Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: The
Palin Doctrine
“The Pentagon
unveiled plans Tuesday for fully integrating women into front-line
and special combat roles, including elite forces such as Army Rangers
and Navy SEALs.”
So ran the
lead on the CNN story. And why are we doing this?
Did the young
officers leading troops in battle in Afghanistan and Iraq, returning
with casualties, say they needed women to enhance the fighting efficiency
of their combat units and the survival rate of their soldiers?
Did men from
the 101st and 82nd airborne, the Marines, the SEALs and Delta Force
petition the Joint Chiefs to put women alongside them in future
engagements to make them an even superior force?
No. This decision
to put women in combat represents a capitulation of the military
brass, a surrender to the spirit of our age, the Pentagon’s salute
to feminist ideology.
This is not
a decision at which soldiers arrived when they studied after-action
reports, but the product of an ideology that contradicts human nature,
human experience and human history, and declares as dogma that women
are just as good at soldiering as men.
But if this
were true, rather than merely asserted, would it have taken mankind
the thousands of years from Thermopylae to discover it?
In the history
of civilization, men have fought the wars. In civilized societies,
attacks on women have always been regarded as contemptible and cowardly.
Even the Third Reich in its dying hours did not send women into
battle, but old men and boys.
“You don’t
hit a girl!” was something every American boy had drilled into him
from childhood. It was part of our culture, the way we were raised.
A Marine friend told me he would have resigned from the Corps rather
than fight women with the pugil sticks used for bayonet practice
at Parris Island.
Sending women
into combat on equal terms seems also to violate common sense. When
they reach maturity, men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive.
Thus they commit many times the number of violent crimes and outnumber
women in prisons 10 to 1.
For every Bonnie
Parker, there are 10 Clyde Barrows.
Is it a coincidence
that every massacre discussed in our gun debate — from the Texas
Tower to the Long Island Railroad, from Columbine to Ft. Hood, from
Virginia Tech to Tucson, from Aurora to Newtown — was the work of
a crazed male?
Nothing matches
mortal combat where soldiers fight and kill, and are wounded, maimed
and die for cause or country. Domestically, the closest approximations
are combat training, ultimate fighting, boxing and that most physical
of team sports, the NFL.
Yet no women
compete against men in individual or team sports. They are absent
from boys’ and men’s teams in high school and college, be it football,
basketball, baseball, hockey or lacrosse.
Even in the
non-contact sports of golf, tennis and volleyball, men compete with
men, women against women. In the Olympics, to which nations send
their best athletes, women and men compete separately in track and
field, swimming and gymnastics.
Consider our
own history. Would any U.S. admiral say that in any of America’s
great naval battles — Mobile Bay, Manila Bay, Midway, the Coral
Sea — we would done better with some women manning the guns?
In the revolutionary
and civil wars, World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, women were
not in combat. Was it invidious discrimination of which we should
all be ashamed that women were not fighting alongside the men at
Gettysburg, in the Argonne, at Normandy or with “Chesty” Puller’s
Marines in the retreat from the Chosin Reservoir?
Undeniably,
some women might handle combat as well as some men. But that is
true of some 13-, 14- and 15-year-old boys, and some 50- and 60-year
old men. Yet we do not draft boys or men that age or send them into
combat. Is this invidious discrimination based on age, or ageism?
Carry this
feminist-egalitarian ideology to its logical conclusion, and half
of those storming the Omaha and Utah beaches should have been girls
and women. Is this not an absurdity?
We have had
Navy ships become “love boats,” with female sailors returning pregnant.
At the Naval Academy, three midshipmen, football players, allegedly
raped an intoxicated classmate. For months, she was too ashamed
and frightened to report it.
An
estimated 26,000 personnel of the armed forces were sexually assaulted
in 2011, up from 19,000 in 2010. Obama and the Congress are understandably
outraged. Such assaults are appalling. But is not the practice of
forcing young men and women together in close quarters a contributory
factor here?
Among the primary
reasons the Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, went down to defeat
three decades ago was the realization it could mean, in a future
war, women could be drafted equally with men, and sent in equal
numbers into combat.
But what appalled
the Reaganites is social progress in the age of Obama. This is another
country from the one we grew up in.
June
25, 2013
Patrick
J. Buchanan [send
him mail] is co-founder and editor of The
American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books,
including Where
the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his
website.
Copyright
© 2013 Creators Syndicate
The
Best of Patrick J. Buchanan
This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell