Get Women Out of Combat
Elaine Donnelly, President of the Center for Military Readiness and I were in a meeting recently at the Pentagon with the Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey and four-star General Richard Cody, Army vice chief of staff to discuss women in combat. We discussed with them new Army policies that are putting female soldiers in combat zones.
Ironically, our travels then took us near Tuba City, Arizona, home of Lori Piestewa, Army Private First Class, the first female soldier killed in Iraq. The news was full of coverage of the services commemorating the second anniversary of the ambush in which Lori was captured and eventually killed on March 23, 2003.
Amidst all of the honor rightly due to Lori, no one is asking a critical question. Why? Why was Lori — a woman and a mother — close enough to combat to stumble directly into the vicious hands of the enemy?
I’ll tell you why. And it’s not just because she was a soldier.
We have a noble and honorable tradition of sparing women and children from combat. It’s part of being a civilized culture. Some people cite female pilots from World War II as setting a precedent for putting women in combat. However, while those women did serve admirably in the war, they did not fly in combat zones and in combat missions.
President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, the late Les Aspin, changed Defense Department policy in 1994 by removing “substantial risk of capture” from the regulations that defined a combat zone where women were not to be assigned.
Now, the Army is moving even further in the direction of assigning women to combat zones.
See this important article — Elaine lays out details.
Watch this space for more. And comments are open below.
Salute to Mudville Gazette
And My View
“Amidst all of the honor rightly due to Lori, no one is asking a critical question. Why? Why was Lori — a woman and a mother — close enough to combat to stumble directly into the vicious hands of the enemy?”
And amidst all this rhetoric I’ve yet to see a coherent arguement as to exectly why they should not be in combat. Provided that they are capable of doing the job.
Donnelly’s arguements are primarly that women are possesed of such poor qualites in general that they are unfit for the military altogether. I realize that the it’s the new “political correctness” to be anti-feminist, but that does seem to me to be taking things a bit too far. Besides being rather degrading to women, it simply doesn’t make any sense. That makes it all the easier to dismiss.
Why not let women into combat zones? If a woman is just as capable as the men who are being killed on a daily basis, then why not let her fight for her country? And why do most people state that the women dying are mothers and daughters. Are the men not sons and fathers? Is it ok to take a child’s father away from him and not his mother? Is a woman’s life more important than a man’s? Does a woman desirve to live more than a man does? These women knew what they were signing up for. They knew that there was the possiblilty that they would be killed in action, and they still went into these combat zones willingly, just like the men do. If a woman is capable of doing the job, then why not let her?
To answer the questions of the commenters, women are NOT just as capable of performing the job as men. I speak from experience. Combat and Combat Support are very strenuous, physically and mentally, even before the shooting starts. During Desert Storm, while the media was reporting to you people back home that “Women are proving that they can perform equally” men were carrying women’s equipment, setting up their tents, changing their tires, and doing the jobs they were afraid to do, like driving trucks on dangerous Arabian roads. The women compensated for this by providing a steady supply of sex.
That aside, the issue here is that it is barbaric to intentionally expose 19-year-old girls to the risk of capture by the enemy. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the consequences. Feminists have been telling us for years that there’s no difference between men and women, but that is a lie. Civilized men PROTECT their women; they don’t send them to do their fighting for them.