March 22, 2016

Recipe for Disaster: Assigning Unqualified Women to Combat Leadership

By Jude Eden, Jane of Trades

As published at Stream.org March 21, 2016.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter grabbed headlines last week when he announced that President Obama would soon nominate the first woman to head a major U.S. military Northern combatant command. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the Marine Corps Times, female officers and staff non-commissioned officers (NCOs) will soon be assigned to infantry units in order to “begin building the cadre of women leaders,” to support female enlisted Marines. Males in both ranking and subordinate positions are supposed to accept female leadership that has not completed the Infantry Officer Course (IOC) because they will be serving in support roles:

These female Marines or sailors will help male infantrymen adjust to the changes in their units before female grunts join their battalions, said Col. Anne Weinberg, deputy director of manpower integration.

“We really didn’t look at them as helping the junior female Marines,” she said. “We really looked at helping the unit writ large — as a resource to the commander, as a sounding board …”

The first ingredient in this recipe for disaster is the female Marines’ lack of qualification. That no women have been able to pass the grueling IOC may be ignored by the Pentagon and Marine Corps leadership, but it certainly won’t be by subordinates in the infantry units themselves, nor should it. Where the women did not earn their place like the rest of the grunts, there will be no trust, respect or faith in their leadership. And since these women will not have worked their way up in the field, they will have no idea how these units should be run.

That they are supposed to be in “supporting roles” is meaningless since they will be in charge of the lower enlisted ranks. Placing unqualified female leaders, especially officers, in combat units goes against the very essence of Marine infantry officers whose motto is Ductus Exemplo, leadership by example.

The IOC standards are very high because infantry officers must not only be educated, brave and highly athletic. They also must be better at everything than the members of their units because Marine officers lead their men into battle from the front. The pressure is already on to lower IOC standards so that women can pass them  and thereby the military can meet the “diversity metrics” (quotas) by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and others.

This is what “gender-norming” has always meant: standards that are equal but lower for all, and  tests and events where women’s performance is consistently inferior to men’s are diluted or removed. Thus the disparities between the sexes are masked — until, of course, they resurface in a real battle situation where the need to sprint quickly in heavy gear and carry heavy weapons, overcome an attacker in close quarters combat, or haul a wounded comrade out of battle is no longer a matter of passing some watered down test designed to make Washington politicians happy but a life-and-death matter of uncompromising physics.

The other glaring element that will destroy unit cohesion and lead to mission failure is the splitting of the chain of command:

“The female officers and staff NCOs’ secondary mission will be to serve as a resource for any female infantrymen who join the battalions, Weinberg said. “If they feel like there’s something they can’t talk to their male leader about, just to have that same gender face.”

This will tear out the heart of the combat units, which is their small-team leadership: the fire team leaders, squad leaders and platoon commanders. Under this plan Marines can go cry to the female when they don’t like whatever their male leadership is doing, just like children playing one parent off the other. Such division can only result in hate and discontent in the ranks, obliterating the good order and discipline so essential to their success.

The recipe wouldn’t be complete without the requisite politically correct indoctrination when it comes to assigning individual jobs within the units for which Marines will be trained using “vignettes.”

“Some of the scenarios are: You’re in the field; you only have this certain amount of space for billeting and you’ve got three women and six guys; how are you going to billet?” Weinberg explained.

Putting the “right” number of women in positions regardless of qualification – just like their leadership – will be the order of the day for any Marine whose own promotions and positions will be at risk if they object or balk in any way.

This is a set-up for destruction of the combat units from the inside out. As with the combat integration policy as a whole, there is nothing in place to assess the real fallout. When it fails, those promoting it have already set in place to blame leadership and training. But there’s no leadership or training in the world that can make success out of an unworkable plan that depends on denying the realities of human nature, human biology and combat. The next president, if willing, may be able to turn this around, but there will be a lot of damage in the meantime to both the fabric of the combat arms and the men and women serving therein.

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February 23, 2016

No, Women Should Not Be Included in the Draft

By Jude Eden, Jane of Trades

As published at The Daily Signal, February 16, 2016.

