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War Is Heck
Remember the study that concluded that female Marines were slower, less accurate with weapons and more injury-prone than men? The one that concluded that all-male units were faster and more lethal than mixed-gender units on most combat tasks? The one that came as a surprise to exactly no one who’s actually looked at a man’s upper body and a woman’s and thought, “Vive la différence?“
Well, not to worry. Turns out that morale in these mixed-gender units is perfectly satisfactory. Just as good as in the all-male groups, reports The New York Times with evident delight:
… a Marine Corps study made public by a women’s advocacy group this week found that after months of testing mixed-gender combat units, troops reported morale equal to that of all-male groups and higher than noncombat integrated groups.
So morale is just as good, albeit no better, but they still can’t shoot as straight, throw a pack over as high a wall, or evacuate a casualty as quickly. Oh well. The important thing is that they feel just as good while shooting the wrong targets, letting the guys pick up their packs for them, failing to drag their buddies to safety, then nursing their overuse injuries, right? It’s not as if those skills are of direct, practical, daily relevance to a Marine or anything:
“There has been this band of brothers idea that there is something special about having only men, and adding women will ruin it,” said Ellen Haring, a senior fellow at the advocacy group and a reserve Army colonel. “The study doesn’t bear that out.”
The other nice thing to know is that the study found sexual assault levels no higher than in the Marines as a whole. (But why would anyone expect them to be? Is the assumption here that only lack of proximity to women separates rape-prone Marines from normal ones?) Apart from that, we’ve still got a few problems with these mixed-gender units. To wit:
- All-male squads and teams outperformed those that included women on 69 percent of the 134 ground combat tasks evaluated.
- All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams. Those teams had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
- Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle and the M203 grenade launcher.
- Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system, at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.
You know what I think is special about having “a bunch of men” do these things? They do it better. If you tell me my neurosurgeon has Parkinson’s disease but not to worry, 41 percent of the time his hands don’t shake at all and besides, his morale is terrific, I’m still not going to want him anywhere near my brain. That’s not prejudice against the disabled, it’s just common sense.
One would think.
Published in Military
Would that it were. But yes, Phyllis did write on the general subject of women in the military, though she isn’t the one I am thinking about.
I have searched Tailhook as well, but the name doesn’t appear. Thinking more on the subject, I remember her writing about the permanent damage to women’s hips from carrying heavy backpacks and gear. She also had all the stats from injuries, to numbers of women who couldn’t perform what was a 2-man operation on board ships or in the field, etc., and was one of the first to bring this to the attention of the public – at least the conservative public. (And also was one of the first to let us know that rather than admit that 2 women couldn’t carry out certain duties – e.g., carry a stretcher on board ship – the solution was simple: it became a 3 or 4-man operation…)
Feminists and the PC crowd push too far in one direction and their opponents would restrict women too much in the other direction.
Whether or not you shoot accurately is more determined by prior experience using guns. Women are arming themselves more so the differences are likely to disappear. I shot “expert” every time while guys around me hit rocks, the roof, the vertical supports, and perhaps even my target.
Problems such as Tailhook are as much a result of the liberated, sexually active woman as it is of guys. If women returned to traditional morality, did not dress as if they were advertising, and reclaimed their modesty, there would be fewer cases of assaults in the news, especially with coed units. I don’t excuse unwanted, forced behavior. I want discipline, but resent the current attitude that the guy is guilty until proven innocent. That is counter to our values.
I commanded two units, one in a dangerous country. I kept my people safe, always met the mission needs, and facilitated promotions because I had the verbal skills to ensure performance reports written by my officers and me sold the value of the person.
My men praised my leadership-proof is in my display case.
There is a happy middle ground where women are not a problem and are needed in this all-volunteer force where so many males no longer qualify due to fitness, weight, or prior drug use.
I submit this as an interesting data point. When the study about the poorer performance of mixed-sex Marine units came out a couple of months ago, I mentioned it to my older son, who is a Marine. He was very supportive of his female fellow Marines.
His attitude was: OK, so maybe she won’t be able to carry or drag me to safety as well as some others. Neither can I. There are really big guys that I can’t lift either.
Trust me, he’s about the least PC person that you’ll ever meet, so I don’t think that his comments were motivated by anything other than his sincere feelings and experience.
During the Tet offensive, Khe Sanh, the marine firebase with 6000 marines close to the DMZ, was under siege for two months by up to 4 divisions of NVA. At night around the perimeter, the fighting was hand-to-hand. The question: does even one of the marines who fought at Khe Sanh think it would have been a good idea to have women fighting hand-to-hand at night with the survival of the base at stake?
