Topic: Ban on women in frontline combat officially lifted

[Glock32]

Just stick another fork in.  I find very little to like about this country anymore.  If any civilization ever deserved to be circling the drain, it's ours.

[trapeze]

I do not understand the motivation or reasoning on this one.

Are they doing this so that we can have female POWs who will be tortured by our enemies?

Or will they be exploiting the images of dead female soldiers?

Or is it just meant to further destroy the military? (That seems most likely.)

To what end? Why?

[charlesoakwood]

To help the movie industry.

[LadyVirginia]

One of the reasons the ERA was defeated was the belief that it would require the drafting of women into combat.

They will use this to erode support for the military...and military actions because who's going to be for this:

Are they doing this so that we can have female POWs who will be tortured by our enemies?

Or will they be exploiting the images of dead female soldiers?

[Glock32]

I think it's to further destroy the military, and even more generally the concept of biological difference between the sexes. In particular it's part of the assault on masculinity and its uniqueness. Nothing at all good is going to come of this. The physical requirements will go out the window, that's as predictable as the sun rising in the east. All it will take is some lawsuit over "disproportionate impact".

Also don't discount the possibility that it was done for no real purpose other than to kick some more sand in conservatives' faces. This administration does it at every opportunity.

[Glock32]

From a commenter over at PJ Media:

I remember a day when we were sweeping the road into Fire Support Base Keene in Hau Ngiah province in Viet Nam. The VC had been mining the road and blowing up mail and beer runs. We took a break and the attached engineer stepped off the road and stepped on an anti-personnel mine and blew his foot off. A couple guys in my squad were helping him when he swung his other leg and hit another mine and blew his other foot off. My buddy was yelling he was blinded (it later turned out to be only dust). Another guy Smitty was laying there with chunks of metal sticking out of his face. I lost it, picked up an m-16 and drew down on a Vietnamese woman on a bicycle’s back. Fortunately for me and her both I didn’t pull the trigger.
I also remember having staph ulcers all over my feet and legs from walking in feces fertilized rice paddies. It took me about two months to wash the dirt out when I got home and ten years to get psychologically well.
War is not a laboratory for liberal a**holes to feel good about feminist theory. It’s dirty, bloody madness which can destroy the strongest of men.

[Alphabet Soup]

Just stick another fork in.  I find very little to like about this country anymore.  If any civilization ever deserved to be circling the drain, it's ours.

My sentiments exactly. Nothing good will come of any of this.

[Libertas]

It's yet another step toward ending war, they basically just want to turn the military into a Praetorian Guard that acts like a federal police force to control the internal population, external threats can only be created by right-wing nutjobs who incite foreign aggression by meddling in somebody elses local issue, so if they get rid of the right-wingers they get rid of the foreign threats...I'm not saying their view of external enemies isn't idiotic, I'm just syaing they hate us more than any external threat.   And that is really all you need to focus on, what they think of you and have planned for you...if more people did that these jokers would be history.

[Weisshaupt]

Maybe they just did a study and found women more willing to fire on Americans- since most of the are unthinking Julias anyway.

[Alphabet Soup]

Maybe they just did a study and found women more willing to fire on Americans- since most of the are unthinking Julias anyway.

I was thinking along those lines myself. Bottom line is that the death/injury rates will skyrocket. A lot of girls are going to get themselves killed - along with the males who get killed trying to protect them (instead of doing their jobs).

[Glock32]

Anyone who tries to argue they are just as capable and that no standards will be relaxed is simply delusional. My dad was a firefighter for a large urban department for a long time. He was there when they started to receive their first females, sometime in the early 1980s. He said there was a lot they could not physically do, and so the entrance requirements were watered down. We're talking essential fireman duties like carrying a person over the shoulder up and down stairs wearing full gear in a burning building.  Or managing the recoil of a high pressure nozzle, even men have difficulty with that. There were lots of examples.  A combat unit in the military certainly has even more.

If a typical combat load for an infantryman is somewhere between 80-100 pounds, are females going to be held to that same standard? Or will they be permitted to get by with 40-50 pounds?  And if so, who gets to hump the extra 50 pounds that she couldn't carry?  Or we will have combat units not having those few extra mortar rounds, those few extra belts for the MG?

