Posted on 02/12/2013 7:57:16 PM PST by neverdem
Two decades ago, the Commandant of the Marine Corps declared that women serving in the infantry “would destroy the Marine Corps.” General Robert Barrow explained that, “in three wars—World War II, Korea and Vietnam—I found no place for women to be down in the ground combat element.” He cited the 1950 fighting retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in temperatures of minus 20 degrees, with one Marine division pitted against eight Chinese divisions. Had women comprised 15 percent of his division, Barrow concluded, the Marines would have lost the battle.
“The very nature of women disqualifies them from doing it (killing so brutally),” Barrow said. “Women give life sustain life, nurture life; they don’t take it.”
To Barrow, a warrior admired by three generations of grunts, ground combat meant killing under the harshest of circumstances. Barrow opposed the incorporation of women into infantry units characterized by primal instincts: sleeping, defecating, eating and smelling like wolf packs while hunting down and slaughtering male soldiers.
Now the military has decided to open up ground combat billets to females. “If they can meet the qualifications for the job,” Secretary of Defense Panetta said, “then they should have the right to serve.”
The Marine Corps has proudly fought our country’s battles for 247 years. Yet in the course of a mere twenty years it has pivoted from General Barrow’s firm belief that women were disqualified by reason of gender to insisting that qualifications have nothing to do with gender. How could the Marine Corps—and the Army—pivot so fundamentally in so short a time? Why was this “the right thing to do”? When did the right of the individual take precedence over the duty to provide for the common defense?
There are two alternative explanations: the “true believer” and the “politician.” Our generals may truly believe that women are genuinely qualified in substantial numbers—say, 5–15 percent of the combat arms billets. Although the Chiefs have said they will not relax standards, they have bound themselves to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having declared that women are capable of serving in the infantry, they must now deliver on that promise.
Forebodingly, General Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has said, “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn't make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the Secretary, why is it that high?” In other words, standards will be determined by politically appointed civilian officials. Inevitably, entry standards will slip. That the Chairman has made a virtue of this error is disappointing.
One could argue that a decade of war has established ample precedent for the female in combat. In Iraq and Afghanistan, our generals had changed the mission of the infantry, declaring that, “Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation-builders as well as warriors.” That led to arduous restrictions on fire support and to zany statements like, “you can’t win a war by killing.” A Marine Corps deployed as a Peace Corps could accommodate females at all ranks, as well as civilian aid workers and visiting Congressmen.
Female soldiers were taken under fire or struck mines while riding in armored vehicles. But taking such risks was not ground combat. Iraq and Afghanistan led to the misleading image that in war there are bases with showers and good food, air-conditioned quarters and moderate rather than stunning casualties. Females did operate very capably in that environment at every level.
Once out on lengthy patrols, however, the environment shifted. Over the past ten years, I have accompanied our grunts on countless combat patrols in cities, mountains and farmlands in Iraq and Afghanistan. I saw the same sticky blood, stinking feces, screaming and wailing, IEDs and tourniquets, smashed vehicles and crumpled bodies that I saw in the paddies and jungles of Vietnam. Ground combat has become no cleaner and no less exhausting.
If you’re a grunt, you go forth to kill. That is your mission. You are uncivilized—a gorilla set loose inside Tiffany’s with a hundred-pound sledgehammer. You are an animal running with a pack on the hunt. Such small-group effectiveness cannot be measured by enlistment standards or during peacetime training. The performance that counts emerges during battle, when the pack has to aggressively close with and kill the enemy.
Once you insert women into these male hunting packs, you introduce the complex dynamics between the sexes. In close, primitive quarters with no privacy, there will be instances of friction, copulation, over-protectiveness, jealousies, miscommunications and resentments. There is a tradeoff between increasing the career opportunity of the individual female soldier and decreasing the net performance of the pack. But in peacetime, evaluating small-unit effectiveness tends to be moot; each platoon argues that it is the best. So the Services could alter the gender composition with no observable degradation—until the next war.
