In 2018, three women applied to Britain’s Special Air Service (the SAS). Only one was considered fit enough to join the normal selection process. She quit two weeks into the 18-week training course.
And the British government’s verdict? Adjust the selection and training as to make it easier for women to join the SAS.
To be fair, though, the idea seemed to have been considered the year before, says The Telegraph. Soldiers hoping to join the Special Air Service and its sister regiment, the Special Boat Service (SBS), currently have to pass an initial physical test, which involves carrying heavy rucksacks over a series of long marches across mountainous terrain. But according to reports, the SAS is considering allowing female recruits to carry lighter loads and giving them more time to complete the test. The suggestion comes after the government said it wanted to see all close combat units in the British military open to women by 2019. (See this link.) It is felt that the marching tests are unfairly discriminating against women who may have the attributes needed to succeed as SAS soldiers.
2017 also saw the US’ Navy Seals’ first woman recruit. She bailed out in the first week of training.
Unlike the SAS applicant, who was given her own accommodations separate from the male SAS members (which, naturally, meant added costs for the unit), political commentator Susan Wright reported that “no special allowances” were made for the female Navy Seal applicant. Good decision on the part of the Seals.
Ms. Wright continues: “They were required to undergo the same physical challenges as their male counterparts, which makes sense, since the challenges in combat they would face would be the same.”
“If you want to compete in a role more suited to men, due to the biological certainties of bigger size, more musculature, then you have to prove you can keep up. Your teammates’ lives may be on the line one day, and war does not take a day off for bloating and irritability.”
Unfortunately, a US Marines 2015 thousand-page study, “Implications of Integrating Women in the Marine Corps Infantry,” revealed that women in combat situations do get injured more and shoot less accurately than men: “All-male squads, teams and crews demonstrated higher performance levels,” were more lethal, faster, stronger.
Conservative writer Phyllis Schlafly puts it best, which is to say quite bluntly — “Women should not serve in military combat.”
There is, after all, “no evidence in all history for the proposition that the assignment of women to military combat jobs is the way to advance women’s rights, promote national security, improve combat readiness, or win wars. Indeed, the entire experience of recorded history teaches us that battles are not won by coed armies or coed navies.”
“Every country that has experimented with women in combat has abandoned the idea. The notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth. Women are treated very differently from men in the Israeli armed forces. They serve only about half as long; they are housed in separate barracks; they have an automatic exemption if they marry or have a baby. Commenting on the sex-integration practices of the US Armed Services, one Israeli general said, ‘We do not do what you do in the United States because, unfortunately, we have to take war seriously.’”
Indeed, war is a serious matter and should be treated with the utmost seriousness it deserves.
The military should not be made a gender project by social justice warriors.
It’s frankly a matter of survival. The military, as General Douglas MacArthur declares, has one job: “to win wars.”
Even that political trope — “equality” with men — used with utter consistency in arguing for women in the military, has no basis in reality.
Christina Hoff Sommers blasted the feminist myth that “men are the privileged sex.” Fact is: “neither sex has the better deal. Modern life is a complicated mix of burdens and advantages — for each sex.” But “when it comes to being crushed, mutilated, electrocuted, or mangled at work, men are at a distinct disadvantage. Most backbreaking, lethally dangerous jobs — roofer, logger, roustabout, and coal miner, to name a few — are done by men.”
Indeed, as Ms. Sommers concludes: “Today’s women’s lobby deploys a faulty logic: In cases where men are better off than women, that’s injustice. Where women are doing better — that’s life.”
Ironically, at precisely the time transgenders (i.e., people who assume a gender identity different from the sex/gender at birth), to be more specific male transgenders, are crushing women in various athletic competitions: biking, track, boxing, wrestling, MMA — that liberal progressives are demanding women be placed in harm’s way in direct face-to-face combat.
They’ll probably get what they want: a Texas federal judge ruled that all-male military drafts are unconstitutional, paving the way for wives, sisters, and daughters to be compelled to fight in the frontlines during wartime.
But, as the feminists would say: that’s life.
Jemy Gatdula is a Senior Fellow of the Philippine Council for Foreign Relations and a Philippine Judicial Academy law lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.
