Posted on 01/19/2011 11:11:11 PM PST by neverdem
Heather Pfleuger -- an exuberant, all-American, girl-next-door -- was transformed when she arrived in Afghanistan. She'd shrug into her body armor, strap on her helmet, yank on gloves, goggles and scarf, and slide down behind her turret-mounted Mark-19, a 40mm grenade launcher. From there, she could kill an armored vehicle and everybody in it a mile away.
When she whooped with glee and led a convoy outside the wire, local Afghan fighters, hard men who'd faced down the Russians and the Taliban, fell respectfully silent.
"Specialist Pfleuger can hit anything," her squad leader. Sgt. Kevin Collins, told me proudly. "I feel sorry for anyone who gets in her sights."
That was nine years ago, when Pfleuger was deployed to eastern Afghanistan with the 511th Military Police Company. At the time, I wrote a story boldly asserting that with women like Pfleuger easily accepted in the ranks, doing well at war and liking it, the argument over women in combat "is over."
It wasn't over. In fact, it's about to heat up again. A study commission chartered by Congress is poised to send up to Capitol Hill a recommendation that the last remaining barriers to women – those that formally exclude them from infantry, armor and special forces -- be removed.
Those "close combat" troops -- roughly 14 percent of the military -- are the ones that most jealously guard the all-male cohesion and camaraderie they insist makes them effective in the chaos and stress of long-term exposure to combat.
Never mind that some 200,000 women like Pfleuger have served in wartime Iraq or Afghanistan, that 134 have been killed and 721 wounded in action. With women attacking insurgents with strike fighters and helicopter gunships, machine guns and mortars, riding shotgun on convoys through IED territory and walking combat patrols with the infantry, the Defense Department and the military services have labored mightily to define just what it is that women cannot volunteer to do.
That hasn't been easy, given that in today's wars there are no front lines and no safe rear areas, as the saga of Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch aptly demonstrated (a 19-year-old supply clerk, she was captured and hospitalized by Iraqis after her military convoy got lost in 2003 and her truck crashed during an ambush).
The Army has tried to block women from joining units that "engage an enemy . . . while being exposed to direct enemy fire, a high probability of direct physical contact with the enemy's personnel, and a substantial risk of capture."
That seems to precisely define the situation of Army Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, an MP, who won the coveted Silver Star for her actions in a firefight in Iraq in 2005. When the convoy she was escorting was caught in an ambush, she leapt out and attacked an enemy trench. Then, with her squad leader, she cleared two trenches, killing three insurgents with her rifle. At the time, she was 23 years old.
Getting the award for heroism "really doesn't have anything to do with being a female," she told reporters. "It's about the duties I performed that day as a soldier."
A group of female Army cooks apparently felt the same way. They were deployed to Iraq where they discovered all the cooking was done by civilian contractors. Instead, they were pressed into service as infantry and came home proudly wearing the highly prized Combat Infantryman Badge, earned only by participating in a firefight with the enemy while a member of or assigned with infantry or special forces.
That's a piece of evidence cited by the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, the group of retired senior military personnel, academics and other civilians whose recommendations on lifting the barriers will be published this winter.
Despite the boots-on-the-ground reality that women serve well and honorably and bravely in combat, what looms ahead are months of contentious congressional hearings and hot-tempered talk show shout-fests and angry op-eds, just like the season of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" of 2010. And this time, the pivotal House Armed Services Committee is led by GOP conservative Buck McKeon of California, who opposed allowing gays to serve openly in the military.
As with the "Don't Ask" debate, the argument will come over whether the presence of women, in small units that must operate for extended periods under fire, would be disruptive.
Would women – if any actually volunteered for and could qualify for an infantry unit -- actually break its tight cohesion and cripple its fighting spirit?
"There's a growing number of women out there who have served 'outside the wire' on combat missions," said a woman who served on active duty in Iraq as an Army intelligence officer. "We carried a full basic load of ammunition and fired the SAW [squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun], .50-cals [heavy machine guns] and M-4 [rifles]) to protect our fellow man and to defeat the enemy," said this young officer, who asked not to be identified by name because of her current job. "We have endured the same harsh living conditions as men, where hygiene isn't exactly a priority," she said.
To insist that gender goes unnoticed in such small units would be "inane," she said; there is a "familial" relationship among the soldiers. "Those who serve for the sake of serving and take pride in their jobs do not feel threatened by sexual orientation, race or gender," she said.
In basic officer training, this young woman was offered the chance to take the physical exam for acceptance into Ranger school, the Army's legendarily tough commando course. She and two other women aced the test – even though they were barred from attending the male-only school or to join Ranger units.
"The truth is that very few women and few men can meet or exceed the desired standards of an Army Ranger," she said. "But some can, and they should be given the opportunity."
In its brief for lifting the barriers, the commission cited research that it said found no negative impact from allowing women to serve in close-combat units. It cited a RAND study which found that "gender differences alone did not appear to erode cohesion." The study was published in 1997, well before women began taking a larger role in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That and similar studies are "wrong!" said retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, a combat veteran, historian and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College. "They simply don't understand the nature and character of close combat . . . the 'Band of Brothers' effect," he said recently on Fox TV news.
