One of the first women to make it into the Marines just got busted last week for sleeping with a subordinate. She will not be the last. This will be a problem that now plagues our frontline warriors the same way it now plagues the mixed-sex U.S. Navy.
Female soldiers are sleeping with the men they work with, and they are getting pregnant. A lot: 16 out of 100 women on Navy ships are getting knocked up and have to leave their posts. Don’t think it will be an issue for the few women who make it through infantry training? Of course it will.
And no, that does not make them bad people. It makes them normal young women. Young, fit people forced to work side by side day and night are going to have sex with each other. To think otherwise is to completely deny facts and the biology of men and women.
Women should simply not be allowed to serve in infantry units. There are many places women can and do serve honorably in the U.S. military, but infantry work is man’s work.
This Doesn’t Mean All Military Service, Just Fighting
All military service is not the same. The infantry is a different place than all other military occupations. It is more physically and mentally demanding. Want to know what really matters to someone? Just watch and see which parts of his or her life have standards. People have standards for who they allow in their homes, for who watches over their children. It is time to leave wishful science behind and have standards for the people we send to the front lines.
If they’re fighting together in the military, women and men will fraternize and ruin unit cohesion. Did you hear about that man and woman who started working together and ended up having a relationship? Oh, you don’t know which one I’m talking about? That’s understandable, because it’s pretty much every office in the world.
Men and women are attracted to each other. That is not a bug, it’s a feature. God made us that way so we would continue the species. But it also means we have to take certain precautions in certain fields. While it might be fine if people are swapping spit as they file reports in the back room at Hobby Lobby, the rules change when lives are on the line.
Female Fighters Endanger Themselves and Others
We haven’t even gotten to raw physical ability. Men were created to be protectors—protectors of their homes and protectors of society. So men are bigger and stronger and faster than women. No, those qualities are not important when you’re at nursing school or scanning invoices at the office. But those qualities are critically important when you’re on the battlefield and large groups of armed men are trying to shoot you in the face.
Do you know why combat sports like boxing, wrestling, and mixed martial arts have weight classes? It is not to protect the larger fighter. It’s to ensure the sport is competitive. Otherwise the big guys would dominate everyone.
Sadly, we do not have weight classes in war. The other side is going to send its finest killers our way. We must do likewise. Don’t take my word for it. Take it right from The Pentagon’s own study:
While there are certainly some women who compare favorably with some men in this arena, among the participants of this study the top 25 percent of women matched the bottom 25 percent of men in anaerobic power; and the top 10 percent of women overlaps with the bottom 50 percent of men in both aerobic and anaerobic capacity. The study also points to the disparate impact on male and female anatomy that the types of tasks these Marines were called on to perform can have. For instance, musculoskeletal injury rates were 40.5 percent for women, compared to 18.8 percent for men.
Women have less muscle mass. They have less lung capacity. Women’s hips are not built to withstand the punishment they get in the infantry, and that’s why there were so many hip injuries in the Pentagon study.
Not only that, they cannot shoot as well. In nearly every single maneuver, the mixed-sex units were outperformed by the all-male units. I don’t mean once or twice, either. There were 134 tasks. The all-male units outperformed the mixed units in 93 of them. Integrating women into combat units is not a win for inclusiveness. It is a conscious decision to make our military slower and weaker.
Fighting Isn’t a Place for Fantasies and Power Trips
A U.S. Marine Corps infantry platoon is not packed full of Boy Scouts and altar boys. It is full of young, testosterone-fueled men. They cuss and they drink too much. They smoke cigarettes and tell dirty jokes. They speak inappropriately about anyone and everyone. It is a man’s environment. And it is rarely a glorious existence.
Ever been in Iraq and had to defecate in an ammo can in front of everyone while dug in a defensive position? I have. It was not enjoyable. Do not for a second believe the fancy recruiting videos you see on TV with clean uniforms, nice gear, and smiling faces. In real life, war is dirty and ugly. It is throwing 80 pounds of gear on your body, walking until you can hardly stand, sweating through your socks and your combat boots, then digging a hole in the ground so you don’t get shot while you sleep.
Some will naively point out the brave women who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces as an example for what we should do. Setting aside the fact that this argument is most often made by someone who spends the rest of his time dumping on Israel, it is an intellectually dishonest point to make.
Israel has women in these units for one reason and one reason only: necessity. Israel has a total population of around eight million people, and they are surrounded by countries that openly announce their intentions to kill all Israelis. The United States has 325 million people, and neither of our neighbors have the military strength to occupy Rhode Island. We have plenty of men available here to defend us.
While it may not be politically popular, President Trump and Defense Secretary James Mattis should immediately reverse Barack Obama’s policy of allowing women into combat. Obama’s disastrous presidency needs to be undone before it is permanently entrenched in our armed forces.
Men and women are not the same. All people may be equal in the eyes of God and the eyes of the law, but they are not equal in the laws of biology. Let us put forth a military of the finest killers on earth. Let Europe worry about diversity. We shall worry about lethality.