One of the impressive things about the Pesh Merga is that they have women in leadership and combat positions – but in their own, separate, units. Integrated fighting units seem very strange to me.
And if those of us who’ve only written about them (or even given them more than a few minutes of thought) can see, clearly, “That’s ridiculous,” imagine how those who’ve fought them feel.
I just don’t get it — what are people thinking these young men and women are training to do? They’re not training to play the role of “Marine” in a movie. They’re training to be in real wars, fighting real battles, in places where such stasitics such as “all-male squads and teams outperformed those that included women on 69 percent of the 134 ground combat tasks evaluated” mean, logically, that more people will die in mixed units. “Ground combat” is a core competency of this job, it’s what Marines do, it’s not a team-building exercise designed to make members feel like real Marines before they go back to the office shouting Ooh Rah while working on the 2016 All New and Improved Digital Scotch Tape Rollout Campaign.
That’s a lovely sentiment, and I’m sure it’s heartfelt. But if the integrated teams perform 69 percent worse than the all-male teams on 134 combat tasks, that unit is much more likely to do poorly against an enemy that’s ceteris paramus a fair or even a worse match (in training, morale, leadership, and equipment) but doesn’t have women in it. I’m not saying this out of an inherent eagerness to keep women out of combat; I’m saying it because that’s what the numbers suggest.
We will find out at a terrible time, in a terrible way, what a terrible idea this is.
I thought women were barred from combat.
So does that mean these women will be in logistics and other roles?
I seem to recall hearing some huge percentage of the military is logistical support. Not sure what the percentage is for each branch.
Ah, just double checked my list of womenincombat links (let me know if you want them) and Leon Panetta pushed pretty hard to make women in combat a real thing starting January 2016.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/23/panetta-lifts-pentagon-ban-on-women-serving-in-direct-combat/
This article is a few years old, does anyone know what the fallout has been since then?
Have exceptions been sought and granted? sought and denied? not sought?
Here’s another article that mentions the muscle atrophy issue – the kind of thing that is non-obvious when people avoid talking about facts.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20140117150815/http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/get-over-it-we-are-not-all-created-equal
And here are some other troop responses for good measure.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323539804578260132111473150
http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/09/the-harsh-reality-of-women-in-infantry-combat/
I prefer not to think of women as weak. I prefer to think of women as having normal, human strength, while men have freakish, unnatural strength, like a vampire, or a mutant.
Establish min physical performance standards for each field and don’t waiver them for women.
Women should now have to register for Selective Service….be careful what you ask for.
Future drafts should only let education deferments last until the end of the semester.
Let’s talk about how the wars have been fought over the last 15 years or so. We haven’t sent just 23 year old active duty males in the peak of physical fitness in combat situations, we’ve sent older and less in shape reservists and guardsmen on multiple tours to serve in combat roles. The decision to send part-time service members to fight a full-time war has lead to major health consequences for those who served. Women aren’t the problem when it comes to our military’s readiness.
Accomplishing the mission would also be nice.
I doubt it. The facts will be covered up.
You’ve identified a problem.
Have you identified a solution?
I hope adding women to combat ranks isn’t the solution, because that doesn’t seem like it would address the problem above at all. The number of women enlisting in the military is lower than the number of men to begin with.
Definitely agree — no argument from me at all. And I should stress that women out-perform men in quite a number of other tasks that are essential to a modern military, and I’d have no problem with giving women preferential treatment for units or assignments requiring the those skills. ( The mixed-gender teams outperformed the male ones in accuracy at firing a 50-caliber machine gun in traditional and provisional rifleman units. Why? Beats me. No idea. But if that’s the case — and if that finding can be replicated, so that we’re sure it’s not a fluke — then clearly, it’s unproblematic to have women do that job, and indeed desirable.) I understand that Israeli women make much better baggage-screeners than Israeli men. For reasons not well understood, the women were reliably better at spotting suspicious items. If you’ve ever flown in or out of Ben Gurion, you may have noticed the dominance of the distaff sex at airport security: that’s why.
But I completely agree with you: women are hardly the biggest problem we’ve got when it comes to military readiness. I just brought this up because the message of the article — “morale is great, so no need to worry about what the Marines really do” — so head-smackingly symptomatic of all the problems that contribute to our lack of military readiness, above all, the failure to reckon with the idea that what’s being readied — or not — is a military.
Pregnancies do impact readiness in “combat ready” units. I had both of my children while in staff jobs. Each assigned person who can’t deploy counts against. As totals increase for whatever reason, the deployment status goes down.
Bet you someone, somewhere, is now swimming in government grant money to study this wholly counter-
intuitive hypothesis. …
“Take that hill, soldier! Hit ’em with everything you got right in the face until one of you is dead, then blow the living hell out of everything on and around that hill, then you move in and make it a parking lot!”