In contrast to the “true believer”, the “politician” explanation is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt they had to preempt the Administration before it imposed even stricter “gender-neutral” regulations. Admitting gays had been a major issue among liberal advocacy groups. With the support of the President and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Congress passed legislation more than a year ago to permit gays to join the military. In comparison, no major women’s advocacy group has lobbied to fight in the mud and the blood. Nor had women suddenly become stronger, faster or more attracted to killing. The military had more male recruits for the combat arms than were needed. Still, we have no information about discussions between the Joint Chiefs and political appointees.
As politicians, the Chiefs may have offered a token gesture, confident that the number of women actually qualifying will be tiny—say, less than one percent. There are women with Olympic-standard physical, mental and psychological attributes who could lead a SEAL or Army Delta team. But they are as rare as Olympic athletes. In a ground combat force numbering in the hundreds of thousands, such women will remain very rare—perhaps less than 2 percent. If the services do keep their current standards, then the Joint Chiefs have mollified the liberal community by a press release, with scant practical consequence.
However, if women in ground combat billets gradually increase to 15% (the overall percentage of women in the military), then General Barrow’s warning about defeat in battle is portentous. We will be defeated.
The Chiefs did not choose between the real and the token change. It all comes down to unknown numbers. You can read the opaque statements by the generals in two mutually exclusive ways: 1) substantially more females (10–15 percent) will fill ground combat billets; or 2) very few females (1–2 percent) will ever qualify. However, General Dempsey made clear that the Chiefs have passed their stewardship of standards to political appointees, guaranteeing lower standards over time. Nor did the Chiefs recommend that women register for the draft and, in an emergency, be forced by law to serve in the combat arms, as is required of men. Instead, the Services went with the political flow, endorsing equality of opportunity but inequality of obligation.
In sum, the Joint Chiefs have taken a clear long-term risk for an unclear near-term political gain, perhaps hoping to diminish budgetary cuts. The question is whether increasing the individual rights of the female soldier decreases the combined combat effectiveness of the killing pack. We won’t know the answer until we fight a hard ground war sometime in the future.
Good read ; a keeper.
Yup, the outrageous comments are even mentioned on his wiki page.
When saw him on TV making this diversity ueberalles statement it was truly a "what the ****" moment.
I keep thinking of it because the bodies of victims sacrificed to the diversity god keep piling up. Quotas are king and put dangerous, incompetent people in positions of power over life and death. Or the diversity worshipers brazenly turn a blind eye to murderous psychos. The diversity mantra started with skin color, then moved on to protected races, cultures, "religions" (no matter how destructive to western civilized standards), women, family, and marriage. Now "inclusiveness" means embracing illegals and the alphabet soup of debased and perverted identities...
Now anyone who will not prostrate to the malevolent god of diversity is a target for all manner of shame, slander, financial destruction, physical punishment or worse. Hiding behind banners proclaiming equality, justice, fairness, and balance, that demon is particularly insidious and relentless.
Worship a lie, wake up without a soul.
On the subject of heinous abominations...
Molech is one of those ancient abominations that engenders much discussion and speculation, but it's all theory. The only thing that is certain is that it is spelled the same as the Hebrew word for king, but is pronounced with different vowels (one theory is that the vowels are used/borrowed from the word bosheth, meaning shame).
Molech, for all its notoriety, is nevertheless an enigma. Nobody seems to be able to nail down its identity with any certainty. And maybe that's the clue... an abomination that operated in plain sight, as hidden as the air we breathe.
Well, just more speculation here, but with women being sacrificed to the fire (combat units), so are our sons and daughters, those having had their minds corrupted by the abomination known as "Diversity". DOMA is supposed to be ruled on by the USSC in June, and we have this quote from Panetta:
""One of the legal limitations to providing all benefits at this time is the Defense of Marriage Act, which is still the law of the land. There are certain benefits that can only be provided to spouses as defined by that law, which is now being reviewed by the United States Supreme Court. While it will not change during my tenure as secretary of defense, I foresee a time when the law will allow the department to grant full benefits to service members and their dependents, irrespective of sexual orientation. Until then, the department will continue to comply with current law while doing all we can to take care of all soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and their families."
