Diversity is Not a Military Virtue

When American sailors, soldiers and Marines landed on Tulagi in the Solomon Islands in 1943, a billboard greeted them with his message:

Admiral Halsey says “Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs”! You will help kill the Yellow bastards if you do your job WELL.”

American fighting men did their jobs well. The representatives of the Emperor of Japan conceded as much in signing the surrender that ended World War II on the Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945. Beside that however, one hardly needs to say that Adm. Halsey would not be welcome in today’s military, particularly given two recent examples of what today’s military is like. In January, Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, lifted the combat exemption that kept women out of harm’s way. But before that, there was this message from Army Chief of Staff George Casey after Maj. Nidal Hasan, a Muslim, murdered 13 fellow soldiers and wounded 31 in November, 2009.

I’m concerned that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers. … Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.

For Casey to say the Army had to re-evaluate Muslims in the military is as unthinkable as it would have for Halsey to prattle about diversity if a Japanese-American had shot down 13 Marines at Parris Island in 1942. Yet the military’s insane commitment to diversity ideology allowed the jihadist Hasan to rise through the ranks and murder his comrades, a murder President Obama calls “workplace violence.”

“Diversity” is one word for this, of course, in keeping with the vocabulary the left has created to displace the traditional symbols of American society (the male, heterosexual, Christian warrior) and reorder its institutions. But a better one is feminization, which has brought down not only the military but other social institutions. Indeed, the growing feminization of the military tracked almost perfectly with the feminization of the society in general during the past 40 years. Such is the commitment to feminism that masculinity is now looked upon almost as a mental illness. Absent the triumph of feminism over society in general and the military in particular, it would have been nearly impossible for Casey to utter such nonsense and not be laughed out of the service.

Casey aside, the important point about Panetta’s decision is this: He ignored all the data the military collected on the subject of women in combat and acquiesced to feminists who, again, exercise total thought control over the ranks. War fighting is now nearly almost secondary to the military’s real task of providing unmarried women with jobs and ensuring that they achieve “equality,” a code-word for promoting as many as possible to the ranks of flag officers.

What Panetta Ignored
Panetta followed the advice of something called the Military Leadership Diversity Commission, chartered by Congress in 2009 and made up of 31 high-ranking active-duty and retired military personnel. Although the commission was concerned with altering the racial makeup of military leadership because of the nation’s declining white and growing minority populations—diversity “enhances performance through inclusion,” according to retired Army Gen. Julius Becton—it also studied the subject of women in combat with an eye toward promotion. Rising to flag rank almost always requires combat experience, but because women are exempt from combat, such achievement is difficult if not impossible. Not surprisingly, given its silly name, the MLDC recommended lifting the exemption because it is an “overt barrier to advancement into senior leadership.” To do so, again the MLDC and Panetta completely ignored the findings of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment on Women in the Armed Forces of 1992. It found, as a practical matter, that assigning women to combat, was not only impractical but also dangerous. Why? Because women are not suited for combat. Period.

Of course, normal people, meaning those unafflicted by leftist ideology, did not need a commission to study the matter for them and deliver a report. But alas, the first President Bush formed a commission, which delivered a report that, again, anyone would have expected.

Here is some of the evidence the commission gathered. As I have reported elsewhere repeatedly since the commission delivered its report 20 years ago, one of the remarkable pieces of evidence the commissioners saw was a graph that showed what anyone would know intuitively: the strongest woman is only as strong, on average, as the weakest man. So if the military recruits the strongest women for combat, it is really recruiting weak men. The commission also learned that the average 20-something woman has the lung power of the average 50-something man. Thus, again, recruiting 20-something women for combat is like recruiting 50-something men. But the military does not recruit weak men. Or old men. It recruits strong young men. Officers nearing 50 years old  routinely train with their young charges.  Do we really expect 45-year-old women officers to keep up with 20-year-old men?

Unless the female of our species has remarkably improved her physical prowess, those facts remain unchanged and the answer to that question is obvious. And indeed, here is what the Marines told the Defense Advisory Committee On Women In The Services in 2011: Compared to men, women generate 20 percent less aerobic power, 40 percent  less muscle strength and nearly 50 percent less lifting strength. They can’t keep up on marches either, moving 26 percent slower. As well, injuries knock them out of the military at twice the rate of men. Their nondeployable rate is three times higher.

These facts, which include the unpleasant truth that a woman’s bones break much more easily than a man’s, mean that the military must ignore reality to shove women onto the battlefield. As one would expect, officer training in the Marine Corps is “gender-normed” for women, meaning that physical standards are lowered so women can pass. And even with gender norming, most women still can’t pass the training, the Center for Military Readiness reported, citing a source in the Marines. In one case, 63 percent of the women candidates flunked combat readiness training, compared with 1 percent of men.

