tab could hinder their infantry careers, Odierno said.
Ranger school is made to be difficult. It is not easy. Many men fail out of it. There’s a reason most dogfaces are legs, and not airborne. Now there’s the push for women in ranger school because not going might “hinder their careers”. Oh, the tribulations of the lifer.
Women in infantry roles makes sense if you’re a nation with it’s back against the wall, on it’s last legs… moreso if you’re a dictatorial regime that doesn’t care for human life whether female or male. Women in infantry roles otherwise is idealistic foolishness at best, dreamed up in think tanks and well away from the pointy end of the spear.
In this case, Ranger school is now being viewed as a resume-building experience, rather than a formative one that creates a special breed of warriors. Ranger school already has a substantial washout rate. Since women are going to be sent there so they can check a box off on their way to becoming Pentagon bureaucrat officers, Ranger school will be forced to be toned down so that women pass – because women are going to be sent to the school in order to pass. The standard isn’t important – the tab so they can become senior officers is now what’s important. The earned value, the substance, will be taken away in order to create the appearance.
For those who’ve forgotten, the army didn’t used to wear berets. Elite units, like Rangers and Special Forces wore berets. It made them stand apart, because they are elite units. It displayed the espirit de corps of their units. So then the army brass decided that the whole army didn’t feel happy enough, and didn’t feel elite enough. So they gave everyone the beret. It was the “everyone’s a winner” participation ribbon. It did nothing except make elite units resentful of the brass, and make a lot of line units equally resentful – because they didn’t earn it.
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As this topic seems to be getting bounced back and forth with No One Of Any Import – most recently on Import here and Patriot Perspective here, I notice there are a couple things worth revisiting.
Even more important than all of that, Short Timer says that the Marines will use something called “gender neutral” tests, and that quotas will be imposed.
Additionally, new functional fitness tests are being developed to help Marine Corps leaders determine how women and men perform in, and cope with, various combat tasks. The goal is to establish “gender-neutral” physical fitness standards.
The current PFT is noted here:
The Marine Corps defines gender-neutral physical standards as being identical for men and women, rather than weighted — or “gender-normed” — like those applied in the service’s annual Physical Fitness Test. During the PFT, women can earn a minimum or maximum score with fewer repetitions and a slower run times than their male counterparts.
The “gender-normed” test involves men doing pull-ups, at 5 points per pull-up, maximum 20 pull-ups, or 100 points, minimum is only 3 pull-ups, or 15. The women’s PFT has the “flexed arm hang” which is basically pulling almost to the “up” position and holding there for a number of seconds. Minimum for the event is 15 seconds, max is 70. Crunches are the same, as many as you can do in 2 min, max 100, 1 point per. The women’s run maximum is 3 miles in 21 minutes for 100 points. For men, it’s 3 miles in 18 minutes. On the men’s you lose 1 point per 10 seconds, same thing on the women’s. Last time I ran a PFT (a while back) I did 21:30 on the run. On the men’s (obviously), it was 79 points. A woman running the same time would have 97 points. Pretty big shift.
The flexed-arm hang, while it sounds easy, is quite physically taxing. Women’s muscles are built different, and they tend to do it better. In boot camp, we were made to do it – our DI said our platoon was acting like girls, so we’d do their part of the PFT. We had only one guy, who could normally only do 3 or 4 pull-ups, able to do the full 70 second hang time. Guys who could knock out 20 pull-ups were shaking and falling before then. Different musculature, but the guy who could do the flex-hang would get pummeled in a brawl with the big guys. (Except for the 90-pound tiny guys who could do 20 pull-ups but couldn’t carry a pack.) The day-to-day humps with full packs, the quarterdeck sessions, etc., showed that the guys who could knock out the 20 pull-ups were far better athletes. There’s plenty that can be looked at with regards to how PFTs and other PT requirements are done, but the difference in musculature and endurance which varies by gender (and within gender, as noted) means that you’ll have a lot more women who can’t meet the standard (and some men who don’t, either).
A gender-neutral PT test is going to end up dropping the standard to let in more physically weaker people, because women are in generally physically not as strong. Just how it is.
To put it another way, consider the difficulty in doing a fireman’s carry of a comrade of fighting weight (neither scrawny nor fat) who’s carrying another 20-30 pounds of gear, and consider who can do that better. I can think of many men who can do this (and plenty who can’t), but I find it difficult to think of more than a rare few women who can.
