It’s An Enormous Mistake To Let Women Serve In Combat Roles

There are two divergent views of the military.

One of them is that it’s primarily a fighting force that we send out to kill people, break things and protect our way of life.

The other view says it’s just another government program that’s all about politics and social engineering experiments.

Even at the highest levels of our military, that second view has been winning out far too often and the latest evidence of it is women being allowed in combat. Setting aside the fact that women can’t keep up with the same physical standards as the men, are likely to be raped if they’re captured by opposing forces, and a significant percentage of them will end up pregnant and will have to be shipped away from their units, there’s very little privacy in the field. Ryan Smith describes what women had been in for had they been in combat during the Gulf War.

I served in the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a Marine infantry squad leader. We rode into war crammed in the back of amphibious assault vehicles. They are designed to hold roughly 15 Marines snugly; due to maintenance issues, by the end of the invasion we had as many as 25 men stuffed into the back. Marines were forced to sit, in full gear, on each other’s laps and in contorted positions for hours on end. That was the least of our problems.

The invasion was a blitzkrieg. The goal was to move as fast to Baghdad as possible. The column would not stop for a lance corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, or even a company commander to go to the restroom. Sometimes we spent over 48 hours on the move without exiting the vehicles. We were forced to urinate in empty water bottles inches from our comrades.

Many Marines developed dysentery from the complete lack of sanitary conditions. When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face.

During the invasion, we wore chemical protective suits because of the fear of chemical or biological weapon attack. These are equivalent to a ski jumpsuit and hold in the heat. We also had to wear black rubber boots over our desert boots. On the occasions the column did stop, we would quickly peel off our rubber boots, desert boots and socks to let our feet air out.

Due to the heat and sweat, layers of our skin would peel off our feet. However, we rarely had time to remove our suits or perform even the most basic hygiene. We quickly developed sores on our bodies.

When we did reach Baghdad, we were in shambles. We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there in a walled-in compound in Baghdad, naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

Yes, a woman is as capable as a man of pulling a trigger. But the goal of our nation’s military is to fight and win wars. Before taking the drastic step of allowing women to serve in combat units, has the government considered whether introducing women into the above-described situation would have made my unit more or less combat effective?

Societal norms are a reality, and their maintenance is important to most members of a society. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.

Despite the professionalism of Marines, it would be distracting and potentially traumatizing to be forced to be naked in front of the opposite sex, particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene. In the reverse, it would be painful to witness a member of the opposite sex in such an uncomfortable and awkward position. Combat effectiveness is based in large part on unit cohesion. The relationships among members of a unit can be irreparably harmed by forcing them to violate societal norms.

This move will do nothing but decrease the effectiveness of the military. Moreover, when our captured women soldiers are being gang-raped by enemy soldiers and other women are filing sexual harassment suits because some Marine crapped two feet from their faces, the very same people who are applauding this move today will be using it to attack the military. At least we can take some satisfaction in knowing that liberal women who hate the military will (at least they should) be required to sign up for the draft when they turn 18. Unfortunately, Schadenfreude isn’t much of a substitute for seeing the military being weakened for no reason other than political correctness.

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