The Problems of Women in Combat - From a Female Combat Vet
The Problems of Women in Combat – From a Female Combat Vet
JANUARY 26, 2013 BY
JUDE EDEN 136 COMMENTS
It’s not all about qualification. I’m speaking as a female Marine Iraq war vet who did serve in the combat zone doing entry checkpoint duty in Fallujah, and we worked with the grunts daily for that time. All the branches still have different standards for females and males. Why? Because most women wouldn’t even qualify to be in the military if they didn’t have separate standards. Men and women are different, but those pushing women into combat don’t want to admit that truth. They huff and puff about how women can do whatever men can do, but it just ain’t so. We’re built differently, and it doesn’t matter that one particular woman could best one particular man. The best woman is still no match for the best man, and most of the men she’d be fireman-carrying off the battlefield will be at least 100 lbs heavier than her with their gear on.
Women are often great shooters but can’t run in 50-80 lbs of gear as long, hard, or fast as men. Military training is hard enough on men’s bodies; it’s harder on women’s. And until women stop menstruating, there will always be an uphill battle for staying level and strong at all times. No one wants to talk about the fact that in the days before a woman’s cycle, she loses half her strength, to say nothing of the emotional ups and downs that affect judgment. And how would you like fighting through PMS symptoms while clearing a town or going through a firefight? Then there are the logistics of making all the accommodations for women in the field, from stopping the convoy to pee or because her cycle started to stripping down to get hosed off after having to go into combat with full MOP gear when there’s a biological threat.
This is to say nothing of unit cohesion, which is imperative and paramount, especially in the combat fields. When preparing for battle, the last thing on your mind should be sex; but you put men and women in close quarters together, and human nature is what it is (this is also why the repeal of DADT is so damaging). It doesn’t matter what the rules are. The Navy proved that when they started allowing women on ship. What happened? They were having sex and getting pregnant, ruining unit cohesion (not to mention derailing the operations because they’d have to change course to get them off ship.)
When I deployed, we’d hardly been in the country a few weeks before one of our females had to be sent home because she’d gotten pregnant (nice waste of training, not to mention taxpayer money that paid for it). That’s your military readiness? Our enemies are laughing – “Thanks for giving us another vulnerability, USA!”
Then there are relationships. Whether it’s a consensual relationship, unwanted advances, or sexual assault, they all destroy unit cohesion. No one is talking about the physical and emotional stuff that goes along with men and women together. A good relationship can foment jealousy and the perception of favoritism. A relationship goes sour, and suddenly one loses faith in the very person who may need to drag one off the field of battle. A sexual assault happens, and a woman not only loses faith in her fellows, but may fear them. A vindictive man paints a woman as easy, and she loses the respect of her peers. A vindictive woman wants to destroy a man’s career with a false accusation (yes, folks, this happens too); and it’s poison to the unit. All this happens before the fighting even begins.
Yet another little-discussed issue is that some female military members are leaving their kids behind to advance their careers by deploying. I know of one divorced Marine who left her two sons, one of them autistic, with their grandparents while she deployed. She was wounded on base (not on the front lines) and is a purple heart recipient. What if she’d been killed, leaving behind her special needs child? Glory was more important than motherhood. Another case in my own unit was a married female who became angry when they wouldn’t let both her and her husband deploy at the same time. Career advancement was the greater concern.
I understand the will to fight. I joined the Marines in the hopes of deploying because I believe that fighting jihadists is right. And I care about the women and children in Islamic countries where they are denied their rights, subjugated, mutilated, and murdered with impunity; and where children are molested and raped with impunity (not to mention defending our own freedom against these hate-filled terrorists who want to destroy freedom-loving countries like America.) Joining the Marines was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m glad I got to deploy. It not only allowed me to witness the war, but to witness the problems with women in combat.
Women have many wonderful strengths, and there is certainly a lot of work for women to do in the military. But all the problems that come with men and women working together are compounded in the war zone, destroying the cohesion necessary to fight bloody, hellish war.
We are at war; and if we want to win, we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the top priority should be military readiness and WINNING wars, not political correctness and artificially imposed “equality” on the military.
In continuing the discussion of opening combat roles to women, we have the argument that women are already there, deploying and fighting in hot zones. This is true, and it gives us a record of the problems we are already experiencing as a result.