As for quotas, there probably won’t be a list next to each MOS saying “we need 12.5% women in the 0800 field”. They may be behind-the-scenes, or they may be kept quiet, but there will be a push to make sure women get into the new jobs. There will be a political push for the actual candidates just like there’s a political push for the program itself. That’s what’s happened every time before, and that’s what will happen again. It happens in the military, it happens in law enforcement, it famously happened with firefighters in the 1990s – where members of the LA fire department released videos of women failing miserably at training.
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If the standards are kept as high, women won’t pass. If there’s a 75% pass rate for men, and a 10% pass rate for women, the bureaucrat social-engineer leftist political-correct hack who came up with this idea will, as always, refuse to accept that men and women are different. And the test will be changed. Ranger school will be changed. The instructors will be viewed as sexists good ol’ boys and face retribution at the hands of the social engineers. The loss will be to the country, to security (one of the few legitimate functions of government), to the Marines and Rangers, to the men who pass, and to the women who actually could pass without the standard being lowered.
The way this will work out (as it almost always does) is that the first few women through will be hand-picked all-stars. They won’t be first in their graduating class, they won’t be the most capable of the class, but they’ll be capable – they’ll be the kind of women who could’ve applied for waivers and gotten in without a service-wide push as highly motivated individuals. But even in their initial class, there will be some favoritism. There will also be the fear of EEO and career destruction on the part of instructors, who would rather get the problem the hell away from them than deal with it. A man who stands up against bureaucrats and says “women aren’t fit for this” will find himself the target of plenty of political retribution.
The subsequent groups with horrible attrition rates are what will result in a modified course curriculum, modified PT tests, and modified MOS schools. The subsequent fears of EEO and sexual harassment complaints will result in destroyed morale, more distant instructors, and good people who don’t want to deal with the hassles that go along with being in that environment.
Look at it from the POV of the instructor, as well. No one wants to teach a class of students that starts making EEO complaints. Nobody wants to be in a situation where they have to deal with it. It disrupts the class, and means the instructor has to walk on eggshells. A good instructor won’t want to be there – he can’t make the course difficult enough to prepare the candidates for their careers as Rangers or Marine combat arms MOSes. He can’t ask for the same level of performance when someone can’t give it – and washing someone out who has a (as a horribly politically incorrect coworker once said) “career enhancement device” – isn’t much of an option without facing retribution from higher-ups, bureaucrats, EEO, and harassment charges. There are plenty of people when faced with difficulty who will take the easy way out, and claiming harassment or unfair treatment is an easy way to pass. It’s hell for the instructors and dissuades good instructors from ever signing on. The knowledge base there is lost. The instructors who will join up will be those with the same political agenda, who will pass everyone at a lower standard in order to get the 100 points on their cutting score, or whatever other incentives they have for promotion.
Who will be the more popular instructor – the Ranger school instructor who had a 95% washout rate for the females in his class, or the Marine MOS school instructor who had a 95% passing rate for the females in his class? To the bureaucrat leftist political-correctness social engineer, clearly the Ranger is a reactionary throwback and the Marine is an enlightened New Man who knows how things should be. Never mind the Ranger sees them as they are. Reverse roles as necessary, wash, rinse, repeat. The instructor who makes a class that prepares his students or candidates for combat will improve their survivability and their ability to end a conflict; and that instructor will do so at the risk of retaliation. The instructor who doesn’t prepare his class and sends them off weak will be rewarded for supporting diversity and Pentagon initiatives, even if his students are unprepared and die because of it.
Again, one could write a book.
Fred does not care that you need something on your resume. He only cares that he is carried or dragged across the line to safety.
I found an interesting development and good analysis over at The Patriot Perspective. Saying that women don’t belong isn’t too popular a stance nowadays. Still, it needs saying sometimes. It doesn’t mean women should have their opportunities limited because their gender is inferior. It just means the constraints of reality can limit women’s opportunities whether we like to admit it or not. Have a great weekend, everyone!
First off, thanks! Second, what you’re noting is the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of results.
There’s something worthwhile to note here that is rarely mentioned, because the military is public sector and not private sector: Bona fide occupational qualifications.
It’s why the term garbageman isn’t “garbageperson”, and why Hooters Girls aren’t Hooterspeople.
But Bikini’s sports bars actually have good food in addition to eye candy. Too bad there isn’t one for 150 miles.
