Women in combat; some reasons it’s a bad idea

More research on the Women in Combat issue. I have to say that Elaine Donnelly and others have done an incredible job, but it’s a shame that she would be sued for standing up for both men and women at arms simply because of political correctness and feminist power in Washington through DACOWITS, which in my opinion, should be shut down. If you think about their concerns about lactating women in uniform and other social issues that have nothing to do with the military and lobbying in Washington, I think what they’re doing is shameful and should be stopped before they do even more damage.

* Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness has beaten back a feminist lawsuit against it. The center believes that the Navy has been more interested in increasing the number of female aviators than in making sure they are fit to fly–and that this practice has risked both military effectiveness and women’s lives.

The issue came to public attention in October 1994, when Lt. Kara Hultgreen, an F-14 pilot, died while attempting a carrier landing. In 1995, the center issued a report citing training records to establish that the Navy was treating its other female F-14 pioneer, Carey Lohrenz, with a double standard. Lohrenz sued. A Navy investigation concluded that the report’s facts were “largely accurate.” A later Navy report confirmed that Lohrenz was removed from carrier aviation because her flying was “unsafe, undisciplined, and unpredictable.” A federal district court’s dismissal of the suit was reaffirmed when an appeals court found that the training record did indeed support Donnelly’s claim “that the Navy made special accommodations for Lt. Lohrenz.” Donnelly’s opponents hoped that the lawsuit would silence her. They have failed. Donnelly continues to demand that the armed forces maintain uncompromising standards. The feminists did, however, succeed in depleting her organization’s modest resources. Donations can be sent to the Center for Military Readiness, P.O. Box 51600, Livonia, MI 48151.
National Review, 2003

I think people should donate to the Center For Military Readiness, because it is important that we stick to the issues involved, rather than politics on the women in combat issue. For example, at the website where Captain Barbara Wilson talks about men, you can pretty clearly see where it is she’s coming from:

Wilson, Captain B. A., Women in Combat, Why not? Retrieved online on June 5, 2007 from here.

Captain Wilson is taking the liberal viewpoint but isn’t citing any resources, test scores or studies, which makes what she writes appear to be emotionalism, not based on fact. She says “The reality is that there is absolutely no intelligent, logical, sensible reason for women not to be in combat roles with the technological style of warfare that abounds today.” She is paraphrasing Pat Schroeder’s ‘push button wars’ phraseology, which is an opinion-a feminist opinion. “There are political, patriarchal, religious, and misogynistically stupid reasons to preclude women but they all belong in The Museum of Natural Idiocy next to chastity belts, urban legends, homophobia, promise creepers, senile senators, proselytizing preachers, and military machismo.” Sounds like Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon. When I read this I think about David Horowitz’s take on the feminist of today and their viewpoint as social architects (like the communists), and how feminists seem to hate men. Most of these women in the military have no children, are past their childbearing years, and are only interested in their promote-ability; not the safety of their fellow soldiers, or the concrete reasons that a sane person should consider when weighing out the issue of women in combat.

Is the military a good place for someone like her? War is a mission. It requires men to endure the most primitive and uncivilized situations and pain to survive. Plus determination to kill enemies who are, as we’ve seen with Afghanistan and Iraq, vicious and sadistic. Historically the military has been for manly men; and the qualities of a good soldier are physical aggressiveness, risk taking and taking enjoyment in body-contact competition. These qualities are simply not prevalent in women, who are biologically nurturers.

Why pretend that they are completely interchangeable with men? They aren’t.

Rand, Recent Gender-Integration in the Military: Effects Upon Readiness, Cohesion, and Morale, 1997, Table 6.5

A 1998 study done by the Rand Corporation showed that only 10% of female privates and corporals agreed that “women should be treated exactly like men and serve in the combat arms just like men.” There were more men, who felt that if they want combat so bad, let them fall on their faces and fail; their opinions were out of vindictiveness.