Scales, an expert on small combat units, said in fact there is no research that settles the question, and that allowing women into such units, in wartime and without knowing how it would affect combat effectiveness, would be risky.
"I've studied this for three decades," Scales said. "The bottom line is nobody knows -- the elements that make up cohesion in a firefight simply aren't known. And to rush into this, in my opinion, could damage cohesion."
And so the battle is joined. Stay tuned.
The article seems centered on “female soldiers deal with issues men don't even think about.” The issues? “You can't wear earrings. Makeup can't be excessive. There probably aren't many times you can feel like a girl. You had to wait in long lines no matter where you were: in the mess hall, bathroom, shower”
>>Ranger Assessment Phase •During induction to the school, candidates must pass a physical exam, typically held over five days. Candidates must be able to do at least 49 push-ups, 59 sit-ups, run 5 miles in no more than 40 minutes, six chin-ups, march 12 miles and pass day and night navigation tests.<<
Except for the night navigation, that’s SOP for Parris Island. BTW, does all this mean that boot camp is going to be coed? Horrors! BAMs and TURDs are a bad mix.
Some of the Army’s Basic Training is coed. My son went to Basic at Fort Benning Georgia and that is all infantry Basic, so there were no women in his Basic training. My son’s friend, though, went to Basic for the Army at Fort Jackson (North or South Carolina, I think) and his Basic had women in it.
The Marines, I believe are the only Armed forces unit that completely separates out the men from training with the women. Hopefully they can continue with that.
As a side note, my son was at the range a few weeks ago (earning his expert rifleman’s qualification) and there were women at the range. Some of them could not even get 10 shots out of 40 to hit a target! Some needed to shown how to use their optics. Overall, he was pretty blown away at how bad many of them were.
Now, that’s not all to be put onto the women. Somewhere the Army dropped the ball or they just really don’t think these women need to be able to use a rifle accurately.
There are many reasons for poor marksmanship, such as: poor weapon familiarity, improper instruction, lack of practice, etc.
If it is your first time at the range, with an unfamiliar weapon and not zeroed in, hitting a target can be difficult. I remember several Marines in my platoon at Parris Island had to exchange their M-1s because of defective sights.
Back then, rifle range was three weeks - week 1 for sighting in and instruction, week 2 for practice and week 3 for qualification. We spent hour after hour dry firing, cleaning and reassembying the M-1s.
It's one thing to ride to the fight; it's another to hump that ruck or fireman's carry a wounded soldier.
Oh, they cited research? Oh, well, hell, that does it! I'm all done -- anyone else have any questions? </sarc>
..... that it said found no negative impact from allowing women to serve in close-combat units. It cited a RAND study which found that "gender differences alone did not appear to erode cohesion."
How the hell do they know, if the Army doesn't have any experience with these blithe, ideologically-driven, typical-liberal-bullshit assertions of fact? They cited studies? I could study my navel, would that tell them anything?
The study was published in 1997 .....
Oh, there it is! -- Clinton-era BS from Slick and Beast. I smell a Hillary slugtrail. Her and her LUGS bunkin' buddies ..... <whine>wymyn are juuuust as gooood as mennnnnn!!!!</whine> And Huma you Abedin there, Hillary?
Fah!
Yes, all of what you said is true.
The one slight difference is that the example I was giving from my son wasn’t at basic but at his current unit. It is reasonable to assume that they had as much time as my son to zero their weapon before they took their marksman test. My son has only been at his unit since November. It’s not like he’s been going to the range every week for the last year. His weapon was newly issued and he was able to shoot expert.
I have no doubt that the Marines probably do a better job on weapons and marksmanship overall, then the general Army does. I’m not there so I can’t really speak to what I have seen, only what my son relays to me.
Now if you want to talk about weak training, I’ll tell you about my Navy range experience. As part of the security force on the submarine, I had to go to the range once a year for what would best be called ‘weapons familiarization’. We would load our weapon, we would shoot maybe one magazine (or slug with the shotgun), and we would leave. We were shown the basics of the .45, the M-16, and a pump, 12 gauge shotgun. I guess they figured we didn’t need to be experts. We just needed to know how to load em, how to carry em safely, and how to send rounds down range. After all, if someone got on a submarine that needed to be removed with gun fire, accuracy over distance didn’t really come into play.
I think they're working on a psych screen .... the Congenital Hater Exclusion.
I should have also added in my description of my range experience was that my primary duty wasn’t security, I was part of the backup or augmentation force. The topside watches got much more time at the range and some of them had expert marksmanship badges.
I should’ve been more clear.
Bullshine. Prolefeed for the moonbats. This is pure PC prolefeed talking. She took it in, she spews it out.
Did we learn nothing from listening to people like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton? These people will say anything. They're ideologues.
IIRC, the Combat Infantryman Badge is awarded only to those holding the MOS of 11B or 11H.