Being a garbageman most places requires a lot of physical strength to pick up and throw trash that can’t simply be mechanically moved into a truck. Being a Hooters Girl requires a pleasant appearance and in general, physical attributes that men don’t have.
War is also a profession.
It’s been a men’s profession since slightly after the first women’s profession was created. It’s not a pleasant profession, and until modern developments and technologies made it so women could be adept is some modern aspects of war, the actual combat aspects of it have been almost exclusively male. Today, the pointy end of the spear still is male – and there’s a reason for it.
Before I go further, I’ll note that both myself and JBH are Marine combat vets. Neither of us are pogues or REMFs. Combat arms MOSes are not easy. Putting women in combat arms MOSes will not end well. Putting women in military professions they didn’t belong in before didn’t end well, either.
Kara Hultgreen was killed by social engineers. She was the first female naval aviator on a carrier. She may have become a fantastic pilot, but she was pushed into a job she shouldn’t have been in that was above her skill level.
As I noted a while back:
Forcing women into military positions they didn’t belong in killed Kara Hultgreen. She wasn’t ready for flying on carriers, but she was promoted into it so some cocktail party Ruling Class general could brag about how progressive he was to congressmen and senators he hobnobs with. When she plunged into the water and died, she did so because someone had to make her into something she wasn’t supposed to be yet.
She might’ve been a fantastic carrier-based pilot, but the political rush to make her The First killed her. A good pilot was killed due to some political general and politician’s ambition.
The ocean and a pitching carrier deck and crosswinds don’t care what you have between your legs, they don’t care how you’re “the first”, or what a great stride forward you are for some cocktail-party general or admiral who can brag to political cronies. She died because someone put her where she shouldn’t have been – and that was in a job that, had she not been forced into it as “the first” she may have lived to excel at. She probably would’ve made a great pilot, instead of a dead one. Technology allowed her to overcome physical differences that made her weaker, and would have allowed her to exploit physical differences that made her stronger.
Even that cannot be said for putting women in combat arms MOSes. There is no fly-by-wire to compensate for natural physiology differences. There is having to lift roadwheels, break track, carry shells, and do the kinds of manual labor you’d see on a construction site, but often with field-expedient tools. There are still the requirements of being a rifleman if your gear goes down. There are plenty of men who can’t do the jobs. Putting women into the jobs simply doesn’t work. Men and women are different. Especially because in this case it’s about social engineering and equality of results, it cannot work. No amount of lofty academic ideals can change reality. People in positions of power – academic social engineering progressives seeking to create the “New Man” – have been doing this to the tune of 94 million dead. The same mindset that fought against economic laws, wheat harvests, and those who didn’t sign up for the big new idea – is the same mindset that fights here against physical and physiological ones.
Equality of results means there will be quotas. They’re already talking about “gender neutral” PT tests, which means you’ll have women and weaker men making it through – who shouldn’t be. This is about politics, plain and simple. This is about equality of results in order to prove how wonderful and enlightened we’ve become as a nation that we can reject reality.
Adam Savage from Mythbusters says it well:
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There are two big functions in the military: Troop welfare and mission accomplishment. Ultimately mission accomplishment comes first, but the close second (and often part of the mission) is troop welfare. Troop welfare means having troops ready and able to accomplish missions. Putting weak men and women into positions where they cannot accomplish missions with the same certainty, where they endanger all other elements of a movement, assault, or action, ultimately threatens entire operations and strategies. It undermines the US’s ability to project force, and ultimately the US military’s ability to keep the US safe, as well as maintain our commitments to allies.
Cornum scoffed at the theory that women lack the animal instinct required to kill. “War is not a hormonal event. It is a profession with discipline. We’re not people who club and bludgeon people to death any more. No one objects now to women flying fighters, bombers, and attack helicopters. They seem to object to hand-to-hand combat. Personally, I’ve never met a woman who wanted to be in the infantry. But if they’re big and strong and tall, and they want to do it, they’ll end up there. Gender should not be a discriminator in combat roles.”
Yeah, actually we do still club and bludgeon people. War is applied force. For those who’ve read the book Starship Troopers, you’ll recognize this as when Sgt Zim explains that you learn to fight with sticks and knives and your fists because that may be all the force you need to apply to get the enemy to comply: “War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him…but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing…but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how — or why — he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say — supply the control.“
You also do still have to drag wounded friendlies. You do still have to hump a 90-pound pack. You do still have to lift a tow bar – for those unfamiliar with tanks and AAVs, it a pair of bars that connect two vehicles to tow, and weighs roughly eleventy-billion pounds. You do still have to be able to lift and carry a 155mm shell.
