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QOTD: The Military Has One Job: Winning Wars
Question: How can President Trump claim to represent all U.S citizens, regardless of sexual orientation, when he banned transgender individuals from joining the military? Isn’t that discrimination?
Trey Gowdy’s Response (in a CNN interview): “Nobody has a ‘right’ to serve in the Military. Nobody. What makes people think the Military is an equal opportunity employer? It is very far from it….and for good reasons–let me cite a few. The Military uses prejudice regularly and consistently to deny citizens from joining for being too old or too young, too fat or too skinny, too tall or too short. Citizens are denied for having flat feet, or for missing or additional fingers. . .
“The Military has one job: Winning War. Anything else is a distraction and a liability. Did someone just scream ‘That isn’t Fair’? War is VERY unfair, there are no exceptions made for being special or challenged or socially wonderful.
“YOU must change yourself to meet Military standards…..Not the other way around. I say again: You don’t change the Military… you must change yourself. The Military doesn’t need to accommodate anyone with special issues. The Military needs to Win Wars….and keep our Country safe….PERIOD! If any of your personal issues are a liability that detract from readiness or lethality… Thank you for applying and good luck in future endeavors. Who’s next in line?….any other questions?”
Trey Gowdy isn’t serving in our government any longer, and I sure miss his direct, no-nonsense style. He knows that people’s belief in their entitlement could put this entire country at risk. The Left believes that every one of us must bow to their gods, whether they are sexuality, equality, fairness (on their terms), political correctness and accepting everything from transgenderism to climate change.
I disagree.
As Trey Gowdy says, the military has one job: winning wars.
Published in Military
We are the pinnacle. We do not look to others for leadership.
What military capacity? All any of them can do is hold our coat.
Please, do share examples of other countries that allow trans people to serve. Are they at war? Have those who are trans been deployed? Were they able to get their medications in a timely manner? Where there side effects? I do so hope all their needs were met …
P.S. (edited to add) : We’re America. Why in the name of God would we look to some other military for guidance.
Define “combat.”
If you’re too proud to learn from others, there are still these interesting articles:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1530.html
And
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/02/27/care-for-transgender-service-members-has-cost-the-military-about-8-million-since-2016/
And
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/new-poll-us-troops-veterans-reveals-thoughts-current-military-policies-180971134/
Which was particularly interesting re the generational differences in opinion within the Forces.
I’d be interested in what your sons think of the issue
I’m not assuming anything. When I talked about the need for on-going blood tests and hormone therapy, you mentioned placing them in non-combat roles. To which I replied, sometimes the war comes to you. There are no 100% guarantees in war. Being a “non-combatant” is certainly high on that list.
It might be good if other advanced countries took on the same role as the US Military. But they don’t. Quite frankly there is no other Western country in the world that deploys an expeditionary Force and fights long-term engagements like us.
@zafar By the way, did you peruse the biographies of the Rand study authors? One person out of seven had actually served in the military and she never saw combat. War is not for armchair quarterbacks. There are plenty of professions and situations you can conduct social experiments in that, when they fail, do not involve getting people killed.
Well we both assumed that all trans people are on hormone therapy, which apparently isn’t the case.
So while I agree (I think) that the need for regular medication without which a person can’t actually function (some diabetics?) is a legitimate, arguable factor for the military to take into account when recruiting, this doesn’t include all (or even most) trans people. That’s why I think individual assessment against defensible measures is a very reasonable approach while assuming something about a whole group of people (erroneously) is not.
There are countries whose situation is precarious enough that they have the draft (eg Israel and Finland) but which do have trans people in the military.
There are others (Australia) which fought alongside the US in its longest (still going) war in Afghanistan.
Just dismissing all of them as slackers doesn’t make sense.
Sounds sorta truthy, to be honest.
Also true, but how is that different from the arguments against women or racial minorities being integrated into the army wrt morale? They’re definitely in Afghanistan and they were definitely in Iraq. In fact one of the articles was about testimony from trans people who were serving or were veterans of the US Army.
Re the RAND study: research is a skill. It’s reasonable to contest their facts and conclusions with other (supported) facts and conclusions. Dismissing the work of one of the authors because she hasn’t been in combat is as rational as dismissing her work because she’s a woman. Why bring it up?
So now we’re comparing women and minorities to those with mental disorders.
Yes it does. There is not one single country on this globe that can even do one third of what the US military does daily. People like to point out the Israelis as some sort of über army, but they are very small, and barely competent. Their last foray into Syria (or was it Lebanon) in around 2005 was an embarrassment where they had to leave because their army lacked the will to fight. Maybe they had too many perverts in their ranks, I don’t know, but they did not press on to a victory after meeting some resistance. Israel is great at propaganda, and that’s important. It’s great to look at the cute women they put in uniforms, but my suspicion is that this is done just to remind their neighbors that the neighbors are so incompetent that bathing beauties can take them on in a battle. They can’t, of course, but the propaganda is effective.
The closest military to having anything close to our ability is the UK, and they are tiny compared to us.
So, no. Calling all others slackers makes a lot of sense. Every other free country in this world relies on our military to keep the unfree world at bay.
