The Equal Right to Have Your Guts Blown Out

The Army embraces feminism by sending women to die in combat:

As Elaine Donnelly has pointed out, the Army has apparently rewritten the regulations regarding women in such a way as to make Bill Clinton’s infamous statement that “it depends on what the meaning of is, is,” appear to be straightforward. In her May 8 NRO piece describing a presentation by Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker at the American Enterprise Institute, she writes:

Current directives exempt female soldiers from direct ground-combat units such as the infantry and armor, and from smaller support companies that “collocate” (operate 100 percent of the time) with land-combat troops. The new, unauthorized wording narrows the “collocation rule” to apply only when a combat unit is actually “conducting an assigned direct ground combat mission.” (Emphasis added.)

General Schoomaker recited Defense Department regulations, but claimed (without justification) that the Army has separate rules that exempt female soldiers from collocation with land-combat battalions “at the time that those units are undergoing those operations” (emphasis added). By adding the words “conducting” or “undergoing” (a direct ground-combat mission) to the collocation rule, the Army has created a new regulation that has not been authorized by the secretary of defense, or reported to Congress in advance, as required by law.

In other words, the Army says it is not in violation of DoD regulations because women in FSCs are not really “collocated” until the combat unit is engaged or about to be engaged in a direct combat mission. The breathtaking assumption here is that women in these units can be pulled out before the battle starts.

General Schoomaker is a very experienced and able soldier. He certainly understands the role of “friction” and the “fog of uncertainty” in battle, having experienced these phenomena first hand. He must know that trying to pull women out of their units under such circumstances, even if it could be done at all in the chaos and confusion of combat, would be incredibly disruptive, undermining unit cohesion and effectiveness and diverting resources needed to prevail in the battle.

Women in combat has been a failure everywhere it's been tried. Aside from the sheer physical strain of the battlefield, men have a natural instinct to protect women. When I was involved with POW resistance training back inna day, the surest way to get American male soldiers to do anything you wanted them to do was to imply violence toward one of the female soldiers. This approach never failed to work, even in an academic setting where participants knew no actual harm would be done. Seeing women maimed, abused, or killed has a strong deleterious effect on morale and combat performance.

Of course, the performance of the American armed forces has never been of importance to the Left.

But there was a time when it was important to the Army.