Women are generally incapable of reaching the level of fitness required of male soldiers, and cause social problems when integrated into previously all-male units anyway. This doesn’t matter, because effectiveness doesn’t motivate military gender integration. Ideology and careerism do. These same factors virtually guarantee that the military won’t be able to hold the line on a single, high standard that only a vanishingly small number of women have any hope of achieving.
What is “Combat” Anyway?
Advocates of gender integration are quick to point out that women have already been in combat (Gen. Neller’s predecessor openly opposed integration). The problem is that “combat” is a broad category. The Army, for instance, considers “close combat” to be the use of direct-fire weapons (engaging with or being engaged by anything pointed directly at a target, as opposed to standoff weapons like artillery). The following activities are all (rightly) considered to be “combat”:
- A truck driver being blown up or ambushed while on the road. On top of the truck sits a gunner who’s responsible for shooting anyone who’s a threat. This is dangerous, but does not require a great deal of technical skill or physical fitness, and rarely or never involves sleeping rough.
- A tanker or other combat vehicle crew securing the above convoy. This appears similar to the truck driver, but operation and maintenance of these vehicles requires substantially more physical strength and endurance than noncombat vehicles. Also, the crew are expected to endure worse conditions as a matter of course.
- An artillery battery that often fires directly at enemy on the mountains surrounding their firebase. Living conditions are the firebase are austere but reasonably comfortable.
- An infantry unit that guards the perimeter of the firebase. Occasionally they shoot or get shot at. Patrols over a single night occur but are rare and even more rarely result in fighting.
- A special forces team that lives in a foreign village for several months at a time. Shooting is rare, but when it does occur, the team may be on its own for several hours at least. Living conditions are extremely and deliberately primitive.
- A direct-action task force. They attack at least one objective (possibly several) every night but live on a major base where living standards approximate an American town.
All of these tasks have differing physical demands and living conditions. Note that while a woman should have little problem with being a truck gunner, she will have a much harder time being a tank gunner. Likewise, while she can man a guard tower, she won’t be suitable for an extended patrol. The specific conditions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mean that these roles have suffered some degree of conflation, usually biased towards becoming physically easier. Many infantrymen spend an entire tour guarding a wall, and many (most, actually) tankers never spend 24 hours outside of a base. This creates an opening for claims about units like military police or truck drivers to say they do “the same job”, which is true, but what’s different are expectations, that combat units be required to do things they may not actually have had to do in a specific conflict.
Likewise, something about the elite direct-action teams. They spend most of their time hanging out on large bases. This allows for female support personnel to “work with the Rangers” or whoever, outside the wire even, while living in extremely comfortable conditions and, of course, not having to actually meet the incredibly high standards for the operators of these teams.
By the way, anyone claiming that “modern combat” isn’t physically demanding because you just press a button or whatever is either clueless (most likely) or deliberately and outrageously mendacious, and anytime someone emits such a statement I invite the hearer to scrutinize the background of the speaker carefully; the result is often illuminating. Yes, such roles do exist, but it’s not what we’re talking about. And they’re not enough to win wars on their own, anyway.
The point of all this is that just because women have “been in combat” and even generated photogenic casualties, it doesn’t follow that they ought to be integrated into combat units.
The “Fine-Toothed Comb”
The military services will never lower standards, but they will change them. For instance, recruiting standards were changed around 2005-2008 in order to support the “Surge” in Iraq. Qualitatively inferior soldiers were admitted to the Army. Externally, the Army claimed that it was simply examining the records of prospective recruits more closely. For instance, instead of automatically rejecting anyone diagnosed with a felony conviction or diagnosed psychiatric condition. After all, just because someone was prescribed Ritalin for ADHD or got busted for a bag of pot a few years ago shouldn’t preclude someone from being able to Serve Their Country, right? Lies, of course — standards were lowered. The quality of these soldiers was immediately obvious to unit leadership, as it had been with McNamara’s Morons two generations before (the Surge recruits weren’t that bad, but it was noticeable). Internally, a colonel in the Army’s training command went on a tour of major installations and gave a presentation where he blamed the problem on Millennials. Eventually, the “suicide epidemic” (in active service, not among veterans) turned out to be an artifact of admitting recruits with psychiatric conditions.
This sort of history is probably the number one reason that service members are suspicious of any changes made to physical fitness requirements. The current standards aren’t as relevant to task performance as they need to be, but at least they were developed before pro-integration meddling was a problem.
The “Standard” isn’t the Norm
One thing I’m suspicious of personally are canards along the lines of “Only Those Who Meet The Standard” will be permitted into combat units, because as things are now The Standard doesn’t reflect actual expectations. Anyone who barely clears the bar to graduate initial entry training is borderline if not outright inadequate for performance in an actual unit, and absolutely unacceptable for a leadership position. I’m extremely concerned that women meeting the “you’re allowed to wear the uniform” but not meeting the customary standards of their unit will lead to such customary standards being declared “toxic” even though they are a direct result of the tactical tasks required of such units.
Efforts to quantify combat tasks remind me of McNamara’s failed Vietnam-era policies; that they’re openly motivated by gender integration efforts doesn’t inspire confidence.
What Will Be Enough?
Any reasonable standard will mean that only very small numbers of women will be permitted into combat units, and those women will be markedly substandard in their physical capabilities, especially compared to unit leadership. Because of the twin motives of egalitarian/feminist ideology and careerism, I don’t think that a 1-5% proportion of female combat troops with below-average promotion rates will mollify calls for gender integration. Once it’s “proven” that (some) women can “meet the standard”, that standard will then be lowered, both formally and informally, in order to increase the proportion of female combat troops. Emphasis on physical fitness and even tactical performance, being a barrier to the advancement of female soldiers, will become toxic. Careerist female soldiers will happily go along with this, probably with the usual resentments resulting from a correct perception of contempt from the men around them.
Slanted media/propaganda coverage, along with simple institutional repression, will ensure that dissenting voices are unheard while misleading the public about the demands of service and the capabilities of soldierettes. I have personally witnessed unexceptional or downright incompetent women made the subject of glowing public-affairs releases, as has most anyone who has served for any length of time.
