Women in The Military

If you look to the right, you’ll see the majority of the blogs I read most days are by current or former military members. One of them, American Mercenary’s, is once again looking at the utility/necessity of women in the .mil, and the recent decree from SecDef Leon "I'm Outta Here, So The Next Guy Can Deal With The Blowback" Panetta that “Women shall be assigned to combat units, because Susan B. Anthony.”

I respect AM's opinion, and I also recognize he's in a tough spot: an officer hoping to someday make field grade and get to retirement and a pension (or if not, faced with a promotion to  U.S. Civilian, First Class), besides not being in a position, as a serving officer, where he can freely tell the Ranks Above Reality that “The Emperor Is Naked!” even if he disagreed with this or any other policy.

 I don’t envy the position that puts him in, but those are constraints I don’t suffer from, and the "pro" argument for the policy is one I have no compunction about calling pure undiluted horseshit.

Women, for a host of reasons, have absolutely no place in combat units. (For the record, my SWAG is that would be 97% of the Marine Corps, probably at least 60-70% of the Army, any Navy ship longer than 8 feet, and any airbase outside of CONUS, or any U.S. military aircraft that leaves the airspace beyond our international borders.) The vast majority of women even in the service can't and couldn't meet the (formerly "normal", and now "male") physical requirements, not only the basic ones, but the MOS-specific requirements, and of those that could, you’d be lucky to find more than you could count with your fingers who could a) also handle the psychosocial toll b) wanted to be there  c) would last long enough to make the expense of dual accommodations cost-effective and d) would bring ANYTHING to the party that couldn’t be had better in spades from literal legions of male recruits with absolutely none of the costs, drawbacks, or social and military upheaval dragooning women into the mix has and will continue to create. More than that, were it not for the second-rate physical requirements, lower than males’ on purpose merely to allow women to gain admittance to the military in the first place, more than 95% of women would never have made it into the service in any capacity, and for that reason alone, don’t really belong there either. (So to the fewer than 5% of women who could meet the male physical standard, most of these remarks don't apply.)

But between AM’s posts in support of the new policy, and some of the half-brained comments, you’d think that all warfare in over 6000 years of recorded human history has totally changed in just the last 20 years - or is it the last 20 days? - to the point that now it's utterly impossible to prosecute a war successfully without Superchicks in the platoon. The thumping noise you hear is millions of troops from field marshals, generals, and admirals down to mere privates dating back to Babylonia spinning in their graves, if not the cacophony of their bony fleshless mandibles chattering in unrestrained mirth at such nonsense. 

Clearly, the total lack of women on the other side is the only logical explanation for our walkaway overwhelming military dominance against Iraq in 1991 and 2004. Gosh, if only we'd had women in combat in Vietnam and Korea, those gals could have blown those enemies right off the map, and then had the Rockettes square off against Ivan in the Fulda Gap for mere sport, making all that Cold War military spending a waste of good money.

And if you believe that, I can get you a killer deal on oceanfront property in Kansas.

The argument then gets made that we “need” women in all the newly created “Operations Other Than War” positions. I understand hearts and minds very well, and it's worth noting that the doctrine was pioneered by a bunch of  knuckle-dragging Marines and soldiers in places like Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Phillipines, when there were NO women involved in implementing it. In fact, other than a very few nurses in actual running-water brick & mortar hospitals and headquarters on paved streets, no women were present in the military services whatsoever, and yet those poor helpless men seem to have coped with the lack just fine. As Casey Stengel used to tell people, “you could look it up”.

The example furnished in one comment  was having some empathetic understanding female troop present to share the pain when our roughneck raiders kick down doors, break furniture, and get muddy bootprints on the camelhair rugs in whatever Trashcanistanian locale in the third world we’re currently heartlessly oppressing.

Calling a reality episode of "Ophrah" an "Operation Other Than War" is accurate, because the former has absolutely nothing to do with waging war - which incidentally is the first, second, and third through ninetyeighth purpose for raising, maintaining, and deploying the military. If Hadji's sister has a problem with her broken door, I don't give a flying fig who unruffles her feathers. But it sure as hell doesn't require anybody in a military uniform. Doors get kicked in all the time here in the U.S. by people in uniforms from Anchorage to Key West (not to mention Baghdad, Kabul, Riyadh, Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Islamabad, Teheran, ad infinitum where - I'm spitballing here - I'm willing to wager any amount the number of female officers has always hovered somewhere between 0.00% and 0.00%,  still does, and short of a religious reformation or thermonuclear rehabilitation of the culture, always will), and it pisses people off here too when their stuff gets broken. But they mainly just want the cash for a new door, and I don't think dollars, dinars, or deutschmarks ever came in military uniforms, or with internal or external genitalia attached, nor need to. And maybe one could look up whether we send  a Certified Non-Testicular Interior Decoration Restoration, Sympathy, and Snivvel-Wiping Team into Pakistan or Yemen every time we whack another Al Queda douchebag  and break a few windows, or whether we either just send a bag of condolence money, or simply a brusk suggestion on which words in the dictionary to find "Sympathy" between. (For those who never served, that lexical location would be betwixt “$#!^” and “syphilis”.)

I’d love to hear the results of that research, because if we aren't carpet-bombing Yemen with an Avon Lady follow up team after every Hellfire strike, it kind of begs the BS question of what makes them so imaginarily necessary in Iraq, A-stan, or anywhere else, ever, and leaves the argument in favor of the military “needing” them  standing on the curb with its pants around its ankles.

Sorry to use logic and all, but I can't help not having picked the silly side of this argument.