Photo: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Caleb McDonald/Released

Photo: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Caleb McDonald/Released

The question of drafting America’s young daughters is finally making the average voter consider the real implications of fully integrating the combat arms. The large majority of the population may have little or no connection to the military and therefore no concept of what’s at stake, until now. They’ve simply supported the idea because they support women generally, and think it’ll be their choice.

Drafting women is a bad idea because putting women into combat units is a bad idea on a myriad of fronts from degraded combat readiness to skyrocketing injuries, risk, expense, and danger to the long-term medical bill and increased casualties. We always need men to fight whereas drafting women is totally unnecessary.

Justifying a policy with such wide-ranging negative impacts based on the performance of a couple of women like the ones who graduated Ranger School is ludicrous. Having equal natural rights under the law does not mean men and women are the same. Combat is not an equal opportunity for women because they don’t have an equal opportunity to survive.

The combat integration policy has been sold to us on smoke. Advocates for it have made the demonstrably false claim that women are physically capable of anything military men are while decades of military and sports medicine studies prove the opposite. They’ve ignored the heavy negative effects that sexual dynamics already have on coed units, especially those that deploy. They’ve told us women becoming men’s physical equals is just a matter of leadership and training when women tested continually demonstrate it’s nature, not nurture, dictating the reality here.

These same proponents have maligned the Marine Corps’ impeccable 9-month Gender Integration Task Force study as “flawed”—except for the parts they like, of course. They love the part about co-ed teams being better at decision-making but omitted that the women were rested at the time, and these were a mere two of the 134 combat tasks. That all-male teams outperformed them on 69 percent of tasks and they retained more than twice men’s injuries must be hushed up and suppressed as they obliterate the argument that women strengthen combat readiness.

With a dictate from Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus to increase female representation in the ranks to 25 percent, top-performing military women can be plucked from their units to “show success” in a combat unit. If the next president agrees with this scheme, who’s to say he or she won’t use the draft to get the desired “diversity metrics”? The Obama administration has done all sorts of unprecedented things. Women, especially athletic ones, are not going to have the choice to ride a desk to “free a man to fight” like in WWII. They will be under orders just like men, and they will go where the military needs them even if that “need” is to achieve “diversity metrics.”

The prospect of drafting women brings the issue home to average Americans who before had no skin in the game. Realizing now that this isn’t just about “a few women who want to,” they are starting to internalize the meaning of “tip of the spear,” and they don’t want their daughters there, fighting the rape- and beheading-happy ISIS. Technology has not lessened the face-to-face bludgeoning that our infantrymen are doing when the gun jams or ammo runs out as they’re fighting house to house and cave to cave on foot.

But is it too little, too late? The policy is in place, but policies change. Although Israel hasn’t put women in direct combat since 1948, they experimented with women in tank crews and the armored corps and reversed the policy. Britain, too, has gone back and forth depending on who’s in office. Although neither is comparable to the U.S. military’s size and scope, both found the same problems: much higher injuries and lower performance among women that skyrocketed costs and degraded readiness.

Congress can defund or postpone the effort in the next National Defense Authorization Act, or postpone implementation until they can review the studies and ramifications. It may take the next president to reinstate women’s combat exemption, but it can be done.

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February 9, 2016

All GOP Presidential Candidates but Cruz Afraid to Defend Women’s Combat Exemption

By Jude Eden, Jane of Trades

 Published on February 9, 2016 at Stream.org.

Saturday’s GOP primary debate question about women and the draft highlighted the fact that most of the candidates are so terrified of the “war on women” label that they repeat the left’s position on women in combat and the draft without serious thought or consideration.

Female-soldiersThe facts are overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining women’s combat exemption, and one of those facts is that combat is not an equal opportunity for women, rendering selective service obligations totally inappropriate. None save Ted Cruz seem even aware of the case, let alone is willing to make it. He wasn’t asked the question in the debate and so released his opinion after, saying that drafting women is “nuts”:

“Listen, we have had enough with political correctness, especially in the military. Political correctness is dangerous. And the idea that we would draft our daughters to forcibly bring them into the military and put them in close combat, I think is wrong. It is immoral and if I’m president we ain’t doing it.”

