In continuing the discussion of opening combat roles to women, we have the argument that women are already there, deploying and 
fighting in hot zones. This is true, and it gives us a record of the problems we are already experiencing as a result.
Wasted: Valuable Time, Training, and Resources
I talk about several of the female-only issues for which extra accommodations have to be made in my previous article. We are not equal except in our rights under our Constitutional Law. Nature has no regard for equality, and each one of us is born uniquely different from each other. We are diverse and dissimilar in our talents, physical aspects, intellect and emotions, and the sexes are inherently different.
We know, for example, that women are much more prone to certain types of infections. For a woman on patrol, setting up an ambush, or, as the infantry do, living in abandoned buildings with no running water and sleeping in close quarters, hygiene is a constant problem. A urinary tract infection can quickly become a kidney infection (debilitating in itself) and then kidney failure if left unchecked. Suddenly a woman needs to be evacuated for a problem that has nothing to do with combat and to which men are not susceptible.
Then there’s pregnancy. Margaret Wente writes, “One study of a brigade operating in Iraq found that female soldiers were evacuated at three times the rate of male soldiers – and that 74 percent of them were evacuated for pregnancy-related issues.”
Women leaving the combat zone three times as much as men! And mostly due to shacking up and getting pregnant. It costs something like a million dollars per individual to get trained through bootcamp and additionally to be made ready for deployment. Those are taxpayer dollars spent on someone who has to turn around and leave the combat zone to have a baby (for which our tax dollars also pay), having nothing to do with combat.
Changing Our Best Instincts: Protecting Women, Mothering Children
We know that rape is a tool of torture for the already savage enemy we’re fighting. In one TV interview a woman suggested that if women are willing to take that risk, we should let them. She also absurdly claimed that men are raped as much as women when captured, which is patently false.
But the idea that men shouldn’t worry any more about women in battle goes against the very best primal male instinct.
In every country from Canada to Israel where women are in combat (and in American units where women are in theater), the men will tell you they are more protective of the women. It’s different from men’s protection of each other, and it distracts from mission completion. The pro-WICs would have men thwart this wonderful and thoroughly ingrained instinct. A world in which men don’t feel a strong need to protect women when they’re in the most dangerous and hostile of environments would be a nightmare. We would rightly call those men brutes.
We’re also thwarting mothers’ nurturing instincts. Women are already training to kill and leaving their children to deploy, even when they are the sole caregiver (turning care over namely to grandparents). This sets a bad precedent and hurts children. There will always be war, and it’s bad enough for fathers to leave their children to fight necessarily, but to allow mothers to choose this path over motherhood is bad for everyone. There are many noble capacities in which women with children can fight for this country, such as administrative jobs stateside. We don’t need to deploy mothers to battle, we shouldn’t.
The Career-Hungry
A small handful of high-ranking females have instigated this policy change in order to advance their own careers. In this interview, Anu Bhagwati, a former Captain, complains about women not being able to promote to certain ranks, claims that women aren’t getting proper recognition for action in combat (a claim also made here), and that it’s harder for them to get combat-injury-related benefits from the VA.
Regarding the latter, I know females who are receiving combat-injury-related benefits, so if there are some who are not receiving them but should, the bureaucratic, inefficient, fraud-riddled VA should be confronted. Administrative changes could certainly be considered to take care of veterans as we should – regardless of sex – for injuries sustained in battle thus far. As for recognition of action, this is also a bureaucratic aspect that can be addressed through the chain of command without changing the policies on women in combat units. And finally as to rank, cry me a river. The military is about preparing for an executing war, not advancing your career at the cost of readiness for war.
The careerists are also on the hook for the double standard that we currently have for the sexes, which inherently lowers the standards overall. Even if one standard is imposed, it’s likely it will be an overall lower standard. As the Center for Military Readiness points out, “The same advocates who demand ‘equal opportunities’ in combat are the first to demand unequal, gender-normed standards to make it ‘fair.’”
Enormous pressure from Washington is already on the military brass to fill quotas of race and sex, and the higher they get, the more politically motivated the brass’ decisions. Whereas imposing one higher standard would in fact result in fewer women serving in these roles, the political pressure to prove diversity will result in more unqualified women (and men) attaining positions for which men are more qualified. But go against the diversity status quo dictated by Washington and you can kiss your rank and career goodbye. The purges have already begun.
The word discriminate has several meanings, including “to distinguish particular features, to be discerning; showing insight and understanding,” and its synonyms are “wise, perceptive, prudent.” We should absolutely be discriminating in our criteria for war preparation, and the lives of our men in uniform depend on us taking an honest, discerning look at who adds to military readiness and who detracts from it. We should absolutely not open the combat units to the myriad problems we face already with women deploying to the theatre of war.
The Globe & Mail: Women in Combat: Let’s Get Real
National Geographic : 8 Other Nations That Send Women to Combat
Center for Military Readiness: Seven Reasons Why Women-in-Combat Diversity Will Degrade Tough Training Standards
Hot Air: Some advice on women in combat from a female veteran
The Washington Post: Most Americans back women in combat roles, poll says
Jude Eden blogs at Poltical Animal and is a graduate of Hillsdale College in Michigan and the Hallmark Institute of Photography in Massachusetts.
She served in the Marine Corps from 2004-2008 and deployed to Fallujah, Iraq in 2005-6.
She is a cancer survivor and cellist now living in North Carolina with her Brazilian husband.