Those cooks probably did earn the Combat Action Badge which is not MOS-specific.
Anyway, too many of our women are being killed in combat, it’s an outrage. The Israelis don’t even do this.
“From the report of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces (report date November 15, 1992, published in book form by Brassey’s in 1993): “The average female Army recruit is 4.8 inches shorter, 31.7 pounds lighter, has 37.4 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body strength… An Army study of 124 men and 186 women done in 1988 found that women are more than twice as likely to suffer leg injuries and nearly five times as likely to suffer [stress] fractures as men.”
Further: “The Commission heard an abundance of expert testimony about the physical differences between men and women that can be summarized as follows:
“Women’s aerobic capacity is significantly lower, meaning they cannot carry as much as far as fast as men, and they are more susceptible to fatigue.
“In terms of physical capability, the upper five percent of women are at the level of the male median. The average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man.”
From the same report: “Lt Col. William Gregor, United States Army, testified before the Commission regarding a survey he conducted at an Army ROTC Advanced Summer Camp on 623 women and 3540 men. …Evidence Gregor presented to the Commission includes:
“(a) Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test, he found that the upper quintile of women at West point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.
“(c) Only 21 women out of the initial 623 (3.4%) achieved a score equal to the male mean score of 260.
“(d) On the push-up test, only seven percent of women can meet a score of 60, while 78 percent of men exceed it.
“(e) Adopting a male standard of fitness at West Point would mean 70 percent of the women he studied would be separated as failures at the end of their junior year, only three percent would be eligible for the Recondo badge, and not one would receive the Army Physical Fitness badge….”
...
Also from the Commission’s report: “Non-deployability briefings before the Commission showed that women were three times more non-deployable than men, primarily due to pregnancy, during Operations Desert Shield and Storm. According to Navy Captain Martha Whitehead’s testimony before the Commission, ‘the primary reason for the women being unable to deploy was pregnancy, that representing 47 percent of the women who could not deploy.’”
Maybe we need armored strollers.
My friend Catherine Aspy graduated from Harvard in 1992 and (no, I’m not on drugs) enlisted in the Army in 1995. Her account was published in Reader’s Digest, February, 1999, and is online in the Digest’s archives.
She told me the following about her experiences: “I was stunned. The Army was a vast day-care center, full of unmarried teen-age mothers using it as a welfare home. I took training seriously and really tried to keep up with the men. I found I couldn’t. It wasn’t even close. I had no idea the difference in physical ability was so huge. There were always crowds of women sitting out exercises or on crutches from training injuries.
“They [the Army] were so scared of sexual harassment that women weren’t allowed to go anywhere without another woman along. They called them ‘Battle Buddies.’ It was crazy. I was twenty-six years old but I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself.”
http://www.fredoneverything.net/MilMed.shtml
RE: ‘the primary reason for the women being unable to deploy was pregnancy, that representing 47 percent of the women who could not deploy.’
Me brudder was a Machine Repairman in Reagan’s Navy, USS Samuel Gompers, primarily . Saw his ship/shore rotation go from 3 years/3 years to 5/1 once his rating was opened to women, because so many of ‘em hated the ship, and hated the watches, and hated the duty, and got as pregnant as possible as often as possible to obtain a shore billet.
The North Vietnamese fielded female combat units..they fall just like men from a 50 and 152mm main gun.
Google up what the Japanese did to American nurses they took prisoner in the Philippines during the early months of WWII. It was savage, subhuman.
The American public can be jollied along for a while, but one really egregious episode like that would have them asking a lot of starchy questions, and I wouldn't want to be the bureaucrat or pol who happytalked them into letting women go into harm's way. Those are our next generation's mothers-to-be we're pouring into BDU's. This Left-wing Marxist "there is no difference between a man and a woman" stuff is pernicious, and wittingly so, and we ought to snap to that right now.
One more thing. We haven't been in a major war with a major adversary since 1945. Speaking of which, a friend of my dad's who flew with Claire Chennault and his Flying Tigers during the Big Show (my dad was with the 8th AF in the ETO) told my dad some things about what he saw the Chinese do to Japanese prisoners during the war. His bottom line was, "the Japanese were cruel, incredibly cruel and brutal. But next to the Chinese, their cruelty was as the cruelty of little children. The Chinese give me the willies."
Something to think about as these Leftist trolls shout about putting women in harm's way.
I believe it was Israel where the effect on male soldiers of seeing female soldiers killed & wounded was thought to be too much; I may be mistaken, but they’ve had female soldiers for a long time (and have higher expectations of them than we seem to have in the US).
Really? When did they do that? I never read or heard anything about it.
Where and when did we engage them?
This would be a good place to discuss that. I once read -- 30 years ago or more -- some story about an Izzie infantry chick with combat experience during the Yom Kippur War (1973). And we've seen fetching photos of heart-shaped Izzie asses decorated with African-carried M-16's receding into the sunset. But what are the IDF's doctrines on this subject these days?
IDIOCY!! Just vecause a FEW women can do this, they should NOT be doing it!
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