We all knew registration for selective service was the next logical step after opening the combat arms to women. As I’ve written previously, most wouldn’t open their eyes to the actual implications of this policy change until they were faced with their daughters signing up for hand-to-hand combat with the likes of ISIS. While some dismiss the likelihood of the draft, this president has done all sorts of unprecedented things. The Marine Corps is currently 8% female. Who’s to say what the President or his potentially spineless successor would do to fulfill Ray Mabus’s demand to have “diversity metrics” of 25% female representation in the military ranks?

Lawmakers and military leaders are using the draft question to do what they should have been doing since the first announcement to repeal women’s exemption back in January, 2013: demanding congressional oversight, public debate and scrutiny, and Congressional voting on the measure so that lawmakers can be held accountable by voters.

ISIS-600

ISIS kills own to stop more desertions

People with common sense know viscerally that putting women in direct combat is wrong. Now we’re left to deal with the fallout of the Obama-imposed doublethink: celebrating sexuality of all sorts in the military while suppressing natural sexual differences. The brutal reality is that women would have to become more masculine because that’s what victory in combat with the fewest casualties requires. In order to accommodate being around more women, the men are to curb their masculinity and aggression, traits that make them good war fighters. But they’re going to have to train the way they fight. That means they will have beat up on the women especially in the infantry because, after all, that’s what it takes to prepare them against face to face bloody, violent, direct ground combat.

I know something about this kind of training. A black belt with seven years training in several forms by the time I joined the Marines, I continued in their martial arts program, which combines all of the world’s most offensive fighting styles. Throughout those years I paired up with all different guys to train. The fast wiry guy, the short stocky guy, the 6’5” beefcake, the tall gangly strong guy. So you throw the guy, and throw the guy, and throw the guy, and you get thrown, and get thrown and get thrown. You kick in the gut and you practice getting your gut kicked in.

I thought a lot about this in the years living on my own after college and then, with all the additional training, in Fallujah. I thought about it on convoys, on the street, at our checkpoints outside the wire as my group of females and I frisked women for explosives, or when in the confines of camp late at night. Even Rhonda Rousy at the top of her undefeated streak admitted that she would not fight a man, since a man would have a natural and unbridgeable advantage. No, this is not an equal prospect for women, and this is why the combat exemption should be reinstated.

But we’ve been sold for decades on Hollywood depictions of women besting men everywhere they go. The Obama administration and the women-in-combat hucksters are counting on you not to realize that it’s all fiction. They misrepresent the stakes and ignore the consequences. They conflate deployment in general with offensive combat missions in particular. They tell us “women have been in combat for years.”

In fact, women have been deploying to the combat zone for years, not engaging in kill missions hunting the enemy on foot, house to house and cave to cave for months in filth, on deployment after deployment. Exposure to combat is not the same as combat itself, and doing a dangerous support job in a dangerous place is not the same as qualifying for the infantry to directly destroy the enemy on the ground.

The selective service question we heard in this week’s GOP debate is inseparable from the question of integrating the combat arms. And it is the second question that needs to be debated. This has never been about a few women who want to engage in direct combat. It has always been about the right thing to do for both women and the success of the most lethal fighting force our taxpayer dollars can buy, unhindered by avoidable problems, added risk and danger.

We need the fastest and the best to defeat our enemies as quickly as possible. We’ve already lost too many good war-experienced men in purge after purge of leadership under Obama, and he continues to slash personnel by the tens of thousands. We’ve wasted millions on the research they ignored and will waste billions of dollars and thousands of precious lives in an experiment that’s guaranteed to fail because it ignores realities of human nature and war.

Can it be that only one of nine GOP candidates realizes that this isn’t about equal career opportunities?

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January 14, 2016

What’s Wrong With Coed Boot Camp?

By Jude Eden, Jane of Trades

Published at Laura Ingraham’s Lifezette.com January 13, 2016

CaptureOn January 1st Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ordered the Marines to provide plans by January 15th for boot camp to go coed.  ABC.com reports that “Mabus also warned Marine Corps leaders not to use any concerns about integrating women into combat jobs as ways to delay the process.”  The problems with integrating boot camp are the same as those of integrating the combat arms, so the Marines are not allowed to talk about it.  Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter used this tactic when, ahead of his Dec. 3 decision, he put a gag rule on discussing women in combat and the Marines’ 9 month integration study which showed that compared to males in combat tasks, female Marines were slower, couldn’t lift as much weight, were less accurate shooters and retained more than twice the injuries.  Now the Marines must comply not only with integration of the combat arms but, suddenly, integration of boot camp, post-haste.  Any problems with either will be blamed on leadership and training.  That leadership will be purged and purged again until everyone is singing the right tune.  If you were interested in what Soviet-style dictatorship looks like, this is it.

