CNN Spot: 2 Females Graduate Ranger School – Why Maintain the Combat Exclusion?

I had the opportunity to discuss why putting women into the combat units is bad policy on CNN today:

Let me count the ways in brief. (I go in depth on many of these here.)

When one group predictably has the lowest upper body strength and a much higher rate of injury, putting them in the combat units adds weakness, not strength.  When standards have been consistently lowered every time military jobs are opened to women, we can trust they will continue to be, formally or informally, as active duty men and women are pressured to show the success the top brass demands in order to fulfill their gender politics agenda.  Needless to say, lowering our military training standards adds weakness, not strength.  When adding one group to the other creates sexual dynamics that are distracting at the least and destructive at the worst and that don’t exist for men by themselves, that’s adding weakness, not strength.  When one group needs many more accommodations that cost additional money, material and resources and add on to standard operating procedures, it adds weakness, not strength.  When one group has much higher potential to be yanked from the field for non-war related issues from infection to pregnancy, adding them to the combat units adds weakness, not strength.  When one group is a higher value target to the enemy, putting them into the units raises the risk for everyone, adding weakness, not strength.  When men are naturally more protective of those high-value targets – a wonderful primal instinct we do NOT want to curb – adding women to the units adds weakness, not strength.

These are all things that activists for women in combat and those who think they are forward-thinking good feminists brush off as nothing, myths, remnants of archaic patriarchal misogyny in need of re-education and attitude adjustment.  They studiously ignore the concerns voiced by infantry veterans who know what it takes to win at ground combat, and what hinders their success. They studiously ignore the harm to women and the fact that most enlisted women do not want to be assigned to the combat units.  The standards aren’t set high to purposely keep women out, they are high to sift out all weakness that obstructs the goal: victory in war with the least casualties possible.  Opposition to women in combat units is not about traditional roles, suppressing women or hanging on to a bygone era.  Women don’t strengthen combat, they weaken it, obviously and predictably. Our men want the strongest combat units possible with the least amount of unnecessary risk so they and their brethren are more likely to come home alive in victory.  They naturally balk at being told that weakness is strength, that it’s just their attitude that needs adjusting.

Ironically, the Diversity commission and other women-in-combat activists pushing gender politics in the military will defeat their own purpose by opening the combat units.  Fewer and fewer women will have long-term military careers as they suffer more and more injuries and have to medically retire out of service.  Fewer will re-enlist in order to preserve their health and well being.  Because of the prospect of being assigned to a combat unit, especially as we’re seeing what ISIS is doing to Christians, women, children, and anyone who doesn’t share their zealotry, women who could otherwise be of great service to the military in non-combat roles will no longer consider joining, and the left will lose its battle of equal representation for women anyway.