Marine Corps Capt. Kate Petrino sharpened that point by writing about her combat experiences for the Marine Corps Gazette: “Get Over It!,” the headline ran. “We Are Not All Created Equal.” If any woman might prove that Hollywood fairy tales can come true, it would have been Petrino, an outstanding college athlete and woman Marine who was a premier physical specimen. But during her 10-month deployment to Iraq, she wrote, the top-flight woman athlete suffered restless leg syndrome and literally broke down after 16-hour days.

By the fifth month into the deployment, I had muscle atrophy in my thighs that was causing me to constantly trip and my legs to buckle with the slightest grade change. My agility during firefights and mobility on and off vehicles and perimeter walls was seriously hindering my response time and overall capability. It was evident that stress and muscular deterioration was affecting everyone regardless of gender; however, the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines and further compounded by gender-specific medical conditions. At the end of the 7-month deployment, and the construction of 18 [patrol bases] later, I had lost 17 pounds and was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (which personally resulted in infertility, but is not a genetic trend in my family), which was brought on by the chemical and physical changes endured during deployment. Regardless of my deteriorating physical stature, I was extremely successful during both of my combat tours, serving beside my infantry brethren and gaining the respect of every unit I supported. Regardless, I can say with 100 percent assurance that despite my accomplishments, there is no way I could endure the physical demands of the infantrymen whom I worked beside as their combat load and constant deployment cycle would leave me facing medical separation long before the option of retirement. I understand that everyone is affected differently; however, I am confident that should the Marine Corps attempt to fully integrate women into the infantry, we as an institution are going to experience a colossal increase in crippling and career-ending medical conditions for females.

None of this, of course, addresses pregnancy or feminine hygiene and living quarters in the field, but those issues aside, human history back to antiquity tells us that Petrino’s travails were predictable. A normal person would act accordingly and refuse to open the battlefield to women. But today’s bemedaled military man ignores truth because he has been feminized. Women control him. At one of the hearings before the commission in 1992, Top Gun fighter pilots testified that their own promotions depended on ensuring that women were also promoted and passed through flight training, a form of control that would not be lost on higher ups. Former Chief of Naval Operations and retired Adm. Mike Mulllen explained the military’s priority years ago: “Diversity is a strategic imperative,” he said, because “[h]aving the cultural skills, having the diverse backgrounds in order to literally achieve our mission is really critical.” Indeed. That is how Panetta came up with his decision, and how Casey explained the real problem with Hasan’s murdering 13 Americans. The problem wasn’t that 13 Americans were dead. It was that Americans, particularly Americans in the military, might not think it’s a bright idea to recruit soldiers  who adhere to a supremacist political ideology masquerading as a religion.

It’s A Moral Issue
Now, these are practical difficulties, and theoretically, practical difficulties can be resolved. Those who favor women in combat will always trot out the one example of a woman who can succeed in combat and ask why she should be denied her “right” to kill the enemy. Answer: Because whether women should serve in combat is not a practical matter. It is a moral one. The question is not whether women can serve, the question is whether they should. Assigning women to combat is utterly barbarian. It is anti-Christian as well, for it  trespasses the complementarity of the sexes and denies nature by suggesting that God made women, like men, to fight and kill. Of course, He didn’t. “Male and female he created them,” Genesis tells us. And the Catechism of the Catholic Church drives the point home:

Everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity. Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented toward the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the sexes are lived out. … Each of the two sexes is an image of the power and tenderness of God, with equal dignity though in a different way.

Feminist dogma, on the other hand, teaches that “gender” is “socially imposed rather than biological,” Andrew Heywood observed in his book Political Ideologies. It is “a political construct, usually based upon stereotypes of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behaviour and social roles.” Thus, assigning women to combat roles enshrines what is perhaps the principal feminist falsehood into military policy. The late military sociologist Charles Moskos, who served on the commission in 1992, poetically put it this way: Putting women in combat suggests that they are merely little men and men are merely big women. They aren’t—as if anyone need say this. God made them different; gloriously different, nature teaches us. One sex can do things for which nature has not prepared the other. It is natural for men to fight, and indeed, every real man, as Gen. George Patton taught us, loves to fight. It is unnatural for women to fight. To deny this reality is to lie.

But that’s what feminism is. A lie. Unhappily, the military has conscripted this lie to justify remaking itself into something that Adm. Halsey and the manly cohort  that won World War II would not recognize.