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When the Woke Come for the Armed Forces
Men and women are the same and the only thing separating us is our sexual organs. This is the lie we’re being fed every day, all day. In countless ways, this lie has the potential to endanger our safety and our lives, and this is yet another example:
Leaked slides reveal the catastrophic failure of the Army Combat Fitness Test. If 84% of women are failing your physical fitness test (72% in a single, preposterous event!), you're not trying to make a stronger Army; you're trying to force women out. https://t.co/X50qO4EGaM
— David W. Brown 🇦🇶 (@dwbwriter) October 6, 2019
If women want to serve alongside men, they have to prove they are actually physically fit to do so. Weaker women serving in the army don’t just endanger themselves, they pose a risk for everyone around them. This is yet another way the woke Olympics hurts women under the guise of unattainable equality.
Published in General
Actually, you chose not to comprehend again. General fitness is not at all the same as the measured ability to march a certain distance in a certain time with a certain load, or to do a specific job task like lifting and pivoting in a confined space with a tank main gun round. So, claiming that a 20 year old and an 38 year old running a certain distance in the same time is an indication of the same level of general fitness makes no sense.
A 20 year old man running an 8 minute mile for two miles is far less generally fit than a 38 year old man. The 20 year old could be completely out of shape and just gut it out. The 38 year old has to actually put in the miles regularly.
Actually, no. Not “indiscriminate,” and I would hardly call the past nearly-four decades of U.S. military experience “surviving.” The legitimate argument, in the Army and Marine Corps, is over infantry, armor, and tube artillery. Those are simply beyond the career sustainable performance of virtually every woman who has every lived.
Deal with the objective reality of women “fixing trucks or fixing plane,” and, never mentioned for some reason, treating the wounded well within the combat zone. That simply negates, or at least seriously complicates your claim. Your claim, beyond the generic “men protect women,” falls apart in actual U.S. experience.
As it turns out, we have had a number of military women injured or killed and no units going berserk or otherwise losing their training. In the current media age, we would know.
(Not on Ricochet, anyway: we don’t like things repeated too often. ;) )
They were also literally against the wall, fighting for national survival. So, just for the length of the existential crisis, they added in those women who could coolly kill at a distance. They also recruited those who had the flying/fighting skills to fight in the skies, mostly in all female units.Â
I think “not going berserk” might be setting the bar a bit low. There’s a lot of room for judgment calls in combat, and I’m not confident that we would know whether there is a significant shift in behavior when a woman is injured versus a man being injured. Perhaps some after-action report would capture that, at least if the behavioral difference were extreme, but I don’t think we’d be privy to those details — and quite likely the media would not be.
I gave away my copy of the Grossman book, but the fact that he mentioned it, and that he generally cited sources, leads me to suspect that there’s something to it.
Incidentally, we are very good now at conditioning the reluctance-to-kill instinct out of soldiers, and have been for decades. I understand that the conditioning techniques used, such as repetitive fast-response simulation drills, are eerily close to what young men experience playing first-person shooter video games. I’ve read that the military has shifted the percentage of soldiers willing to shoot-to-kill from about 20% to about 95% using these techniques. I think that should give us cause to wonder about the generations of young civilian men similarly desensitized.
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This would absolutely leak, as did the alleged slide deck driving the OP. Soldiers, Marines, sailers, and airmen are all connected back home and amongst themselves by the internet. Anything unflattering to the military is going to come out, along with claims of coverup, within a very short time of the incident. Remember our past 18 years of media coverage.
@cliffordbrown Now I’m wondering how much you know in the “actual experience” And you still haven’t said where in history women didn’t look to men for protection. And I’m not talking about women fixing helicopters for the 101st. But one could make argument that those women are relying on men for protection.
Oh, c’mon. The media only reports what fits The Narrative, and The Narrative is that women are the equal of men in combat. That was true all the way back to the late ’80s in my USMC days. I only saw positive media stories concerning women’s military abilities. I even remember some Democrat politician claiming in a debate that women met the same standards as men in the military, shortly after I had graduated Marine OCS with its ramps so women could get through the obstacle course, different PFT standards, and short marches. (We men would go 15 miles, the women would go no more than 9 and get trucked back).
Some other things I never saw reported: The inability of women to charge a .50 cal machine gun, which takes good arm strength and pretty much any man can do, but I never saw a woman able to do it. The fact that most women couldn’t throw a grenade more than 5 yards. Yes, there was the occasional softball player who could heave it, but most were only a danger to themselves with a grenade. The inability of women to do many of the routine tasks of military life, like changing a wheel on a 5-ton truck, which two men can do (they weigh close to 300 lbs as I remember) but no number of women could do because it required so many there simply wasn’t room for them.
My favorite unreported story: On field exercises at Camp Lejeune, my unit (Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Mar Div) would suffer inexplicable dehydration casualties among the female Marines. It turned out the women weren’t drinking water because they didn’t want to pee in the field, to the point of dehydration. Leadership’s solution? Have my drivers truck the women into mainside every morning so they could pee in a real bathroom. A real morale booster for the male Marines. I’m sure you never read about this in Newsweek or the Washington Post. Any serviceman who served in a unit with women will have similar stories, but somehow they never make it into the mainstream media.
