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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
I think the use of quotes indicates sarcasm as such . . .
A seductive glance from a woman with a smokin’ hot body . . .
I understand we have operations in the continental USA running drones in the middle east. Â I’d be fine with that. Â But I’m imagining a mixed special forces team on a mission: Â What could possibly go wrong? Â Give me a break.
Proportionality! The Left loves it.
Can you picture Ret Gen Votel defending uniform Cross Fit type standards for women attempting Ranger and SF selection? Can’t see it.
The Woke came for the military a long time ago. When I was at Marine Corps OCS in 1986, the obstacle course featured a ramp on the first obstacle (a high bar) so women candidates could reach it. Men were not allowed to use the ramp and there were some shorter male candidates who had trouble reaching the bar. One of those candidates – a guy who could also run 3 miles in 15 minutes – was eventually kicked out. Not only for that, but it was a contributor. He’d have to take a running start and a number of attempts at the bar before finally getting it, all the while earning the wrath of the platoon sergeant.
Yep. Endgame, season 7, episode 7 (I did have to look this up). The episode was focused on Director Vance. She had previously killed his partner and shot him, but left him alive. I think that it was Vance’s wife who ended up killing the assassin, in their home.
I was in Golf company in first increment 85.  The ramp was there then, too. I didn’t think much of it because women weren’t allowed in combat back then.
Edit: Â All women had to be in Charlie company too.
A few observations – an Army Field Hospital unit had difficulty passing the annual ARTEP when there were not enough men in the unit to unload and set up the tents for the Hospital. For the record an Army GP Medium or GP Large tent weighs a BUNCH and is a pain to get out of the truck, man handle(errrr people handle?) into place and set up – less than half of the unit’s personnel were men(eventually got help from another unit to unload and set up the tentage- assistance than may or may not have been available if operationally deployed). When Army units deployed to Bosnia in the 90s it was a bad deployment. Living conditions were not good and it was winter. Several female soldiers got pregnant and were med-evaced to Germany as policy at the time was to not have pregnant soldiers in forward areas (no OBGYN care for starters). when the female solders got back to Germany several had abortions (but stayed in Germany because had already been replaced). Coincidence or just a quick way to get out of a lousy deployment? Opinions vary but up to you to decide. Also, Navy ships regularly deploy short a few female sailors who are assigned to the ship but are unable to sail because of they are pregnant (no OBGYN aboard ship) leaving their shipmates to take up the slack. Navy damage control procedure used to call for two sailors to carry an injured sailor to medical care but that was changed as two female (or even female and one male) sailors were significantly challenged to lift and carry the injured sailor. The standard was changed to 4 sailors doing the med evac – problem is that the passageways onboard ship are basically too narrow for that, but that was someone else’s issue. Also note that EVERY sailor onboard ship has responsibility for damage control…
Yeah, I was third platoon Charlie Company.
During my time they were allowed defensive but not offensive combat missions. At TBS the male platoons would often assault a hill defended by the female platoon. There’s nothing quite as demoralizing as charging up a hill and discovering a female lieutenant with her pants down, squatting and dropping a load. You can’t unsee that.
Back then all women lieutenants were in Fox company, so I’m guessing that’s where you were, or perhaps your year was when they decided to integrate the lieutenants into all the companies. Â I was in Echo company 85. Â I was wrong on the year for OCS, I was in Golf 84, first increment.
Thanks! I guess we musta fallen asleep . . .
Actually, I said no such thing. Rather, I pointed out that the fitness standards, not physical standards, were scaled to measure general fitness by age and sex. So, the 38 year old First Sergeant did not need to run as fast as the 20 year olds to max his test, nor do as many pushups or sit ups. It was so for many decades, and had nothing to do with their ability to do their jobs.
If you were in a light infantry unit, the real test was the company road march, in which the senior leaders most certainly had to lead. That and the various field exercises.
Saying it does not make it so.
That is just objectively not true. Hasn’t happened. Plenty of observed history starting in WWI.