If you’re a 90 pound woman or a 98 pound man let in under “gender neutral” PT standards, you don’t have physical controls to use when the military is doing police actions. You don’t have those tools to use. But I’m sure Cornum is right – after all, we haven’t done a police action for the last eleven years or anything with a substantial ground force in two different nations. And we’re not talking about women in the infantry, we’re just talking about women in combat arms MOSes, and then it’ll be the infantry.
It’s called the slippery slope; for the side pushing it, it’s the Overton window. The old insanity is the new sanity. Note the Cornum story is from 2003.
Some more from the Cornum story:
Weighing just 110 pounds on a 5-foot-6 frame, with both of her arms broken and a bullet in her back, she couldn’t fight. If she bit her assailant, she worried he’d hit her and break even more bones. She vowed not to scream, but every time he knocked her broken arms, she couldn’t stop a scream of pain. Her main worry wasn’t rape, she says, but rather that the shackled Dunlap might get himself shot trying to defend her. “Other than that, it didn’t make a big impression on me,” she says, shrugging. “You’re supposed to look at this as a fate worse than death. Having faced both, I can tell you it’s not. Getting molested was not the biggest deal of my life.”
See that new dynamic there? That another new thing that you’re introducing to ground force elements. You’re introducing a physically weaker person that others will naturally be protective of, especially due to gender. Like it or not, chivalry still exists, especially in the kinds of men who put their lives on the line for their country. That doesn’t help mission accomplishment or troop welfare. That introduces another dynamic that will make mission accomplishment more difficult, and troop welfare more elusive.
The dynamic between genders exists for a reason, it’s one of the wonders of the human condition. Women have strengths and weaknesses, men have strengths and weaknesses. Womens weaknesses make them ill-suited to war, and some men’s strengths make them well-suited to war. None of it helps troop welfare or mission accomplishment. Also, as noted last time:
A group of 18-25 year olds in the same environment with mixed genders (and orientations, thanks to politicians) is going to end up with pregnancies and relationship squabbles moreso than an all male unit. There are a myriad of reasons why this doesn’t work, none of which are being listened to by the politicians and political generals.
Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in mixed-gender units see this all the time. There’s office drama, there’s field drama, there’s hygeine issues (this is a whole other can of worms), there are pregnancies that prevent deployments – which means a fully staffed unit will lose troops of it’s TO&E, going from full to reduced strength because a woman chooses an easy way to dodge war. While men also do similar things – like going home and getting high with their buddies on pre-deployment leave, there’s stigma attached. The man is a coward, and pulled a coward move. A woman getting pregnant doesn’t face the same criticism, because she’s not expected to face physical danger, and she’s hiding behind a baby to get out of deployment. It’s unpleasant to discuss, but those who see it and have to deal with it do acknowledge it. (Being in an all-male unit, I saw the male cowardice. The female equivalent is well noted.)
There are other factors to consider as well. Realistically, “On Women In Combat” could be the title of a book. To look at one last phenomena – ask why we fight. We fight to protect our home and hearth – we fight to protect security, liberty for ourselves and our families, friends and neighbors. Humans as a species have fought for their noncombatants. They’ve fought for their children, for their wives and their homes. Men, biologically speaking, are expendible. Men, biologically speaking, aren’t as necessary for raising children (and not in the lefty Murphy Brown sense, either). Men are there to protect and preserve, women are there to nurture and create. Thousands of years of human history have led us on this same path. When we look at all our traditional reasons to fight, never does someone say “send the women and children first”. That’s backwards. Thousands of years have agreed.
Morally, a nation that sends its women to fight by choice is one that is rejecting nature. Women who fight because they must (like WWII Soviet women’s units) are something else (though it’s worth noting what the level of concern for Soviet leaders about their citizens was). Politicians wanting to put women in harms way to make them “equal” flies in the face of pretty much the whole history of humankind.
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(Note that none of this questions the virtues of a person or their spirit as a human being, but once again, that there are certain differences between gender. Doesn’t change their value as a human being, or the virtue of their spirit. But gender can be a limiting factor in certain aspects of life – for both women and men.)
ShortTimer
JBH