As a nation, we already compared separate-sex and coed boot camps and found the Marine Corps’ methods far superior.  In the 1999 Congressional Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related Issues, the commission’s chairman, Anita Blair said, “gender-integrated training entails special problems that simply do not arise in gender-separate training. These problems revolve around the difficulties of providing appropriate privacy for both sexes, accommodating fundamental physiological differences, and controlling sexual conduct.”

Sexual Dynamics & a Myriad of (Expensive) Consequences

imageThe Army knows intimately what can go wrong combining young end-of-teen-aged kids together in the formative period of boot camp.  Remember Aberdeen?  Multiple Army drill sergeants were abusing their authority and having sex with or raping females under their charge.  Even when relationships are consensual the damage can be just as great.  The expenses are high in time, money and effort to shuffle personnel due to relationships, fraternizing, pregnancy, misconduct and the litigation thereof, let alone the destructive impacts to the personnel themselves and their units.  That we’ve come to tolerate this mess in the fleet and other branches’ boot camps hardly justifies doing more of it by forcing the Marines to follow suit.

If there’s one thing that’s primal and unchanging, it’s that men and women are distracted by each other.  The second you throw them together they’re checking how they look and competing for each other’s attention.  The fallout can run the spectrum from marriage and/or babies to serving in the brig for rape.  It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the east, and all the ripples created detract from the objective: training to become the nation’s enemy-killers.  Advocates for total integration insist “we’re professionals,” as if professionals don’t hook up and mess up their lives and jobs.  Regardless, new recruits are hardly professionals, and boot camp is not an office job.  Harassment?  That’s boot camp: you can’t train young kids to attack and defend without some touching.  A drill instructor’s simple correction or instruction can be construed as harassment when done by the opposite sex.

(Photo by Cpl. Caitlin Brink)

(Photo by Cpl. Caitlin Brink c/o popularmilitary.com)

Having separate boot camps allowed the Marines to postpone or at least greatly minimize the opportunity for all these problems until after recruits had finished their training and earned the title.  (The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has worked to sexualize areas that were once neutral, worsening these negative impacts.  Same-sex sexual assaults are on the rise since its repeal.)

Quotas & Lowered Standards

Double standards for women have been in place since their full integration into the military in 1948 because every time they tested against men’s standards, they didn’t perform as well as the men and retained more injuries.  Also, men and women don’t like being treated the same.  What’s neutral between men can be considered harassment to a woman and vice versa, and what’s tough for women tends not to be challenging enough for men.

When West Point was integrated and 61% of female plebes failed the men’s physical fitness test (PFT) compared to less than 5% of men, separate lower standards were created for women.  It was the same in the Air Force’s Cadet Wing when they couldn’t perform the pull-ups or complete most of the men’s other standard tests.  In every branch’s PFT, women have more time to run and don’t have to do as much or the same requirements as men.  In 2013 the Marine Corps tried to get female recruits to achieve the men’s minimum three pull-ups and gave active duty females the option to do pull-ups instead of the arm-hang.  They dropped the requirement when, in over a year of boot camp cycles training for the goal, less than half of female recruits (compared to 98% of males) could make the standard and only 15% of active duty females elected to do them at all.

Marine General John Kelly is right in saying “There will be great pressure” to lower the standards to accommodate women and fulfill the Obama administration’s destructive policy.  While claiming there will be no quotas, Mabus has already demanded an increase to 25% female representation in the ranks.  The only way to satisfy that requirement is to lower those standards.  They will call them gender-normed “new” standards, and “equal” will be equally lower for all.

