brasspounder
2004-12-10 19:57:14 UTC
GI Janes, By Stealth
The Army tries to pull a fast one.
http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200412090818.asp
"Women are four times more likely to report ill, and the percentage of womenThe Army tries to pull a fast one.
http://www.nationalreview.com/owens/owens200412090818.asp
being medically non-available at any time is twice that of men. If a woman
can't do her job, someone else must do it for her. Only 10 percent of women
can meet all of the minimum physical requirements for 75 percent of the jobs
in the Army. Women may be able to drive five-ton trucks, but need a man's
help if they must change the tires. Women can be assigned to a field
artillery unit, but often can't handle the ammunition." And then there is
this annoying propensity to spew out OOW sprogs. That Pfc. Lyndie England
was knocked up wasn't news, it was to be expected. Wanna get outta the war
zone, hon? Just spread those legs! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
GI Janes, By Stealth
The Army tries to pull a fast one.
Mackubin Thomas Owens
December 09, 2004
The U.S. Army is quietly making a radical change in its personnel policy
that may well see the 3rd Infantry Division redeploy to Iraq early next year
with mixed-sex support companies collocated with combat units. The move
violates not only Defense Department regulations, but also the requirement
to notify Congress when such a change goes into effect.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the military opened a number of
specialties to women, permitting them to serve on the Navy's fighting ships
and to fly Navy and Air Force combat aircraft. There were several reasons
for this. First, some military women - mostly officers and pilots - and
their civilian supporters argued that women could never attain the highest
levels of command unless they had the opportunity to serve in combat.
Second, there was widespread acceptance of the view that technological
advances had completely "changed the nature of war": Emerging technologies
and "information dominance" would reduce the risks inherent in warfighting.
If this were the case, why did we need these old restrictions that hampered
the progress of women? As former congresswoman Pat Schroeder famously
remarked, a woman can push a button just as easily as a man.
Even so, women continued to be excluded from units that engaged in direct
ground combat. This prohibition extended to the support units that were
collocated with these forces as well.
The indefatigable Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness has
discovered that the Army has surreptitiously begun to violate these
regulations without advising Congress, which requires notification of any
changes to policy within 30 legislative days, and when both houses are in
session. Unfortunately, Ms. Donnelly's longtime commitment to the combat
effectiveness of the military is often not matched by that of the very
leaders who are responsible for ensuring it. As she has illustrated time and
again, no branch of the military is completely free of political
correctness.
Right now, for example, the Army is beginning to implement an innovative
structural reorganization designed to make its new "units of action" (UAs)
more rapidly deployable while maintaining a high degree of lethality. One of
the factors enhancing the effectiveness of the original UA concept was that
support troops would be collocated with maneuver battalions 100 percent of
the time - essentially becoming an organic part of the direct ground-combat
units. But if such a forward-support company (FSC) is part of a maneuver
battalion, current Defense Department policy says that it cannot include
women.
So Army commanders have simply transferred FSCs from the maneuver battalions
into "gender-integrated" brigade-support battalions, thereby avoiding the
requirement to report the policy change to Congress. Of course, no matter
where the FSCs appear on a table of organization, the fact is, they will
live and work with the maneuver battalions all the time.
In a letter to Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee, Ms. Donnelly argues that such an incremental alteration
constitutes a slippery slope that will lead to radical changes for all
land-combat units, starting with the reconnaissance, surveillance, and
target-acquisition (RSTA) squadrons of the Army's Stryker combat teams, and
ending with Special Operations forces, and maybe even the Marine Corps.
The Army's defense of its actions has been disingenuous. On one hand, the
Army claimed in May that there were "insufficient male soldiers in the Army
to fill forward support companies," and therefore it "cannot support
elimination of female soldiers from all units designated to be UA elements."
But if the Army knew about this back in May, why didn't it ask Congress for
more recruits at the time? One cannot escape the conclusion that the Army's
position appears to be that we don't have enough young men to fight our
wars, so women must be integrated into fighting units by subterfuge and
sleight-of-hand.
But then, on the other hand, an Army spokesman recently told Rowan
Scarborough of the Washington Times that the policy of prohibiting women
from serving in units supporting ground-combat formations is outdated.
Today, said the spokesman, the threat is "asymmetrical... There is no
front-line threat right now" since all soldiers, support or combat, face
rocket, mortar, and roadside-bomb attacks, as well as ambushes.
This is arrant nonsense. I'm sure the soldiers and Marines who just took
Fallujah would beg to differ with those who claim there is "no front line"
in Iraq. The threat they and the support troops collocated with them faced
as they carried out their mission of "closing with and destroying the enemy"
was qualitatively different from that of support troops not so collocated.
Putting women into the vortex of combat so vividly illustrated by the savage
fighting in Fallujah would undermine the effectiveness of our ground-combat
units by undercutting the unit cohesion critical to achieving victory in
war.
Despite recent attempts to redefine it, unit cohesion in combat is far more
than mere teamwork. Cohesion arises from the bond among disparate
individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery. This
bond is akin to what the Greeks called philia - friendship, comradeship, or
brotherly love.
Despite claims to the contrary, there is substantial evidence that the
presence of women in a combat environment fragments unit cohesion. The first
reason is traceable to the fact that men and women have radically different
bodies. For instance, the female soldier is, on average, about five inches
shorter than the male soldier, has half the upper-body strength, lower
aerobic capacity, and 37 percent less muscle mass. She has a lighter
skeleton, which leads to a higher incidence of structural injuries than for
men. She also tends, particularly if she is under the age of 30 (as are 60
percent of military personnel), to get pregnant.
These differences have had an adverse impact on U.S. military effectiveness.
Women are four times more likely to report ill, and the percentage of women
being medically non-available at any time is twice that of men. If a woman
can't do her job, someone else must do it for her. Only 10 percent of women
can meet all of the minimum physical requirements for 75 percent of the jobs
in the Army. Women may be able to drive five-ton trucks, but need a man's
help if they must change the tires. Women can be assigned to a field
artillery unit, but often can't handle the ammunition.
The second reason that the presence of women in a combat environment
increases friction is that the mixing of the sexes leads to the introduction
of eros into an environment based on philia. Unlike philia, eros is
individual and exclusive, manifesting itself as sexual competition, male
protectiveness, and favoritism.
Those who deny the impact of eros on unit cohesion are kidding themselves.
As the eminent military sociologist Charles Moskos has commented, "When you
put men and women together in a confined environment and shake vigorously,
don't be surprised if sex occurs." Mixing the sexes and thereby introducing
eros creates the most dangerous form of friction in the military, corroding
the very source of military excellence itself: the male bonding necessary to
unit cohesion.
Feminists, of course, contend that these manifestations of eros are the
result only of a lack of education and insensitivity to women, and can be
eradicated by means of education and indoctrination. But all the social
engineering in the world cannot change the real differences between men and
women, or the natural tendency of men to treat women differently than they
do other men. Unfortunately, far too many senior U.S. military leaders have
bought into the idea that men and women are interchangeable and that future
war will be neat and tidy. Fallujah suggests otherwise. What is the Army
leadership thinking by tempting nature in the midst of war?
- Mackubin Thomas Owens is an associate dean of academics and professor of
national-security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He led a
Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam in 1968-69.