As Horowitz pointed out in his article at NRO dated 1992, change the rules in order to accommodate women, and the guys aren’t going to feel very ‘warm and fuzzy’ about it. Give them special treatment while they yell about ‘equal opportunity’ and you’ve got the men resenting it, and more sexual harrassment. But God forbid that the men should be allowed to respond in any way; the feminists are loudly complaining about sexual harrassment, and in one article I read, 10 things you might not know about women at war from the Chicago Tribune, one woman carried a knife because of sexual harrassment from her fellow soldiers. This kind of an attitude between them is not going to help with effectiveness, either in the classroom or more significantly, on the battlefield.

Let the battle of the sexes remain in the private sector; there is no room for it in war.

The Army Research Institute (ARI) took a number of surveys since 1993 and discovered from the results that most military women do not want combat assignments. In 2001, Question #60 asked military personnel if women should be assigned to DGC or direct ground combat, which is defined as “engaging an enemy on the ground with individual or crew-served weapons, while being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact with the hostile force’s personnel.”

Army Personnel Survey Office, U.S. Army Research Institute, Direct Combat Assignment Policy: Findings from the Fall 2001 Sample Survey of Military Personnel, p. 1

We can no longer find out what women soldiers think about it, because they dropped asking the question about how women feel about direct ground combat assignments on the survey in 2002.

On physical requirements, there is also enough information available that indicates that women are at a disadvantage, and these results explain why there are special rules for women now; they can’t cut it when pitted directly in a competitive environment against men. But this isn’t a sociological construct, this is simple biology.

Charts from the Statement of Dr. William J. Gregor, Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (Ret) to the Congressional Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related Issues, December 2, 1998 based on the APFT (Army Physical Fitness Test Results) for ROTC cadets at summer advanced camp over a period of 7 years (1992-1998).

While the feminists deny the physical differences and promote special treatment for women in order to equalize their test scores, we have devastating examples of the ramifications of this poor policymaking, like the death of Kara Hultgreen. Her crash was in fact not because of engine failure as the media claimed, it was, in fact because of pilot error, and she had low test scores when going through flight school. It is dangerous to assume that lowering scores for excellence will have no consequences when it comes to life and death situations.

In the Testimony put forth in the case of the United States of America vs. Virginia Military Institute et al., U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Roanoke Division, April 8, 1991, Colonel Patrick Toffler, Director of West Point’s Office of Institutional Research, testified about the Virginia Military Institute’s men-only admissions policy. What the prosecution hoped to prove was that gender norming had no effects on cohesion, morale, or effectiveness. But Toffler’s testimony proved completely the opposite.

He said under oath that there are special rules for women now at West Point; separate physical requirements for men and women. Some physical activities for both sexes have been made easier or eliminated so that women would not suffer what Toffler delicately called “adverse impact.” ( Ibid., p. 608.) There are numerous examples:

West Point identified 120 physical differences between men and women. There are also some psychological differences that they’ve identified. This prompted West Point (said Toffler) to make physical training easier to accommodate women:

Cadets don’t train in combat boots because women suffered higher rates of injury; cadets wear jogging shoes.

Women cadets take comparable or equivalent training when they can’t meet the standards in some events. At West Point, when male cadets do pull-ups, females do “flex arm hangs.”
“Recondo” endurance week has been eliminated. That’s when cadets used to march with full backpacks and undergo other strenuous activities. Those activities have been eliminated and so have upper-body strength events in the obstacle course.

Running with heavy weapons has been eliminated because it is “unrealistic and therefore unappropriate” to expect women to do it. Where men and women are required to perform the same exercises, women’s scores are adjusted to give them more weight.

Today’s West Point males are not increasing their cardio-vascular efficiency as much as their predecessors did because they are insufficiently challenged by physical training standards geared to include women.

In load-bearing tasks (carrying and lifting), 50 percent of the women score below the bottom 5 percent of the men.

Peer ratings have been eliminated because women were scoring too low.

Fraternization between the sexes is occurring on campus. Said Toffler under oath: “I think it would be fair to say that certain forms of sexual activity can have a place on the grounds at the Military Academy.” ( Ibid., p. 585-586.)

The cadet honor system has been weakened by making breaches of the code no longer grounds for expulsion in most cases.

This information is also available in a study for the Heritage foundation called, Women in Combat: Why Rush to Judgment? by Robert Knight, dated June 14, 1991 retrieved on June 2, 2007 from here.