Recruiters now have an impossible task to perform.  Women are already five times harder and more expensive to recruit because very few women want to join the military and fewer are qualified.  While having to pull in much greater numbers to reach that 25%, the young women who can make combat standards is a yet smaller pool even in the age of Crossfit.  Now that women’s combat exemption is to be fully repealed, the potential for involuntary assignment to combat jobs and competing with men in those jobs are all deterrents for young women thinking of enlisting.

Conclusion

The Marines have been the last hold-outs on integrating training just as they have been for the combat arms because the Marines are in the business of killing.  Gen. Kelly had it right when he said the question is whether or not this policy makes us more lethal: “If the answer to that is no, clearly don’t do it…”

Recruits graduating coed boot camp will be a lower-caliber breed of Marine, Guinea pigs required to follow orders and “prove” integration a success.   Injuries and misconduct will increase even as standards are “gender-normed” lower, but as long as everyone delivers their lines correctly: “Women in combat is a great idea! Women are the same as men in the infantry!” that’s all that matters. That we’re supposed to be training them to fight and win against the likes of ISIS with the fewest casualties possible is irrelevant.  Ain’t modernity grand?  Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

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December 30, 2015

Women in Combat: No, Most Military Women Didn’t Ask For This

By Jude Eden, Jane of Trades

As published at Stream.org December 22, 2015.

The author before heading out on convoy to checkpoint duty, Fallujah, 2005.

The author before heading out on convoy to checkpoint duty, Fallujah, 2005.

Don’t confuse most military women with the tiny feminist cabal comprised of a few officers and a lot of political groups who’ve been pushing for complete integration of the combat arms.

There is a vindictive refrain accompanying Ashton Carter’s recent dictat that the combat arms be opened to women without exception. “You women asked for this,” some seem to be saying, “now suck it up.” No, most military women did not ask for it, but the few times they’ve been asked, their voices have been ignored in favor of a teeny tiny group dishonestly claiming, “This is equality.” Some 92.5% of enlisted women surveyed by the Army in 2014 said they didn’t want to be assigned to combat units. Surveys by the Army Research Institute have yielded similar results. This colossal majority matters because it is they who will pay the price for this asinine policy pushed by a small few.

That some men who join the military may also be unwilling is irrelevant. Men are uniquely suited to the demands of combat and we will always need them to fight. We don’t need women in direct ground combat and, in fact, evidence shows they hinder success and incur greater harm than men.

More than anyone, military women know how much harder the physical demands are on our bodies compared with men. Our military training makes us tougher, but it doesn’t make us interchangeable with male peers, let alone men at the infantry level.

There is zero evidence showing that women strengthen combat units and plenty of evidence to the contrary. That’s why the administration and its mouthpieces, Ray Mabus and Ashton Carter, ignored the Marine Corps’ 9-month integration study that showed all-male teams outperformed coed teams on 69% of combat tasks and women suffered over twice the injuries. The study was heavy on oversight and engaged the best personnel. Its results echoed what we already know from decades of testing and injury stats. In other words, the results were nothing new. After saying they would consider exemption requests upon serious review of data, the administration ignored all of it.

Many women who fail to make infantry standards think it’s only they individually who cannot prove to be the equal of infantrymen, but that some women out there might. But we never seem to see the amazon women materialize in real life. Women are finding they cannot overcome Nature but they’re being told it’s men’s attitudes holding them back. What cruelty.

Women want to serve their country with dignity and honor. They want to be successful where they serve. They don’t want the standards lowered, to be quota fillers or to hinder the units that require the best of the very best, the most skilled at direct violence on behalf of our national defense. The decision to fully integrate the combat arms without exception puts women in the worst place of all, at far greater risk than their male peers and on the receiving end of undeserved resentment.

When making military policy that has sweeping ramifications for all America’s women, responsible stewards would base the decision on the 99.9% who don’t volunteer for such service, not on the tiny feminist element of the tiny fraction who do volunteer.

The blame for soon-to-be lowered standards, weakened combat effectiveness, increased injuries, greater expense, lost battles and higher rates of attrition lies with the feminist harpies who’ve been pushing this for the better part of 45 years and the men who’ve surrendered to them without a fight. These men are spineless politicians in uniform who’ve stood up neither for combat readiness nor for the welfare of men and women alike serving in uniform, and spineless members of Congress who have been derelict in their oversight duties.

