Jan

28

Ban-dido Ban-ada, Oh Ban-ada Ban no-no Ban-dollar-O

Girls just wanna have guns

By marion ds dreyfus

By virtue of being lithe and of lower body mass, and having much smaller feet, in the main, women have always been terrific at mountain climbing. Women with ‘scopes were first among perseverant astronomers, though their achievements were largely ignored and stepped on by males with high-power magnification. Women are superlative and self-abnegating in the lab, often working 50 and 60 years, unmarried and unchilded, in the shadows of their discoveries before they reap awards and recognition.

Women are great in a myriad of occupations and professions, are as brave and heady as males in the full spectrum of human endeavors—not to mention childbirth, which Norman Mailer quipped would never be anything a male could do.

Since time began, women aspiring to “male” jobs and occupations have been derided and disrespected as a consequence of their menstrual periodicity. Everything suspect, from womb-connected “hysteria” to lack of judgment and inferior cognition was assigned to the female, and used as a club to deny women representation in education, careers, the opportunity rung on the rigorous escalator of achievement.

But women, on the whole, are not the best candidates for firefighter roles, other than support. The heavier duties of carrying deadweight injured comrades, the upper-body strength needed for many of the tasks associated with the military, and the steadiness required to maintain combat positions in the face of withering fire and lengthy attack, are not the circumstances where women shine. To disagree that women are, in fact, different from men in these specifics is to live in a faux-construct—we have many strengths, but we are not gorillas, and we have different musculo-skeletal apparatuses and hormonal tides than men.

All this by way of explaining why Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s recent initiative to open some 328,000 combat jobs is a bad idea. The prospective groundbreaking decision overturns a 1994 Pentagon rule restricting women from artillery, armor, infantry and other similar combat roles.

Career advancement, yes, does often result from valorous action in war, and to date these emoluments and ribbons of glory have been male-only. But there are numerous reasons not aired in the miles of ink generated by Panetta’s (and the President’s) little change of definition of who qualifies for what in combat-forward posts and training.

As Ryan Smith, an ex-military (currently a lawyer) who served several battlefield tours in Iraq explains in “The Reality That Awaits Women in Combat: A Pentagon push to mix the sexes ignores how awful cheek-by-jowl life is on the battlefield,” there are egregious battlefront conditions that absolutely militate against women being crammed into such conditions.

If you rejoinder that “women can take it,” assuredly yes, we can. If we choose to subject ourselves to the glaring lack of hygiene, the days-long stakeouts without toilets, the long spans without proper bivouacking, the shattering noise and grime, and the eternal close quarters with men in the same clutch of duty, without end. But the esprit de corps that is critical to unit success in the military is broken by having women around—even expertly trained, above-average-strength women with top honors in pushups and hauling and obstacle-course running.

Women are great firearms experts. We win awards in shooting competitions year after year. And Annie Oakley is a proud estrogenic legend in the country. But shooting is not the sum of tasks in combat. More of the time, most of the time, is spent in awkward human-human contact that is uncomfortable, difficult, dangerous–and messy.

“I think people have come to the sensible conclusion that you can’t say a woman’s life is more valuable than a man’s life,” the retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught once said. But in the IDF, there is a recognition, as is only reasonable, that women are different from men. And they are child-bearers, and their status in society is different, obviously, from that of men. Those differences bring consequences that ignoring would be worse than folly on the part of military brass. Imperiling lives is the natural result of the congeries of elements making women in close combat quarters a decided and constant liability.

Israel’s top-notch IDF (Israel Defense Forces), acknowledged as one of the best fighting forces in the world, has long had women in their military services. But the jobs they are assigned to are predicated on what women can do without subjecting them to frontline bullets and man-on-woman infantry and the like. Women are recognized as child bearers, and hard-wired male consideration for women cold-cocks neutral equality on the battlefield. The addition of women into the traditional male-male mucky soup of war or defense changes the equation. Men are prone to gallantry instead of better moves that save themselves and their fellows. Gallantry has little place in the menu of man-hours fighting. It will, as many writers and analysts have observed, cost us lives. Needless lives lost.

And as for training, there are indications, even now, that standards will be lowered. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made reference to such lowered norms at a Pentagon press conference in January that will be used by critics of the decision to open up combat roles to women. The New York Times headline read: Gen. Dempsey hints–Bar likely lowered for female combat units.