I might be more open to the concept if the females were to be held to the exact same physical requirements, but you just know they won't be. Don't even get started on special forces units like the SEALs or Green Berets. The vast majority of men wash out of those programs. BUD/S training for the SEALs, you're looking at physical rigors that literally no woman on Earth can meet. It's just pure biological reality.

[pisskop]

Even without the differences in performance, let's not forget about the . . . other factors.

sanitation, the torture factor, the distractions as noted above, the other factors.  What if one gets pregnant?  Physcially and psyiologically there are many things which make the proposition riskier then some would put it.

But, to be clear, I am generally in favor of letting anybody do a job so long as they can do it at least as well as those currently employed to do so.  If females prove adequate than they should be offered. . .  But I am weary of putting them in the thick with violent women-hating rapists.

[Alphabet Soup]

This is where I usually get myself called a chauvinist.

I've known some women who could out-shoot me. I knew one gal who could physically kick my ass. I have never met a single female cop that I couldn't overpower and beat to death (if the mood struck me). I'm now an older guy and I know my limitations - many (if not most) cops could take me these days (as long as we're not talking an armed encounter).

There is no good reason to put women into combat. The reasons not to are endless.

Ending the proscriptions against fags in the military was stupid but women in combat is suicidally dangerous.

[Pandora]

This is where I usually get myself called a chauvinist.

I've known some women who could out-shoot me. I knew one gal who could physically kick my ass. I have never met a single female cop that I couldn't overpower and beat to death (if the mood struck me). I'm now an older guy and I know my limitations - many (if not most) cops could take me these days (as long as we're not talking an armed encounter).

There is no good reason to put women into combat. The reasons not to are endless.

Ending the proscriptions against fags in the military was stupid but women in combat is suicidally dangerous.

I agree with you, and too bad for what they call me. 

It's bad for the men, bad for the women, bad for morale, destructive to the institution, and tells us there's something horribly wrong with a society in which the protection of women, particularly of child-bearing age, is not a priority.

[Glock32]

That is another point I have made elsewhere on this subject. We as men know we are biologically expendable compared to women. That's why it has always been natural for men to put themselves between danger and the women. Women can engage in combat -- in WWII the Soviets had a number of very proficient female snipers -- but it should be the desperate actions of last resort. It speaks to the values of a society, and this does not speak well for ours.

[pisskop]

You know its been a rather wide taboo since humanity found out how to plow?

[benb61]

I knew we were in for trouble in the early 80's when the Air Force was allowing female Tanker crew members.  Though a tanker does not engage in direct combat that does not stop the enemy fighters from looking to get an easy kill.  Lots of the refueling routs skirted enemy territory.

[Dan]

When I was in Basic, we had a bunch of Canadian officers visiting to get a  look at our program. I was talking to one, I forget his rank, but an officer, and we were talking about this subject. He told me they (Canadians) ran 2 test platoons of women through their basic training program, with no gender modifications. Out of 100, only 2, yes TWO! made it...one was a lumberjack and the other an aerobics instructor.
Damn expensive way to have women feel all warm and fuzzy about themselves, if you ask me.
ANd Weisshaupt has it right, I think. Julia has an axe to grind and soon she'll have her very own, properly defined, Assault Rifle.
I've said it before, we won't be counting on the military to do the right thing before too long.

[pisskop]

I've said it before, we won't be counting on the military to do the right thing before too long.

hmmm?  The military is a branch of the government.  If the government goes awry, than its only natural for the military to follow.  Power with power.  A purge would be easy with the mental health code and the scare over guns and PTSD and whatnots.

[trapeze]

I remember reading somewhere that the IDF uses women in combat roles but I will give them considerable slack since they are basically in an existential threat situation every moment of every day.

We are not and, what with modern military technology, we hopefully never will be.

So...again I ask, "What is the endgame here?"

What is the ultimate goal of the left in this particular situation?

I believe that this is yet another way to weaken the USA militarily. I believe that the ultimate goal is a mostly neutered USA. Morally, economically and militarily. We are to be cut down to size. American exceptionalism has always been resented by the left and now, since it is within their power, they are working actively to eradicate the notion.

At least, that's what I think.