They’ve had all the facts on their side — a mountain of them — for both effectiveness in battle and troop welfare. Yet they have been unwilling to claim their responsibility or make the case. Our enlisted men and women will pay with heavier loses of life and limb, the country with weakened national defense.

The Obama administration has been undermining and dismantling the military since Obama took office. That he would impose a reckless and destructive policy on a group that has no choice but to obey orders is no surprise. That the supposed opposition would capitulate so abjectly is inexcusable.

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December 16, 2015

Thanks, Ashton – Women Now Subject to Involuntary Assignment to Combat Units, Selective Service

By Jude Eden, Jane of Trades

As published at Breitbart, December 10, 2015.

AP_353703431946-640x480

AP Photo/Cliff Owen

This morning I had an intense conversation with a mother of a new female Marine. Mutual friends had messaged us about yesterday’s announcement by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter that all units without exception would be opened to women. This marine’s mother thought that only women who want to will be assigned to combat units.

She was understandably upset at being informed that repealing women’s combat exemption removes choice from the equation for recruits and active-duty women and subjects all young American women to Selective Service obligations. Before the House of Armed Services Committee Marine Lt. General Robert Milstead was asked about this directly and confirmed: “That’s why they call them ‘orders.’” That was 2013, and earlier this month Ashton Carter re-emphasized the same:

Q:  Mr. Secretary, will the women’s desire to enter combat roles or missions be entirely voluntary? Or will there be a time to — where they could, like many of their male counterparts, be required to go into combat missions?

SEC. CARTER: Absolutely. If you’re a service member, you have some choices, but you don’t have absolute — absolute choice. People are assigned to missions, tasks, and functions according to need as well as their capabilities. And women will be subject to the same standard and rules that men will.

That mother’s shock and distress is something I knew would come and will never leave me. I have seen it over and over again. Most people don’t understand that this is not a matter of what a couple of willing and able women want. A 2013 New York Times poll and others like it would have us believe that Americans generally support putting women in combat units. However, the questioning always includes the critical and false caveat if women want to. In the military we’re all under orders and women are no different. With exemption fully repealed, top-performing women can be plucked from their units and placed along with highly athletic female recruits at the very front to wage offensive action at point blank range whether they want to or not. Where the idea that military men and women are interchangeable is being pushed and our unchanging biological differences are ignored, there will be even less consideration to women’s unique concerns. If you think assignment against consent is unlikely, consider the case of Army Pfc Stephanie Filus. Promised she wouldn’t be sent to the front lines by her recruiter precisely because Department of Defense policy prohibited it, the light wheeled vehicle mechanic was later told by officers of her 101st Airborne unit that she would be deployed to Iraq in a forward support company (FSC) with an infantry unit:

“Filus was aware, however, that the FSC would be physically attached and collocated with an infantry maneuver battalion, despite the collocation rule. Her attempts to obtain a discharge prior to that deployment were denied, and she was sent to Fort Polk, Lousiana, for pre-deployment training. Filus finally obtained her discharge from the Army in May 2005, but only after she took the desperate and dangerous step of attempting suicide with pills in front of the commanding officer at Fort Polk.”

One shudders to think what unwilling women might do to avoid being placed at the very tip of America’s spear.

The combat exemption was also the only thing constitutionally standing between women and the draft. Some think drafting women is only fair, and that might be true if the risks among men and women were equal. But they are far from it — rendering combat a very unequal opportunity in which women are at a severe disadvantage. Imagine your daughter in a one-on-one cage fight with a member of ISIS. No rules, no ref. Hand-to-hand combat is not a relic of Vietnam and prior wars. Get to know those who’ve been there and what they went through in direct combat missions in Iraq or Afghanistan. Read their accounts which chronicle having to bludgeon fanatics on methamphetamines with their bare hands or whatever they could grab. This is what direct ground combat means despite our technological advancements. How is this an equal opportunity when women don’t have the same chance of survival?

This policy will destroy more women than it will help, and more men and missions in the process. When viewed along with Obama’s refusal to name our radical Islamic enemies or even acknowledge that we are at war with them, it’s clear this is all of a piece: the fundamental transformation of America is nothing but destruction. The repeal of women’s combat exemption is nothing to celebrate. It’s more appropriate to mourn.

