Recommended Reading
Dr. MacKenzie’s post celebrates a change in policy that is going to be extremely difficult to implement once the military moves beyond the very few female soldiers and Marines who can meet minimum PT standards for combat specialties and are highly motivated to join combat arms. Aside from the issue of qualifying standards (two or one or one new “de-gendered”) the women admitted to combat will still have to shoulder a pack and gear that now can tip the scales at an astronomical 120 lbs and then march and fight under that weight. This is three times the weight of the WWII GI’s kit and more than twice the weight of medieval plate armor. We are going to have to either find very tall and athletic women or expect a very high rate of knee, hip and back injuries during sustained campaigns removing female soldiers from their units. There is also the issue of the difference between sporadic combat seen in COIN with shorter stints “outside the wire” where women have made valorous contributions and the day to day, week to week, month to month grind of total war conventional battles like D-Day, Okinawa, the Bulge or Chosin which have a much different actuarial logic than COIN. Any conflict of that order will require a mass army based on conscription and not a small, selective, professional AVF and drafting millions of young women into combat is something to be viewed with skepticism
The Glittering Eye – When You’re Rich They Think You Really Know
Dave takes a very different tack on the Bill Gates op-ed and the utility of measurement than Dr. Tdaxp
Thomas P.M. Barnett –China’s future with a only-child society
China embarked on the greatest demographic social engineering experiment in history. The results are now with us.
That’s it.
Page 2 of 2 | Previous page
Justin Boland:
January 28th, 2013 at 4:22 pm
Re: Women in combat. I took that to be a very grim sign, because I did not and do not believe the motivation behind this was egalitarian — DoD are pragmatists, and I assumed this policy move was driven by continued recruiting shortfalls. “Women in combat” seems to be a prelude to a national conversation about resurrecting the Draft.
.
I would definitely be interested in knowing why and how my assumptions are wrong, though.
zen:
January 28th, 2013 at 5:43 pm
hi Justin,
.
The drive is not due to shortfalls in recruiting. The military is in the process of a fairly brutal downsizing due to budget crunch and a bean-counting desire to curb rising veteran health care costs. The military will be forcibly separating many highly qualified and expensively trained personnel who have no desire to leave the service. The interest in ressurecting a draft, likewise is driven by the same desire to cut longitudinal personnel costs – you can slash recruiting bonuses and GI Bill benefits if you can draft whomever you need. OTOH, the short and medium term conversion costs of returning to a draft are also very, very high for the military which is organized to be run by a selective pool of recuits on a professional basis. The danger in my view is the government fusing a draft with civilian national service to conscript cheap labor for big government projects with only a tiny minority going into the military (the military does not want unwilling draftees, they are a pain to train and discipline and make poor soldiers) such a program would inevitably be administered with abusively with gross favortism toward children of the elite and would be obnoxious to liberty.
.
The drivers of women in combat is primarily ideological, a mixture of career opportunity advocacy by the standout class of female officers who believe combat exclusion inhibits their chances from becoming 4 star generals (oddly, many of these exemplars have no personal intention of going in to combat arms at this stage of their careers) and ideological, deriving from gender-feminism of civilian appointees to DACOWITS and liberal MoC and the MSM. Without a draft, very few women will go into combat arms and most of those will be the superacheivers who can meet the current standards or get close enough. They have far more drive than the typical officer or enlistee to perform and advance their careers. The problem would be a sizable influx of women who cannot make standards who will get “voluntold” into these units for political atmospherics by the service chiefs to please Congress and the bureaucrats. Combat efficiency will suffer with subpar personnel, be they male or female (which is why they don’t allow unqualified men either)
Justin Boland:
January 28th, 2013 at 6:07 pm
Thank you for the comprehensive answer — much appreciated.
carl:
January 28th, 2013 at 7:10 pm
Zen:
Your phrase “very few women will go into combat arms” is obsolete because very many women are already in combat arms, aboard Navy surface ships and soon in submarines. We haven’t experienced serious naval combat in almost 70 years and people forget what happens when we do. Those crews are combat crews. Many have so thoroughly forgotten that that I am convinced the superzips don’t believe that USN ships ever again will be destroyed thereby drowning, frying or dismembering their crews. The results of this experiment will first be seen at sea when the next big ocean fight comes. And it is an experiment. I never tire of noting that in the history of the world, no big fighting navy has ever sent fighting ships with mixed sex crews into battle.
L. C. Rees:
January 28th, 2013 at 11:37 pm
History suggests that anything endorsed by Bill Gates is doomed to crash:
Windows NT 2000 XP Vista 7 8 crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death
No one hears your screams.
– Peter Rothman
Ceterum censeo Microsoft delendam esse.
zen:
January 29th, 2013 at 1:58 am
Hi Carl,
.
You are absolutely correct. I should have said ” infantry, artillery and armor” instead of “combat arms”. You are further correct that the people running this country do not think in terms of losing a ship in naval battle, even though for more than two thousand years that was a normal and understood risk of naval warfare. You are only incorrect only on one point – this is no experiment. An experiment would indicate that there are empirical results significant enough that they could conceivably lead to a rejection of the hypothesis and a change in policy and that is impossible here. An ideology that is a closed loop does not brake for reality.
carl:
January 29th, 2013 at 2:32 am
Zen:
You are right. It is probably no experiment in this country. I hope that things could change when the bloody evidence comes in but the superzips won’t be able to see it. The ideological belief is more important to them than the fate of the country. No, that isn’t right. They can’t see beyond the ideology. They truly can’t see reality. That is the scary thing. Our leadership class can’t perceive reality.
There is precedent for elites refusing to give in to military reality. In “Conquest” (you have to read that book) if I remember correctly, the Aztecs found their way of war so pleasing, fighting to capture rather than kill, they refused to give it up when confronted by the Conquistadores, who hesitated not the slightest in killing. That put them at a very great disadvantage and they lost. No Aztecs around now.
In that respect, our policy is an experiment still. That is, it is an experiment by a group of people acting on the stage of world history. We may not give it up. But if it doesn’t work, the rest of the humans won’t do it again because the experiment will have failed. Perhaps if this fails (as I think it will), there will be a whole school of historical scholarship looking at how the Yanks went from having the Navy they had in 1945 to a modestly sized coast guard in less than 100 years.
Jonathan:
January 31st, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Because the women-in-combat decision is essentially political and ideological, everyone involved in administering it will understand that the new program is to be continued despite any negative empirical results. The inevitable outcome will be an overall reduction in standards, though some of the better-run military subgroups will probably develop workarounds to minimize the damage.