At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the military’s primary concern
seems to be “diversity” with all of its hideous hydra heads, not winning
wars
writes Iraq War veteran
Benjamin Duffy in his post on Barack Obama's
Recipe For A Weaker Military.
The Pentagon continues to charge full speed ahead toward integration of
women into combat roles by 2016. If you harbored any doubts that
standards will be lowered in order to achieve the goal, rest assured
that they will be.
Perhaps you’ve heard otherwise. In January, then-Secretary of Defense
Leon Panetta told reporters,
”If members of our military can meet the
qualifications for a job — and let me be clear, I’m not talking about
reducing the qualifications for the job — if they can meet the
qualifications for the job, then they should have the right to serve,
regardless of creed or color or gender or sexual orientation.”
Panetta summed up the classic argument in favor of allowing women to
serve in combat roles: If standards remain the same, why shouldn’t a
woman be allowed the opportunity to meet them? Good question, though I’d
suggest that anyone who asks it doesn’t know the state of today’s
military. This isn’t your daddy’s army, or even your older brother’s.
… We now know that efforts to lower standards are already underway. 
The US
Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is currently conducting a
scientific review to determine gender-neutral physical standards for
the co-ed combat units of the future. Why is a fancy study even
necessary? Won’t women be expected to meet the same old standards that
men always had to? Well, no. If that were the case no study would be
needed to formulate new standards because they would simply apply the
old ones.
The newly minted gender-neutral standards will likely fall somewhere
between the current “gender-normed” separate standards of today’s
military. … Combat effectiveness
will thus suffer on two fronts—units will be forced to include both
males and females who otherwise wouldn’t be qualified. The standards
will be the same for both genders, only lower. If a woman is too weak to
throw a grenade sufficiently far to avoid blowing herself up, that’s
fine because a man who does the same will also pass. Equality is a
wonderful thing.
How difficult it can be to explain this to people who think that the
current policy is just petty sexism. Proponents of women in combat roles
like to tug at our heart strings with emotional appeals to fairness,
insisting that gobs of women who are both qualified and patriotic are
simply not permitted to do the most for their country because male
chauvinists won’t let them “try out for the team.”
The number of women who are truly qualified is probably paltry, hence
the lower physical standards already in place across all services. Yes, a
few exceptional superwomen may be able to make their male counterparts
look like chumps. I met a handful of these women during my army years.
The military will not however, formulate policy with only the top one
tenth of one percent of womankind in mind.
The new policy of women in combat arms is not about allowing women the
opportunity to meet the same standards; at least not the current
standards. It’s about lowering the bar for both sexes, a recipe for a
weaker fighting force.