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December 7, 2015

Combat Harms Women & Combat Effectiveness

By Jude Eden, Jane of Trades

As published at Laura Ingraham’s LifeZette, December 7, 2015.

Capture3Many are not surprised that Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter chose to fully repeal the women’s combat exemption, especially those who’ve been pushing for it.  But many regular Americans are surprised at what it actually means.

The mother of a new female Marine I spoke with last week was understandably upset to find out women can now be involuntarily assigned to these units, just like men.

Carter confirmed this when he said, “People are assigned to missions, tasks, and functions according to need as well as their capabilities. And women will be subject to the same standard and rules that men will.” Women may also now be subject to selective service obligations.

These may be classified as decisions in the name of “equality,” except that women don’t have an equal opportunity for survival and success in the violence of real combat at point-blank range. For many Americans, the reality is only now starting to sink in.

The tiny few who are willing and maybe able still bring much higher risk of injury, lesser performance and are higher value targets to our enemies, all of which unnecessarily adds risk and weakness for everyone involved. The Marine Corps’ recent 9-month integration study showed that all-male teams outperformed coed teams in 69 percent of combat tasks.

Women — top performers who had made men’s minimum fitness standards and passed enlisted infantry training — were slower, were less accurate shooters, struggled with tasks requiring upper body strength, and suffered more than double the injuries of men.

These factors can’t be ignored when speed is a weapon and brute strength is at a premium, but that’s exactly what Carter did in his decision.

Women are also at a significant disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat against men who want to kill them. Technology has not changed the violence of close quarters combat, as the accounts of infantry veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan amply show. They have been using their knives and bare hands face to face when required. No, this is not equal opportunity.

The secretary assured us that women will have to meet the same high standards as men, but how is that really possible when, for example, none of the 29 women who attempted the Marine’s Officer Infantry Course were able to pass? In the initial announcement of repeal, Gen. Martin Dempsey called for the standards to be “re-evaluated,” putting the onus on the combat units to prove why their standards are so high if women can’t make them, while also requiring “that there are a sufficient number of females entering the career field and already assigned to the related commands and leadership positions.”

Where will these women come from? We couldn’t even get a solid 30 to try for OIC. Most who did dropped due to injury, and none were able to show they could match the men’s physical ability.

The only way to achieve “sufficient numbers” and make up for both higher injuries and weaker performance is to lower the standards. Not formally, of course, but the standards have been lowered every time more military jobs have been opened to women.

This policy decision also won’t really help women’s military careers, the entire foundation of the argument for putting women in combat. The real effect will more likely be to handicap them. Take a woman at the top of her field in a noncombat military occupational specialty and drop her in a combat unit with the highest performing males and you’ve just killed her career prospects. No matter the standards, men especially at this level will always outperform women, permanently relegating them at best to the bottom half of their units.

Carter’s decision will also likely result in less female representation in the ranks over time, presumably the opposite of what advocates for repeal want. Since the colossal majority of active-duty women say they don’t want to be assigned to these units — 92.5 percent of enlisted Army women according to a 2014 Army survey, with similar results in other branches surveyed — the female talent we’re told is so critical is likely to walk out the door. Young women considering joining, already five times harder and more expensive to recruit, are likely to be more deterred by the possibility of involuntary assignment.

There are star performers who can and have been used effectively and recognized for their achievements without integrating all-male units thus far. But you don’t make a policy with such broad negative consequences based on the performance of an unusual few who, no matter the standards, are at far higher risk.

The averages matter, and military women tending not to be able to perform at infantry standards and to be injured at more than twice the rate of men means that women in combat units are likely to have to be replaced at far higher rates. They will not be competitive with their male peers, and will leave the military sooner and with more life-long disabilities. Not to mention, we have to break hundreds of women just to get to one who can make the men’s minimums.

The story isn’t over. This was never Carter’s decision. It was and is the American people’s. Congress has it in its power to defund this effort through the next defense authorization bill, and the next president can reinstate exemption just as it was repealed, administratively. But not before much disruption is inflicted on our men and women in uniform who are now preparing to face ISIS in Syria.

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