Wasted: Valuable Time, Training, and Resources
I talk about several of the female-only issues for which extra accommodations have to be made in my previous
article. We are not equal except in our rights under Constitutional Law. Nature has no regard for equality, and each one of us is born differently from each other. We are diverse and dissimilar in our talents, physical aspects, intellect, and emotions; and the sexes are inherently different. We know, for example, that women are much more prone to certain types of infections. For a woman on patrol, setting up an ambush (or, as the infantry do, living in abandoned buildings with no running water), hygiene is a constant problem. A urinary tract infection can quickly become a kidney infection (debilitating in itself) and then kidney failure if left unchecked. Suddenly, a woman needs to be evacuated for a problem that has nothing to do with combat and to which men are not susceptible.
Then there’s pregnancy.
Margaret Wente writes: “One study of a brigade operating in Iraq found that female soldiers were evacuated at three times the rate of male soldiers – and that 74 percent of them were evacuated for pregnancy-related issues.”
It costs approximately a million dollars per individual to get trained through bootcamp and to be made ready for deployment. Those are taxpayer dollars spent on someone who has to turn around and leave the combat zone to have a baby (for which our tax dollars also pay), having nothing to do with combat.
Changing Our Best Instincts: Protecting Women, Mothering Children
We know that rape is a tool of torture for the already savage enemy we’re fighting. In one TV
interview, a woman suggested that if women are willing to take that risk, we should let them. She also absurdly claimed that men are raped as much as women when captured, which is patently false. But the idea that men shouldn’t worry any more about women in battle goes against the very best primal male instinct. In every country from Canada to Israel where women are in combat (and in American units where women are in theater), the men will tell you they are more protective of the women. It’s different from men’s protection of each other, and it distracts from mission completion. The pro-WICs would have men thwart this wonderful and thoroughly ingrained instinct. A world in which men don’t feel a strong need to protect women when they’re in the most dangerous and hostile of environments would be a nightmare. We would rightly call those men brutes.
We’re also thwarting mothers’ nurturing instincts. Women are already training to kill and leaving their children to deploy, even when they are the sole caregiver (turning care over namely to grandparents). This sets a bad precedent and hurts children. There will always be war, and it’s bad enough for fathers to leave their children to fight necessarily; but to allow mothers to choose this path over motherhood is bad for everyone. There are many noble capacities in which women with children can fight for this country, such as administrative jobs stateside. We don’t
need to deploy mothers to battle; we shouldn’t.
The Career-Hungry
A small handful of high-ranking females have instigated this policy change in order to advance their own careers. In this
interview, Anu Bhagwati, a former Captain, complains about women not being able to be promoted to certain ranks, claims that women aren’t getting proper recognition for action in combat (a claim also made
here), and claims that it’s harder for them to get combat-injury-related benefits from the VA. Regarding the latter, I know females who are receiving combat-injury-related benefits; so if there are some who are not receiving them but should, the bureaucratic, inefficient, fraud-riddled VA should be confronted. Administrative changes could certainly be considered to take care of veterans as we should – regardless of sex – for injuries sustained in battle thus far. As for recognition of action, this is also a bureaucratic aspect that can be addressed through the chain of command without changing the policies on women in combat units. And finally, as to rank, cry me a river. The military is about preparing for and executing war, not advancing your career at the cost of readiness for war.
The careerists are also on the hook for the double standard that we currently have for the sexes, which inherently lowers the standards overall. Even if one standard is imposed, it’s likely it will be an overall lower standard. As the Center for Military Readiness
points out, “The same advocates who demand ‘equal opportunities’ in combat are the first to demand
unequal, gender-normed standards to make it ‘fair.’” Enormous pressure from Washington is already on the military brass to fill quotas of race and sex; and the higher they get, the more politically motivated the brass’ decisions. Whereas imposing one higher standard would in fact result in fewer women serving in these roles, the political pressure to prove diversity will result in more unqualified women (and men) attaining positions for which men are more qualified. But go against the diversity status quo dictated by Washington, and you can kiss your rank and career goodbye. The
purges have already begun.