No. Wrong. Lowered standards are automatic reasons for rejecting the ‘wisdom’ of this females-in-combat initiative. Women in threat conditions need the same training and the same reliability as men. Making women acceptably laxer or less tough is simply unacceptable, and works against the equality notion we have come to worship as the gold standard in all of our public life.

Sources say outgoing Sec. of Defense Panetta will announce his decision to permit female soldiers to participate in combat roles starting later in 2013. Special units like the SEALS and the Army’s Delta Force, will have until 2016 to document why they should qualify for an exemption to the new ruling.

While some women may be able to come up to the mark achieved routinely by male inductees, most simply won’t. How many women wrestlers, miners and construction workers are filing their tax returns, even in 2013? Not that many. This is not about to change any time soon, even with Pilates, Super-Spin and Zumba classes as the hottest gym tickets around.

Aside from the ineradicable problems of excreting and undressing or not undressing in the tightest quarters, body sores from lack of bathing and maintaining uncomfortable postures for hours on end—as is typical when armies are on the move, as was true with Desert Storm in Iraq, and will continue to be true, even with reduced military budgets.

Which brings us to the slash and burn budget curtailments of the newly re-elected president. President Barack Hussein Obama’s brutal budget slices have already, to hear every defense head of the Joint Chiefs, destroyed our retaliatory or offensive strength, such that we will be sitting ducks for a determined and especially asymmetrical force such as the ever-stronger al Qaeda in both the Maghreb–and wherever else you pin the tail on the map. Such carefully calculated cuts in military and tactical supplies, equipment upgrades, accessories and general provender have been detailed despite strenuous objections by the military charged with conducting their forces to exemplary effect.

This initiative is, it seems clear to this writer, another in the nefarious efforts of an obdurate administration that believes in nothing, very much, beyond their own peculiar and failed notions of “normalizing” the status of the United States into the mediocrity of their imaginings. This initiative, coming from the mouth of Leon Panetta, but fronting for the top dog of the Administration, is another in the pantheon of disastrous missteps along the lines of Fast and Furious, a Team Obama/Team Holder stab at disenfranchising the nation’s gun owners by virtue of trafficking firearms to Mexican drug mafias in hopes of public alarums against gun availability.

From a comment thread between David Brooks and Gail Collins of the New York Times: Now [women] wear fatigues and tote rifles. So the Joint Chiefs of Staff have bowed to reality and told Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that “the time has come” to stop excluding women from combat positions. The transformation won’t happen immediately, and it might not be universal. But it’s still a groundbreaking change. When the recommendation became public Wednesday, except for a broadside from the Concerned Women for America (“our military cannot continue to choose social experimentation and political correctness over combat readiness”), the reception seemed overwhelmingly positive. [Emphasis added.]

It’s hard to remember—so many parts of recent history now seem hard to remember—but it was the specter of women under fire that did more than anything else to quash the movement for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in the 1970s. “We kept saying we hope no one will be in combat, but, if they are, women should be there, too,” recalled Gloria Steinem. (Gail Collins excerpt)

Why? Fortunately for the country, the stunningly failed plot by the anti-Second Amendment President Barack Hussein Obama and the 82nd U.S. Attorney General, Eric Himpton Holder, who seemingly share an aversion to the continued hegemony of the United States, flopped. Big time. We have, of course, under this current Administration, yet to get a full accounting of the bluffing, intransigence and simple mendacity involved in this audacious and simpleton scheme, which resulted in deaths of many innocents, including our own Border Patrol agent.

In a Newsmax article by David A. Patten, ex-Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke comments:

Former Navy SEAL commander and Montana State Sen. Ryan Zinke reacted sharply [Wednesday] to news the Obama administration will drop the prohibition against women serving in military combat roles, warning it is “nearly certain” to cost lives.

A Republican who served in the elite SEAL Team Six, Zinke cautioned that introducing male-female dynamics on the front lines “has the potential to degrade our combat readiness.”

“I know there are some women who can do the physical training,” Zinke told Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “When I was a SEAL instructor, the Olympic training center is in San Diego, and I watched some Olympic-caliber women athletes run through the obstacle course better than certainly many of the SEAL candidates could do.