Panetta Signs Memo Extending Benefits to Same-sex Partners
http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=72025
Is it really too "out there" to point out that the in-your-face modern-day king and idol of diversity (who even has his own Federal holy day) is known as MLK? MLK Day is Diversity Day. While in Hebrew the English name "King" is written (begins) with a quf (not a kaf as with the last letter of Molech), Molech (i.e. melek, mlk) *IS* the Hebrew word for king.
Well, there's always *that* wiki page:
Moloch (representing Semitic מלך m-l-k, a Semitic root meaning "king") – also rendered as Molech, Molekh, Molok, Molek, Molock, Moloc, Melech, Milcom or Molcom – is the name of an ancient Ammonite god.[1] Moloch worship was practiced by the Canaanites, Phoenician and related cultures in North Africa and the Levant.As a god worshipped by the Phoenicians and Canaanites, Moloch had associations with a particular kind of propitiatory child sacrifice by parents. Moloch figures in the Book of Deuteronomy and in the Book of Leviticus as a form of idolatry (Leviticus 18:21: "And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch"). In the Hebrew Bible, Gehenna was a valley by Jerusalem, where apostate Israelites and followers of various Baalim and Caananite gods, including Moloch, sacrificed their children by fire (2 Chr. 28:3, 33:6; Jer. 7:31, 19:2–6).
Moloch has been used figuratively in English literature from John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) to Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1955), to refer to a person or thing demanding or requiring a very costly sacrifice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molech
MLK/King [of Diversity]/Molech/shame
FWIW, YMMV
Oh and one more thing...
FUBO
Bing West gets it. He has been there and done that, and understands what the perfumed prices do not.
If you have not read his The March Up, I recommend it highly.
http://www.amazon.com/The-March-Up-Baghdad-Division/dp/055380376X
/prices/princes/
Yep. You’ve got it. Don’t forget affirmative action.
I have a bad feeling we are shortly to find out just how bad “commander zero’s” policies are.
This utterly nonsensical development is a direct result of the deliberate misinterpretation of our consitutional guarantee of equal opportunities to imply equal outcomes.
It is part and parcel of the federal power grab executed under the rubric of civil rights, and has led us into a cloud cuckoo land of federal interference in every aspect of daily life of which a Marxist such as Obama is the inevitable outcome.
Eventually, it will weaken the United States from within to such an extent that the nation falls under the weight of its own baggage of silliness.
Meanwhile, China and Russia are watching with hungry grins.
It is insane, and to underscore this, you cannot be a Christian and at the same time underwrite the carrying of "equality" to irrational and uscriptural extremes.
Facts: About the term "radical egalitarianism:"
From the governmental implementation of the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, our Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) wrongly opined that they believed they were just in departing from prior Constitutional interpretation and procedure, in order to promote a desirable "equality" demanded by cultural pressures of that time. Thus the desegregation of public schools in the entire realm under American rule was declared as a requirement, and the Executive branch applied and enforced the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, and the race-based barrier to equality of educational opportunity was broken.
Take note that while the outcome of the Brown decision was consistent with the intents of the framers, the methodology and rationalization of the Justices rendering the descison was not. The unfortunate result, going forward from that, was that success here led the Justices to embark on more adventures in egalitarianism that (unlike the Brown case) really did depart from the Constitution.
Even more dismaying is the fact that SCOTUS has taken on themselves powers that are not rightfully its own. Contrary to the plan of the American government, the Supreme Court has usurped the powers delegated by the Constitution only to the people and their elected representatives. Having done so, the Court has robbed the people of the freedom to make our own fundamental moral and cultural personal and aggregate decisions, because the Court has placed itself in the position of overseeing all such matters, when and as it chooses.
Regarding "radical egalitarianism," the Court--obsessed with the equalization of leveling opportunities--interfered in many heretofore judicially untouched areas of social and political life. One such was pushing redistricting of state legislatures so as to produce the "one person, one vote" result, redesigning out district boundaries (gerrymandering) so as to equalize (diminish vote differences) based on party, racial, and personal incomes mismatches.