The word “discriminate” has several meanings, including “to distinguish particular features, to be discerning; showing insight and understanding.” We should
absolutely be discriminating in our criteria for war preparation, and the lives of our men in uniform depend on us taking an honest,
discerning look at who adds to military readiness and who detracts from it. We should
absolutely not open the combat units to the myriad problems we face already with women deploying to the theatre of war.
The Invisible War is a 2012 documentary showing the shocking prevalence of sexual assault in the military, and worse, the cover-ups that tend to follow. The rate of assaults against women is completely unacceptable as it is. We should not put women in infantry and special forces where the risk will be even greater to them because there is
less supervision,
more pressure, and everyone does
everything together and in front of each other. It will be totally destructive of both women and combat readiness.
According to the documentary that cites government studies, 20% of women in the military have been assaulted, fifteen thousand in 2011 alone. They estimate half a million women have been assaulted over the years. The testimonies of rape victims are horrendous. But it shows that neither the boot camps, nor the deployment training, nor the Feminist theories on women’s equality we’ve been fed since the mid-sixties equipped these rape victims to fight off the men who raped them or to avoid dangerous situations in the first place. Besides exposing a very dark problem in the military branches, what
The Invisible War shows without intending to is that breaking down the age-old standards of behavior and of separating women from men doesn’t empower them – it makes them more vulnerable to attack. This is the truth the Feminists don’t want you to know. They’ve been lying about it for the past fifty years.
Women have served in the military since World War I, beginning with separate units for women in nursing and administrative roles that “freed the men to fight.” Today, everything is integrated: We train together, eat together, we socialize and often drink together (one of the common avoidable circumstances that leads to rape), and single servicemen and women sleep in the same barracks together. These all become high-risk activities for a woman, as the documentary shows. Some were raped while on duty, or in the offices of their attackers. Some were having a few drinks, bonding with their fellows who in some cases drugged them. When all that stands between a woman and an attacker is a locked door, we’re already too late. And in special forces in the combat zone, there aren’t even any doors to lock.
We’re putting the sexes together as if eros and human passion don’t exist. All the steps that for thousands of years have been in place to protect women have been destroyed by Feminists who see these protections and standards as oppression. They are in fact the opposite. It takes a village to protect women – with both men and women holding each other to high standards of behavior. The differences in how we treat the sexes not only exist; they are essential. We don’t expect women to be treated like men – that would be barbaric. We don’t expect men to be treated like women – that would be pathetic. In the age of “friends with benefits” and “dress like a slut” day, everybody instinctively knows that how a woman dresses affects men. They can’t turn it off. That’s why dress and other behaviors in our own control matter. The Feminist’s assumption that we can
presto-chango transform our natures is absurd (and when tested is proven false.) They give
themselves the lie by adding double standards – women can be sluts, but you have to respect them as if they were chaste; women can do what men can do, except you need to gender-norm the testing standards to manufacture equal results. There’s no way they can create sexless uniformity among men and women, so they have to propagate a huge deception. They falsely frame the issue as one of civil rights and liberation, making it all but impossible to discuss the real issues.
Anu Bhagwati, a female veteran advocating for women in combat roles, was in this documentary giving “expert” testimony. Even knowing the horrifying rates of assault, she wants women in elite units where there is
no separation of the sexes, where there is not just less but
no protection of women. Put the sexes in close quarters, under pressure; tell them their biology is artificial and their previous sense of decency something to just get over. Anyone who doesn’t want to share their junk with the opposite sex (the spouses are cringing) is just a prude trapped in a bygone age.
Martha McSally continually claims that common decency standards are nothing and that the lack thereof doesn’t hurt unit cohesion at all. The media claim outrage at the prevalence of violent rape in the military. Yet in the combat roles debate, rape is nothing. The female proponent in
this debate asserts that if women are willing to risk capture and rape by enemy combatants, they should be allowed to do so. Just another
choice. Would she say the same to women joining the military in the first place? Big Lies, perpetrated by big-time Feminists.
Women with men is not an equal opportunity. The standards of conduct and degrees of separation have existed for women’s own protection, but Feminists have bullied us into abandoning them in favor of fake constructs that end up hurting women most of all. The appalling rate of sexual assault and the lack of prosecution in the military are serious problems that
The Invisible War brings to light. These should be dealt with before putting women at greater risk in combat units on the battlefield.