“These were quality athletes. So physically, I think there are some women who can do it. But the issue is what are the unintended consequences? This is not a Demi Moore movie.

This administration seems to excel in leakproof debacles that then leak, hurt the country, hurt our citizenry, hurt our prestige and standing abroad (Think: Benghazi. Think: Algeria) yet manage never to result in an open airing of underlying orders and ideological priming that created the specific imbroglio. Somehow they only reluctantly come under the microscope of the bemusingly slacker media.

Ex-SEAL Zinke also suggested that the decision appears to be hastily undertaken and fails to reflect a real-world understanding of combat.

“The hard truth of combat oftentimes is brutal,” he said. “It involves face-to-face, hand-to-hand, close-quarter battle. And I think we forget that. We’ve become so sensitized that warfare is wrapped up in a 2-hour movie featuring stars who always live. And that’s not how it really is.”

Zinke said the decision to open up combat roles for women should have followed “a longer national discussion than a simple executive order.”

“I’m disappointed that it was taken lightly, and obviously it was,” he said.

Zinke also addressed concerns that mixing men and women on the front lines could impair unit morale and effectiveness.

In the case of women in the military, the “jobs” that could be provided would be taken up by men, if women do not fill them. The record of this government in the past four years has not been exemplary in their job numbers, either assessing the jobs they “will” create, or the jobs they “did create.” Both facets of employment in the public and private sectors have been, at best, extremely dubious, and given to all manner of Howevers, and data manipulations. The current 7.8% unemployment, for instance, “forgets” four million jobless who have given up in hopelessness, but they have been expunged from the official jobless rate, as have minority jobless figures, which conveniently ignore long-term unemployed among minorities. The true jobless rate is likely twice the official 7.8% in most cases.

But regarding the women in combat issue, again, this is yet another stealth way of de-balling the one institution in the country that works well, at least until the advent of the scorching budget cuts de-man the military’s effectiveness as a defensive and offensive force. It is no secret that the military is the orphan-child of a President who has little use for defense. His failure to react to provocations against our people on a global scale is already a scandal, at least among those who love the country, if not among the glazed eyes of the fawning and subterranean-IQ news corps.

Women in the military, in combat-forward posts, will further compromise esprit de corps, will lead to a heightening of the already-notable rape and sexual harassment in the ranks, will lead without question to a rise in unwanted pregnancies and liaisons (wanted or otherwise), and will create, as per the law of unexpected consequences, a host of other unconsidered sequellae. Men in command units cannot act as they normally would if a female colleague is threatened or in trouble: That spells certain disaster. Female soldiers might not be able to rescue fellow soldiers when one is injured. Women experiencing their menses may be sussed out by sensitive dogs and/or detection devices, and staked positions in camo may be disclosed.

Seem unlikely? It is not. Hunters refrain from aftershave and perfumed soaps when on the hunt, as do professional anglers: Animals and even fish can detect an infinitesimal taint of sweat, scent, cosmetics and ointments in hunters and fishermen.

This is not even to broach the fearsome scenario of captured females in war theaters. What will be done to captured women soldiers, when what is done to our brave male soldiers beggars description and defies comprehension for normal humans? All other armies are all-male–what are the uneven results of having a male and female force confronting an all-male force? Tennis gives us a good idea: The mixed-gender loses to the usually superior all-male singles.

The men making the decisions are, in this unmilitary Administration, largely unacquainted with military needs and circumstances, the President included. They are also signally uninterested in correcting their unacquaintedness with the military life. They know it all already, no lessons needed, thank you.

Is there any out? Perhaps. As James Taranto wrote on this topic in his Opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, Panetta's decision gives the military services until January 2016 to seek special exceptions if they believe any positions must remain closed to women.

Net-net, our now-disemboweled military, with the addition of albatross women in duties for which they are unfit and unsuited, will be rendered a laughingstock. Exactly as apparently desired by the current, regrettable, Administration.

This is not “equal rights” for women. It is unacceptable wrongs, for men, and for women. Adoption of this foolhardy misstep will entail headaches, loss of efficacy, and needless deaths. Those in the military who know whereof they speak have already predicted “almost certain needless deaths.”

As a colleague once remarked to me, when she felt she was being shafted by our employers: The fornicating we are getting is not worth the fornicating we are getting.


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