Another, and now a most potent of the applications, has been in the areas of race and sex. The outcome was enforcing unconstitutional awarding of scholarships, construction contracts, military occupational specialties, job descrip-tions, and entrance to military academies that have long been bastions of exclusive male dominion, etc.; regardless of marked diminished physical qualifications, emotional intrusions, hormonal events, pregnancies, etc. The qualities of great military schools such as Annapolis, VMI, West Point, Citadel, and Valley Forge have been so critically damaged by radical egalitarianism that they can no longer produce leaders of the quality they once did. Now the goal of the liberals is to snuff out the armed forces general esprit, morale, proficiency, and moral purpose.
In leveling-out the culture, the intent of "gender reformers" has been to blur the difference between men, women, and those given over by God to their deviancy, bringing "normalcy" down in the areas of mental, physical, and sexual preference, to standards once rightfully called depravity. The SCOTUS has thus presented itself more and more willing to permit intrusion into extending the reach of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, far beyond any conceivable intention of the Framers of the Bill of Rights, and their successors -- incredibly beyond any limits previous Courts had been willing to do in the cultural dimensions of racial, ethnic, and sexual behavior. And the Court is permitting this intrusion of the Executive branch, specifically the Presidency, and namely our current Chief Magistrate, Barack Obama. The Court, having made itself a cultural change agent, acts without guidance from the historical Constitution in its language and intents.
Question: Is placing women into combat roles a Biblical moral stance?
Such a definition and implementation of equality does not have any kind of support from Scripture interpreted by a literal/historical/grammatical/cultural application. This is a secular rejection of Biblical principles, and hence, a furthering of Satanic designs to undercut the Biblical, governmental foundation upon which our government was founded, that the exercise of the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and happiness might be pursued. Those are rights given to mankind by their Creator, not to be changed capriciously by a God-rejecting element minority, as they now are, increasingly.
Thanks for the link.
As far as dykes or fairies serving... I’m all for it.
We need good people on the front lines!
A young neighbor gal is a medic and spent her first tour on base in Iraq treating mainly civilians. She wanted to be helping our guys instead, and requested to do that. Her second tour was in Afghanistan on patrols with our guys. Treating them, but also a big asset in the villages as she could treat the women and gain their confidence.
She was requested on her third tour to be on patrols again, so I’m guessing she was found capable. Perhaps technicaly the patrols weren’t considered “front line combat”. But her mom would ask her if she is in danger and getting shot at. “Mooommmmm - don’t ask that. But duh - we’re in the middle of Afghanistan!”
I don’t know her views on women in combat - but I’m thinking that she would probably agree that a woman shouldn’t be in a primary combat role.
“Women in ground combat” isn’t about women in ground combat. It is about women officers commanding units in ground combat so they can be promoted to higher ranks, including General officer ranks.
Feminism.
And what will it do to the military?
Destroy the bond between men in combat, which every historian and military researcher knows is the primary reason men in the heat of battle fight. They fight for each other, not for flags, at that point.
I’ll have to get that on my next order.
I’m sure it is a great example of why he is able to speak on the subject here so authoritatively.
Exactly. Power lusting career field grade female officers are not the ones who will be doing the bleeding, it will be the young ladies they thrust into the gore, in order to advance their own careers.
Those pushing this policy believe that until female officers are able to get their ticket punched in a combat command, they can never achieve high rank.
However, in the "department of unintended consequences," this superb article in the Marine Corps Gazette "Get over it! We are NOT all created equal" by a female Marine office who has seen combat, makes the point that it will actually HURT the ability of female offices to rise to the top.
A good read.
Homosexuality is the emasculation and perversion of our military. Woman in combat is the very definition of a fallen culture and uncivilized. Both are against the order and design of the Lord.
If you have not read his The March Up, I recommend it highly. Bump!
“...He cited the 1950 fighting retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in temperatures of minus 20 degrees, with one Marine division pitted against eight Chinese divisions. Had women comprised 15 percent of his division, Barrow concluded, the Marines would have lost the battle.”
Roger that.
“We fought so hard we ran out of ammunition..”
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