By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
What if, during the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney
had accused President Obama of wanting to let servicewomen serve in combat?
After all, Obama had hinted as much in 2008. What would Obama’s response have
been?
My hunch is that he would have accused Romney of
practicing the “politics of division” or some such and denied it.
In any case, wouldn’t an open debate have been better
than putting women into combat by fiat? You’d think the folks who are always
clamoring for a “national conversation” on this, that, and the other thing
would prefer to make a sweeping change after, you know, a national
conversation.
Instead, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the
change on his way out the door. And Panetta has been lionized even though it
wasn’t really his decision to make. If the president didn’t want this to
happen, it wouldn’t happen. Perhaps Obama let Panetta run with the idea, just
in case it turned out to be a political fiasco.
The good news for Obama is that it hasn’t been. Absent
any informed debate, polls support the idea. Indeed, the Republican party has
been shockingly restrained in even questioning what is a vastly bigger deal
than the lifting of the half-ban on gays in the military — “don’t ask, don’t
tell.” The mainstream media have celebrated the milestone and largely yawned at
the skeptics.
Most lacking from the coverage is any attempt to explain
how this will make combat units better at combat. Instead, we’re told that
gender integration is necessary because without combat experience, it’s hard
for women to get promoted.
Lifting that glass ceiling is an understandable, even
lofty desire. But what does it have to do with making the military better at
fighting?
My point isn’t that women should be kept out of all
combat roles. Indeed, as many supporters of the move are quick to point out,
women are already getting shot at. “In our male-centric viewpoint, we want to
keep women from harm’s way,” Ric Epps, a former Air Force intelligence officer
who teaches political science, told the Los Angeles Times. “But . . . modern
warfare has changed. There are no true front lines; the danger is everywhere,
and women have already been there in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
True enough. But does anyone believe such changes are
permanent? Will we never again have front lines? Or are the generals simply
fighting the last war and projecting that experience out into the future?
Heck, if we’ll never have wars between standing armies
again, we can really afford to cut the defense budget. Something tells me
that’s not the conclusion the Pentagon wants us to draw.
It is a common habit of many liberals and self-avowed
centrists to preen about how they don’t deny science and evolution the way
conservatives do. Well, on this issue, it is the opponents of women in combat
invoking the scientific data that confirm a fairly obvious evolutionary fact:
Men and women are different. For instance, at her physical peak, “the average
woman has the aerobic capacity of a 50-year-old male,” notes defense
intellectual and veteran Mackubin Thomas Owens in a powerfully empirical
article in The Weekly Standard.
Another evolutionary fact is that men act different when
around women. This creates challenges for unit cohesion and fighting
effectiveness.
The three most common responses to such concerns are that
countries such as Israel and Canada let women in combat; advances for women
can’t be held hostage to sexist attitudes; and there won’t be any lowering of
standards, so only physically qualified women will be in combat.
As to the first point, Israeli gender integration is
often wildly exaggerated. And the Canadians have neither the capacity nor the
need for a large standing army.
The latter arguments don’t strike me as particularly
reality-based either. Sexist attitudes alone aren’t a justification for
anything. But we’re not talking about misogyny here. Proof of that is the fact
that the military already practices gender-norming (giving women extra points
for being women) in many instances. Will there really be less now?
Obama’s decision hasn’t stifled the debate, it’s merely
postponed it until the day Americans see large numbers of women coming home in
body bags, alongside the men.
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