I’m against women serving in the combat arms: infantry, armor, and artillery. Since we have an all-volunteer army, the guys can’t complain about women getting all the cushy jobs.
Fit or not fit.  Can they do it?  Who cares about some strange and unmeasurable concept of “fit?” Â
And though you charge me with incomprehension, I think you aren’t understanding.  If your 18 year old 8 minute miler can gut it out to pass, that’s good.  It’s when the 40 year old only needs to run a nine minute mile that is the problem. Â
The 18 year old who is so unfit as to have to gut it out to pass is going to be fatal steps too slow when called on to sustain effort in combat.
This is why actual military tasks might be the correct measurement of individual physical military readiness. So, marches as a unit over a specified distance and within a specified time make a lot of sense for a ground force. Put on your unit issued equipment, ruck up with your unit standard packing list of stuff, and move out as a unit. Carry your own stuff, including chemical protective equipment, then execute a portion of the march in full chemical protective gear (including mask, gloves and overboots.Â
Performing loading drills for tankers and tube artillery, specifying a number of rounds and a time limit, also make perfect sense. Use the stuff actually assigned to the unit, not some special set of gym gear and some field and track set up! Plus, assessing physical military readiness by actual military tasks means you are not wasting training time on specialized events that do not directly train the unit jobs.
Embrace the power of “and.”  The bandsmen might only need to carry a flute or tuba, but their other role as guards might be planned or it might be expedient. They all need to be strong men, whether a general, or private, flautist or infantryman.Â
The band, at least in the Army, has had a headquarters defense task in their standard mission set, in their task outlines that specify standards of performance. The thing is that such a guard task is not about going somewhere with a load on your back. It is about using a rifle, pistol, and possibly a light machine gun as the last line of defense, maybe just before the general and his colonels, who have always only been issued a pistol. So, no, not a “strong men” task, never has been.
Ask the bandsmen at the battle of the bulge.Â
Or the cook who won the Navy Cross operating a .50 cal AA gun at Pearl Harbor.
We  had the exact same problem at Moody AFB in the 80’s.  During operational readiness exercises in MOP gear women were going down left and right from dehydration.  As flight surgeon I was sending them out of the exercise in bunches, forcing the men to pick up the slack.
Men are primarily responsible for advancing civilization, often by violence. Men are the risk-takers, the aggressive competitors, the protectors and providers. Women are a civilizing force when they act like women — attuned to people — husband, children, neighbors — the cooperative impulse. This is why it was a mistake to give women the vote. We’re inclined to be collectivists at the expense of individual liberty, which carries risks and frightens us. I’m only sorta (not really) kidding.Â
It’s not that no women have been responsible for advancing civilization (Margaret Thatcher). But the normal order of things is as described above. If we were a small nation surrounded by enemies (Israel), I could see the point of putting women through military training. And even though we’re not in Israel’s situation, I’m all for women training to handle firearms and carrying for protection. But, otherwise, I’d prefer an all male, all volunteer military capable of kicking ass and breaking things. They only need to take names later for the grave markers.Â
Too harsh?
Oh, and btw, women of fighting age can get pregnant. Fighting for two? I don’t think so. It’s a very bad idea on many levels (imagine women captives).Â
Absolutely.
In BCT in 68. APFT was 5 event with a 1 mile run. In T shirt, fatigue pants. and boots I ran a sub 5 min mile. Cadre were following my run yelling encouragement. And then they discovered my other scores. No quicks, no jumps, no upper body strength and couldn’t fight my way out of a wet paper bag The yelling stopped. I went from hero to zero. More to the story than gutting out a 8 min mile.
Holy cats. That’s amazing.
Two weeks before, Tom Von Ruden, an Olympic 880 runner did 4:45.
Would you consider flight crews combat arms?
If you mean the pilots, yes. I was thinking in terms of ground combat. There’s no reason a woman can’t fly a plane as well as a man. Maybe better. I think I’ve read they’re more resistant to g forces.
And they can get pregnant. It’s their superpower.Â
/sorry, couldn’t resist.
Honestly, lol. My sister’s a Marvel fan, I was hassling her about the Captain Becky movie the other day.
They are not more tolerant to g-forces. Â That is a myth.
I will never get used to women being in combat aircraft. Â Flying a combat aircraft might seem easy nowadays when our enemies don’t have aircraft, but if we ever need pilots with an instinct and lust for killing, we’re going to find that these women pilots have been entrusted with very expensive targets to fly around.
A stellar post packed with observations.
As to your last statement, my feeling is that if there is a real reason and need to go to war, everyone should go. They do that in Israel, and I admire the Israelis for that. If those individuals in the 30 year range are fit enough to get up early each morning to follow the Dow Jones stock ticker and see how their war investments are going, they should be able to do some basic training and tackle some war-related job.
No more of this baloney that goes: “I am a patriot, cuz my car carries a yellow ribbon bumper sticker with ‘Support the Troops’ on it.” You want a war – you help fight it.