Hollywood’s favorite message these days features the invincible
Woman Warrior. “Xena, the Warrior Princess,” “Witchblade” and the
like are meant to instruct us that girls can kick any guy’s butt.
The fantasy is fine, and the babes are sexy, but in the real world
we need to start rolling back Clinton’s feminization of the
military.
For more than a decade there has been no debate — far less an
honest one — about the proper role of women in the armed forces.
In the early '90s, the “Defense Advisory on Women in the Services”
— DACOWITS — turned itself into a feminist coven. Its close ties
to Congress and the Clinton White House gave it power far beyond
its value. Since then, it has served only to bully some wimped-out
members of our military leadership into allowing women into combat
jobs for which they are unsuited, at the risk of the lives of real
warriors. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz decided last week
to renew the charter of DACOWITS. It’s a bad decision, but he
should make the best of it.
One of Mr. Bush’s campaign promises was to restore trust between
the White House and the guys at the point of the spear. He has
accomplished much, but a lot more needs to be done. Some of the
worst damage to that trust was the Clintons’ forcing women into
combat arms. They did in two stages. First, they changed the
standards for physical performance to “gender neutralize” them: to
hold the women to lesser standards than men. Those diminished
standards betray the real warriors who have met the tougher tests,
and they rightly resent the hell out of it. Warriors recognize, as
the Clintonoids didn’t, that lowering the standards means more
young men — and women — come back in body bags.
After the lower standards were in place, it was easy decide that
women can serve in combat arms. If they can pass the rigged tests,
why can’t they serve in combat roles? The feminists argued that
women couldn’t be denied the combat arms because it was the
prerequisite to reaching the rank of general or admiral. They
complained about a “glass ceiling” that only combat vets rise
through to flag rank. Forgive me not seeing a problem here.
Warriors have to be commanded by other warriors. Pilots should not
be commanded by ground-pounders like yours truly whose eyesight
kept them out of the cockpit. Those who can’t pass the tests to
become warriors can’t understand what they do, and can’t lead those
who have made the grade. The DACONITWITS are willfully ignorant of
this. Thanks to them, we now have mixed-gender basic training. We
have ladies who are fighter pilots, at-sea naval officers, and we
have the first girl graduate from Army sniper school. (If they let
girls into BUDS, I may defect to Scotland. At least the whiskey
there isn’t produced to phony standards.)
In the combat arms — the military jobs where you have to kill
people and break things — the “glass ceiling” is smeared with
blood. Those who can’t pass the admission tests will probably get
killed — and get others killed — trying to do the job. It’s a
damned shame that the feministas can’t see the difference between
leading a sales team trying to close a tough deal and leading an
Army Ranger squad searching a cave in Tora Bora.
Last year, the Brits completed a field study on women in combat
arms. Called the “Combat Effectiveness Gender Study,” its tests
were rigged to prove the ladies can perform in combat. Brigadier
Seymour Munro, the Redcoats’ director of infantry, wrote a
politically incorrect criticism of the study that was promptly
suppressed by his betters. But Brigadier Munro’s commentary found
its way into the press. Munro reported that the field tests were
apparently “gender-neutralized” and, according to Brig. Munro, the
tests amounted to nothing more than “aggressive camping.”
The “Daily Telegraph” reported that the women in the field tests
“were not capable of a number of tasks under battlefield
conditions, such as digging into hard ground under fire.” Under
fire, in places like Bastogne, Okinawa and the Ia Drang Valley, men
faced the choice of digging in or dying. The ground you have to dig
into — fast enough to get out of the line of fire before you catch
one — isn’t the soft topsoil in grandma’s garden. It’s often as
hard as dried clay and you have to put all your weight on the
entrenching tool just to break ground. The report in the
“Telegraph” quoted a defense source saying, “The girls could not do
it. So they decided to reduce the level of tests for everybody,
which kept it gender neutral but meant that of course the girls did
OK.” Too bad you can’t “gender neutralize” war.
A couple of pals of mine are former Navy SEALs. One is a pretty
big guy, about 220 pounds of energy, brains, and solid muscle. He,
like all of the other real combat vets I know, has a very strong
opinion against women in combat arms. On my best day, with a huge
adrenaline surge, I might be able to hoist him over my back and
carry him out of the line of fire if he were wounded. Some woman
who can’t even do a single pull-up just couldn’t. If she tried,
both she and my pal would be KIA. It’s as simple as that.
If the decision had been mine, DACONITWITS would have been
history. But it can serve a useful purpose, if its debates can be
cleansed of feminist agitprop. The first thing to do is replace all
the members, and put women and men — a few real, no-kidding combat
vets — on it so the committee won’t be captive to the radical
feminists. Let them talk to Brigadier Munro. And then DACOWITS
should say publicly that women can’t serve in combat arms.
Women can, and should, serve in every other military capacity.
This is not a question of sex discrimination. It’s a question of
national security that we can not afford to mess up. There are very
few things a woman can’t do. Serving in the combat arms is right at
the top of the list.