To put it in context: I don’t think objecting to trans soldiers is always really about the impact on military effectiveness, going by the apparent disinclination to take the argument deeper than assertion to data regarding how it has really affected the effectiveness of real life armies in other parts of the world or how it’s actually effected the effectiveness of the US Army over the past few decades. It often just seems a way of expressing a wish about how gender should work in broader society and why.
Israel has always included women because from its inception, they would never have had enough men to fight. And you know nothing about their performance, so please don’t insult them.
Susan, did they withdraw after attacking in 2005 or 2006? Yes, they did. Why do you say I know nothing about them? What would I need to know? I know what my battalion was doing and I read about their battalions failing in very similar fights. How am I wrong?
If you’re referring to women in the Israeli army, well, they’re women and that is a huge limitation. That is not conjecture, that is fact. The Marines did the largest study on the topic and the data is undebatable. Women are not very effective as combatants.
Their desperate situation may require the use of women, but I promise you that if they had enough men, they would rather use men.
I’d also appreciate some data on your evaluation of the Israeli army, and your assessment of your pulling back, @skyler.
No Zafar, it’s because the army is not the place to try social experiments. When we are talking about life and death decisions, it’s not a good idea. And as others have said, there is no army in the world like ours.
From that paragon of accuracy (lol), Wikipedia, comes the following quote:
“Despite being officially classified as combat soldiers, women in combat roles are not deliberately deployed into combat situations. They are expected to respond in the event a combat situation does erupt, but are not deployed to situations where there is a high risk of combat. The three mixed-sex infantry battalions are deployed to border patrol duties on the Israeli borders with Egypt and Jordan and security duties in the Jordan Valley, and female infantry soldiers are barred from joining the frontline combat infantry brigades which are deployed in the event of war. Female tank crews, who are also only regulated to border guard duties, do not serve in the regular armored combat units.[29][30]“
I think this validates what I wrote above.
Many of them are smaller because their countries’ are smaller. Are you confusing the advantage of size with qualitative rather than just quantitative superiority?
I’m voting for the perverts!!
More seriously: it was Lebanon, and they ran into the issue that the US has in Afghanistan (and did to a degree Iraq, and completely did in Vietnam).
What does a more advanced army do after over-running a country when the conquered population doesn’t cooperate and surrender?
Eventually they’re going to ask themselves whether the army is the tool the invading country really needs to achieve what it wants to. If the answer is no, they’ll start to wonder why they’re still there.
No. Increasing size is not just a matter of adding more people. What our military is capable of is orders of magnitude greater than any other country in the world.
Does size of budget have a multiplier effect?
Meaning: does (for eg) doubling the funds available more than double the effectiveness because it can leverage technology to make each soldier that much more effective?
My experience, and this is not just a military matter, is that the larger the organization, the less you get for your money. That is, improvements do not have a linear relationship to the amount of money spent. There’s an asympotote of sorts, and this is true for the military, the USDA, medicare, IBM or the Catholic Church.
I couldn’t care less about the studies or how gender should work in a broader society. Gender has been working just fine for many years w/o help from SJW’s. We can afford a few freaks but we can’t all be freaks. Can we @Zafar? That should tell us something both in society and the military. No amount of mutilation surgery and no hormones can turn a Y into an X. A delusional person says a trans woman is a woman. One who looks in his pants, sees a penis, and says “gee I feel like a woman” is delusional. How the hell does he know what a woman feels like? Our politicians both civilian and military, every one of them shielded from the consequences, expect the military to embrace this lunacy.
So let’s break your comment down. I did not say you knew nothing about them. I asked for references. That is hardly the same thing. I have no problem with how they choose to use women in combat, so we agree. I also suspect that they don’t want women subject to capture and to potential rape and abuse.
I suspect that the use of women in the military will continue in Israel. Much of the country is on the left and would scream gender bias.
@skyler, I did some brief additional research on the 2006 war between Hezbollah (Lebanon) and Israel and I defer to your assessment. Although I hope Israel is a better army than you portray!
They’re certainly not bad, but they are way over-rated in western imagination, and hopefully in Arab imagination. They have a strong propaganda machine to instill that reputation.
If I had to pick a foreign country to operate on my flanks, the Israelis would be in my top ten, for sure.
I’d have Brits, Aussies, Canadians, maybe Danes (I liked how the Danes operated in Afghanistan, so I might be biased there), maybe Norwegians, possibly Poles, Spanish, and then the Israelis would be in that list, not in any certain order.
Edit: I should have included the South Koreans and even the Japanese.
I’ve spoken to one about it and he is firmly against.
That said, my family has personal experience with the trans issue and are well aware of the hell that it can bring. We all firmly believe that most trans suffer from an underlying mental problem that remains unaddressed by transitioning. (proven by suicide rates being similar pre and post)
I personally believe that the military is under no obligation to accommodate any one for any reason. Too short? Too bad. Too tall? Tough luck. Pregnant? Well, I guess we all should have thought about that before we accommodated you …
Edited to add: And I couldn’t care less about opinion polls about this subject, even if it is the opinion of those in the military.
Fascinating, @skyler. I appreciate your expanding on the question!