“Beg pardon?”
When Bill was prez, he attempted to integrate Marine Corps boot camps. The 53 generals of the Marine Corps offered to resign en masse over this issue. Bill took the hint and the Marine Corps did not integrate the men and women in its boot camps.
One of the political hacks put in place in DoD by Bill was a woman who was committed to integrating boot camps. She hated the idea that the Marines were exceptions to this rule and excoriated the Marine Corps. Always good to know your enemies.
Semper fi.
When I was in, there was an impact but not that large because there were so few women. The pregnancy rate was balanced by the greater likelihood of men serving time for, well, being more likely to do things that put you behind bars are getting kicked out. With more women, and especially more women in confined, wartime environments, and with pregnancy an excuse not to deploy or to be sent home from a bad location, the impact increased. Another impact to a unit’s readiness was the notional taskings, the deploying of individuals to meet national and not unit deployments. A person doing time in Saudi obviously was not able to meet the units 24hr (or whatever) criteria to deploy and this hurt the unit readiness to the point the distance away was waived. Obviously, this skewed the readiness picture and women were not the problem in this case.
I hated when politicians and not those tasked with mission effectiveness chose the roles for women (Pat Schroeder, for ex). Today, military leaders are politicians making political and not mission decisions.
I was against making military academies co-ed but was proud of the women I saw at the AF Academy last week. Go figure.
I talk with Marines now & then. The one I’m closest to used to tell me about some of the types of things he did, like working with operators. He has told me he has seen women who can do the job as required & he has no problems with that. He has told me he always measures people he’s working with as to competence, not to say diligence, & is not moralistic about all the possibilities one could take into account, but he judges by his experience of what it takes & who’s likely to give a good account of himself. This apparently includes women.
I have never disbelieved, but I hold by my opinion that women should not be involved in the martial pursuits. He has never agreed with me, for what Americans think are practical reasons, but seems not to have engendered contempt for me. I think practical wisdom goes a good deal farther than doing a job.
Do you remember 80s action movies, when last stories showed men–working class heroes, not like the rich handsome things now on display in HD–face up to horror & face it down? I was young when I watched those things. It seemed to me I was watching what I now think of as a revelation. I see it in the young among my own, the way they fear me & follow me. I have seen this in young men & boys alike. I see what they seek in warriors, enshrouded in death.
I’ve heard Marines say the same.
Once they are in combat and lives are being lost because of this nod to the PC Gods, morale may be a problem.
I have five Israeli kids over the age of 18. All three of my daughters are physically fit and very active, robust types, but two of them chose (extremely demanding) alternative service rather than the IDF. My tour guide daughter, who climbed the Snake Path at Masada in her 8th month of pregnancy, a good shot who carries a handgun, says she finds the idea of women in most combat positions “ridiculous and insulting”.
My youngest daughter underwent testing and selection, but decided that committing to 2 full years with the Israeli Society for the Protection of Nature would offer her more interesting challenges.
(continued)
(continued) My middle daughter qualified for a difficult position in a combat unit, but eventually left because she found it too stressful, and thought that the relative contribution she might make was not worth it.
My elder son served in an elite combat unit, and his younger brother is in the Armored Corps. Both think that women should be allowed to serve in combat duties if they are capable, but point out that they and many of their male counterparts are regularly excluded from combat duties in which they might have succeeded, because they did not meet certain health qualifications.
“That happens all the time to men too. What’s the big deal?”, they ask.
Another thought occurred to me just now. In the case of Fallon Fox, a male to female transgender MMA fighter, Fox claims that Fox is a female because hormones treatments have given Fox less muscle strength and bone density than a male (yes, I’m just not going to use pronouns here). So, when the topic is transgenderism, we are supposed to regard physical weakness as a defining feature of womanhood. When the topic is gender equity in the military, we are supposed to think that these gender differences do not exist.
FYI, I agree with you about this, Claire. I found it interesting that my son, who has actual (and current) experience in the Marines, felt less strongly about the issue than I did.
From what I’ve heard of Marines, they get the left over gear after the army is done with it and they make do. They always make do.
They just decommissioned the vietnam-era harrier jets in 2010 according to this google result for: last harrier.
From what you’ve written, I’m inclined to read it more as a “we’ll get the job done no matter what” response rather than a “it’s better this way” response.
I would say this is more a result of the troop draw down than anything else. When you can’t have a fully staffed military because of political reasons (budget, “compromises”, etc.) you are going to draw on those people who are still in the reserves/national guard because you can’t have the regular Army in the field 24/7 for 15 years.