The brand new “requirements” are not demonstrably linked to actual combat readiness. If women, who have successfully performed their duties in Iraq and Afghanistan, are now being labeled as not meeting the new “standard,” you might wonder about what is actually being measured here.
I guess you missed all the women deployed in all the services to both Iraq and Afghanistan. You’ve been the beneficiary of national defense provided by both men and women of the All Volunteer Force with women in the divisions confronting the Soviet Union, starting in 1985, and in the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea.Â
309 confirmed kills in 10 months. Withdrawn from sniper duty after she was severely wounded by mortar fire. After recovering and being sent to the U.S. to drum up support for the war, she returned to the USSR to teach snipers for the rest of the war.
So you just said it again.  Scaling the requirements by age is wrong, and it doesn’t matter how many decades they’ve been doing it.
No, actually. Â But you seem to justify indiscriminate assignment of females because we have previously survived limited assignment of females. Â
And it also ignores that none of those divisions had to fight a really tough battle.  We haven’t had a multi-division battle in many decades, and recently the largest size battles we’ve had were battalion sized, and a few with multiple battalions that were still very limited in scope.
@cliffordbrown Sometimes I wonder about you. Where in history have women not turned to stronger men for protection?
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@cliffordbrown Ever seen or competed in a Spartan Race. Men are helping women.
In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Dave Grossman comments on Israeli experience with women in combat roles. He described an observed phenomenon whereby highly disciplined male soldiers would lose that discipline as soon as a female soldier was injured. Similarly, when describing the normal mammalian reluctance, present in a the majority of humans, to kill a member of its own species, he mentions how a threat to woman or children would override that reluctance.
I don’t know how accurate that is, nor how significant. But I would be very surprised if women in combat roles does not significantly change the dynamics of the combat group, once casualties occur.
That’s something that has always bothered me, and it’s a delicate subject to bring up because you invariably get accused of not respecting the troops. Our total KIA in 18 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan is less than 7,000. Those servicemen gave the ultimate sacrifice and deserve our honor and respect – but Iraq and Afghanistan are not Iwo Jima, where the USMC lost more than 7,000 in a little more than 30 days. And it’s not Vietnam, where we had 50,000+ KIA in half a dozen years. Drawing lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan about what we can get away with in a full-on Iwo Jima style war is dodgy.
I’m not sure that WW2 Soviet-era combat doctrine should be our authority for current U.S. doctrine. These are the people whose method of clearing a minefield was to march a battalion over it, and the favored way to preserve morale in the attack was to place a row of machine guns on the departure line with orders to gun down anyone who returned. A major reason for the staggering Soviet casualties in WW2 was that they didn’t give a damn about lives – either men or women.
It’s also probably worth restating the obvious: anecdotes don’t make good data. There is enormous overlap between men and women in most respects but, to the extent that we want our soldiers to exhibit traditionally masculine traits of strength, resilience, and aggression, we should expect relatively few women to find themselves way out on the masculine end of the overlapping bell curves of human sexuality.
(Which remains largely irrelevant to me, as I don’t want to be protected by a woman.)
There’s nothing disrespectful about it. Â
While a Marine veteran, I’m not a combat veteran. But if you read the accounts of combat veterans, (e.g. Karl Marlantes’s great novel Matterhorn), the thing that comes through is that combat can devolve into a state-of-nature of the most elementary and brutal sort. I don’t see how anyone can read Jim Webb’s Fields of Fire and think a Marine night patrol along Charlie Ridge is a great place for women.
That state-of-nature also occurs occasionally in civilian life. I remember reading accounts of the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, which was proclaimed a sanctuary so people flocked to it. But they had no adequate organization, facilities or police at the dome, so it soon degenerated into a Mad Max style hellhole with roving gangs robbing, raping and occasionally killing people. How did people respond? They made defensive circles with the men on the ring and the women in the middle. The same thing they would have done in 20,000 BC.
Yes. Â This. Â And I doubt it can be repeated too often.