I assume that “Wellness Committee” will be the formal name of the politburo in whatever future progressive tyranny I end up living. Perhaps it will be my failure to live up to wellness commitments that will eventuall cause one of the members to snap and cut me to bits with a letter opener.

Thus reconciling both the tyrannical caring aspect and the hidden cruelty of it all, so there’s at least hope of philosophical harmony.

I don’t think I actually offered any views on the capacity of women to take to killing.

I have some idea that women’s confrontational spectrum covers much of the same ground as men’s, though it probably skews more in the direction of manipulation than opennness. Not necessarily omitting that much at the open conflict end of the spectrum, though.

Just based on the available record whether of female rulers or criminals, I have every confidence that women could be excellent war criminals, and agreed, possibly more scary in some cases.

Your concerns are valid, but… Having been the poor bastard trying to make this crap work, on the ground…? A lot of those issues and problems never actually showed up. You would be shocked, shocked, I tell you, at how decidedly unattractive a young lady can be, after you’ve spent a week smelling her unwashed ass in the field, listening to her fart, change her pads and tampons, etc., etc.. All of the attraction and most of the romance goes completely away, and since you come to know your peers maybe better than anyone else in their lives, you don’t get to keep any of the illusions you might have had about them. You might, in other words, go out on a drinking spree with one or more of the girls, but date one…? Nope, nope, and hell no.

One of my peers who went through that same period with me later commented that the thing he resented most was having all his illusions about the “fairer sex” shattered into dust; he’d had his nose ground into things that he simply didn’t know, even as a husband and father of teenage daughters. Such as, what a woman actually smells like, sans daily hygiene… Especially during estrus. Which was something he said he could never forgive the Army for putting him through…

Graham,

I think you would be disappointed to learn just how gleefully women take to killing, and with how little restraint they can act when they do. Review Kipling vis-a-vis the advisability of letting yourself be captured and turnt over to the women, in Afghanistan… Women can have a civilizing impact on things, but we have yet to see what happens in a Western army when one goes off the rails and enables or approves of atrocity. I think that a female Lieutenant Calley could prove to be exponentially worse than Calley and Medina were. Men have conflict restraint and limits built in, biologically and culturally. Women don’t.

It’s not merely that women are physically inferior to men by almost every metric — that in terms of upper body strength and run times the upper 10% of women overlap the bottom 10% of men, women only achieve near parity in abdominal strength (sit ups, on the Army PT Test).

It’s not simply that women do not have the same degree of psychological toughness, the “killer instinct” that men have, or the same degree of emotional toughness and detachment necessary to kill with systematic ruthlessness.

It’s not just that women have a deployed rate of attrition 5 times that of men. As noted here they can get pregnant, which results in automatic return to CONUS. They also fat out at a much higher rate, and get injured at an exponentially higher rate.

What guys in the combat arms do not yet understand — I’ve heard more than one poo poo this — is that fraternization will destroy your unit cohesion, potentially destroy your career, your life.

People will die because of “special relationships.” Envy, jealousy, spite, revenge, special treatment due to these unnecessary exclusive relationships will cost us many lives.

Homosexuals and women will create all sorts of unnecessary emotional drama and trauma.

Coercive relationships, exclusive “friendships” will form up and down the chain of command.

Superiors will coerce and reward inferiors for sexual and emotional favors.

Inferiors will seduce and manipulate their superiors.

People will be blackmailed emotionally and sexually.

Many people will be needlessly raped and sexually assaulted.

Many people will be seriously hurt; lives, marriages and families will be destroyed; many people will unnecessarily die.

The reason fraternization, sodomy and adultery are all crimes under the UCMJ is that lives are at stake. Your superiors have potentially coercive life and death authority over you. In combat, everyone is armed, and it is far too easy to assassinate (“frag”) someone else over sexual or emotional hijinks. You need to have radical trust in everyone in your unit.

If you throw sex into the mix, it will destroy such trust, people will die and be imprisoned due to all the needless f***ing around, and the mission will be unnecessarily imperiled.

The combat effectiveness of our military will suffer for all this foolishness. Until now this has all been rather abstract to most Americans. We do not have the “data” as Mattis says. But we will get it, and soon.

One can only hope that we receive it gently, and not during a war for national survival against ruthless enemies like the Russians or Chinese..

Personally, I have no problem with women in combat as an intellectual ideal. Where I have problems is where you start to bring in the reality of implementation by the US military, which has proven to be signally unable to produce or stick to any common-sense standards in areas pertinent to this issue.

Hell, they can’t even adjust to the idea that girls get pregnant, or deal with the implications of that fact in any realistic manner. I could come up with a bunch of ways to deal with the issue, and compensate for it, but a.) the establishment is unable to admit the need for doing anything, due to ideology, and b.) the civilians who help run the cluster-f**k that is our armed services are entirely in denial about the very real issues at stake. Not to mention, they’re mostly beholden to the cunni on the DACOWITS committee, who are more concerned about the career opportunities for female officers than they are about military effectiveness, readiness, or the lives of junior enlisted personnel, male and female.

You could, in an ideal world, make “women in combat” work, for some definition of the word “work”, but the problem is, that ideal world doesn’t exist in the US military–And, likely never will. They won’t let it happen, or take the necessary actions to make it work. So, for that reason, I’m dead set against the entire concept of “women in the military”, period–Not just in combat. As a cold-blooded assessment would inform you, the whole thing just doesn’t work on any level, because we refuse to deal with realities like “boys and girls are going to f**k, which implies babies, which further implies that the girls are never going to fulfill their enlistment contracts in a full and fair manner…”.

Hell, they refuse to even address the issue in any way, shape, or form, let alone discuss it with potential enlistees. And, to be quite honest, they should–With both sexes. The guys need to know they’re going into jobs that are going to be exponentially harder, in some cases, because the girls they’re supposed to be able to count on during training and deployments may or may not actually be there, because “babies”. Not to mention telling them that they’re going to be serving beside people who are physically incapable of doing their share of the physical labor in their jobs, and that the males are likely to be worked to ‘effing death trying to compensate. During my time in uniform, I know of at least two different cases where a male soldier incurred career-ending injuries due to overwork or a set of female soldiers who literally were unable to hold up their end of the task at hand. That’s just two that I personally observed, so extrapolate from there…

The whole thing is iniquitous to both males and females, and it’s mostly because of how we administer the whole thing. You could compensate, but we don’t.

Ah, well… The insanity will run its course, and then we’ll see. I just hope the armored exoskeletons come in before the next major peer-level conflict.

The US military reforms only reluctantly, and generally only after it becomes brutally apparent that what it’s doing is no longer working. In the last few generations, lying to ourselves about things has become all too endemic in the forces.

Hopefully, Mattis will be able to inject a bit of reality into the situation, but he’s got some powerful forces aligned against him.