No, Women Should Not Be In Combat

When questioning Hegseth, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said this: “If you are a sharpshooter, you’re as lethal, regardless of what your gender identity is, regardless of who you love.”

This writer would reply: “Senator, go to the largest high school in your state.  Pick out the 100 toughest senior athletes: 50 male, 50 female.  Form two gender-segregated infantry platoons.  Issue them standard infantry combat gear, M4 carbines, and 80-pound rucksacks.

“Teach them how to shoot.  Then order the two platoons to march ten miles, climb a hill, dig foxholes, jump in, and fire at targets 50 yards downhill.  Which platoon would get there faster, open fire faster, and fire more accurately?  Therefore, which platoon is more lethal?”

We all know the answer.

Consider the biathlon, an obscure Olympic event.  Competitors have to ski cross-country, then fire a rifle at a target, then start skiing again, over and over.  Any sharpshooter can confirm that breathing hard; a pounding heart; and shaky, sweaty hands make sharpshooting difficult.  But these are the obvious results of having an exhausted body.

Scores are derived from both accuracy and overall time over the cross-country course.  A mediocre marksman who’s in top condition can beat an expert sniper who’s out of shape, and vice versa.  Infantry must excel in both areas.

Exhaustion effects are both physical and psychological.  Exhausted people don’t want to fight — and if they fight, they’re far less effective.  And as Hegseth observed, the weight of an 80-pound ruck or an artillery shell, or the labor of digging foxholes, doesn’t become lighter or easier if XX rather than XY chromosomes are involved.

An average man is five inches taller and 40–50 pounds heavier than an average woman.  Even if they’re the same height and weight, the man has 50% more upper body strength, greater bone density, larger heart and lungs, and other advantages.

Yes, the Soviet Union put female snipers and combat pilots into combat during World War II — because they were constantly scraping the bottom of their manpower barrel.  A few women rose to the occasion to become Heroes of the Soviet Union, simply because both men and women, when they’re not breathing hard, can be outstanding shots.  And women can develop a truly cold-blooded killer instinct.  All they need to do is imagine their targets attacking their children.  That’s how they’re wired.

There are stories about the Israelis, who also scraped the bottom of their manpower barrel, and were forced to put all-female infantry into combat in the mid-20th century.  According to these unconfirmed reports, male units focused on protecting the women rather than achieving their military objectives.  Again, that’s how we’re wired.

Left-wing defenders of women in combat claim that tanks, radios, and fighter jets don’t require XY chromosomes.  Insert a sighing, eye-rolling emoticon here.  Radios break, tanks break down, and fighter jets get shot down.  Command posts get overrun, and ammo runs out.  In a jam, everybody’s infantry.

Recent events in women’s sports have only served to underscore the difference between men and women.  Like the difference between intelligence and wisdom, we’re just not the same — but each has its own great value, in its own roles.

We’re always had men’s and women’s divisions in sports.  Boxing, wrestling, and all martial arts have weight classes within those divisions.  All this is for good reasons.

The Army was forced to rewrite its field manuals to turn “two-man jobs” into “three-person jobs.”  This can lead to disaster for any military force that faces recruiting shortfalls and relies, in every instance, on quality rather than quantity.

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That didn’t say not being in the military, but the firefighters in LA couldn’t and wouldn’t get men out of a burning house. No shots were being fired and they wouldn’t even do that.