See the picture atop the post (best seen at the homepage)? It’s what the New York Times used to tout women as warriors.
Now I am a man at least twice that young lady’s age, long past my own days of service, yet if she were an enemy in actual combat I could despatch her with a hard look.
“Did you say despatch? What gave you the right to use such violent language! You are a brute, Briggs.”
I’d have her skull crushed before she could speed dial HR and cry that I called her a little girl.
“You can’t say that! You’re advocating violence! This is sexism pure and simple.”
Before she could unholster her sidearm, I’d have her skull leaking—
“—-Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! This is just awful. It’s a good thing you’re too old to join the military. Because if you weren’t I’d be sure to report you and they never would take you. Then you’d learn about real power. Besides, you forgot about Israel. They have women warriors.”
Israel? That puny Mideast country that buys its weapons from foreign powers and that it so strapped for manpower on occasion it has to recruit women, who are not exactly feared by their enemies? Yeah, I’ve heard of it.
“Okay, Sweden, then. The lady who wrote the New York Times article said she ‘visited Sweden to talk with conscripts in mechanized infantry, artillery and army ranger units. I learned that the performance of women in those units was not at issue. What was, at times, was the ability of their male peers to accept them.’ Just like you obviously can’t accept women.”
Sweden? Terror of the North? What exact performance of ranger units could that sweet lady have meant since Sweden hasn’t been fighting anybody (except, maybe, the people it’s been importing)? Probably some pen-and-paper ratings made by bureaucrats designed to show how lovely Diversity is. Talk to me about Sweden after the bullets stop flying.
“There you go again with your violent language! You need to be taught a lesson. And I’ll find somebody to do it, you can bet. You missed the point that housing men and women together had a ‘degenderizing’ effect and reduced ‘harassment’—like that lady said.”
Bullshit.
“What! Watch your language and answer the point, if you think you can.”
I’m saying it’s bullshit that young men and women in the prime of their hormones quartered together has a ‘degenderizing’ effect. I’m saying it’s bullshit of the rankest kind. I’m saying anybody claiming this is either dreaming, like you, or lying, like the Swede bureaucrats are.
“But women can handle stress better than men. The article says so.”
Oh, maybe. But they can’t handle swords betters. And men can crush skulls better than women.
Do the Israelis still have women on the front lines? I thought they stopped that years ago because they were treated worse when captured.
“Israeli women are not in direct combat special operations such as the Green Berets. Nor are they in front-line combat brigades mobilized to engage in direct heavy combat.
“In the infantry, virtually all of Israel’s female combat soldiers are confined to two light battalions — the Caracal and the Lions of Jordan — which are assigned to guard the borders with Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab countries that have peace treaties with Israel.”
“The Israeli Ynet news service last week reported that the IDF studied the suggestion of women in tanks and rejected the idea based on physical shortcomings compared with men. Ynet also said the study found as problematic putting men and women in the intimate close quarters of a tank for days at a time.
Ynet quoted a defense official as saying, “Integrating female soldiers into tanks was harmful.”
“The decision not to assign Israeli women to armored tanks in the IDF is based on reality, not myths that often surround these discussions,” Mrs. Donnelly said.
“The Times of Israel said the IDF provided a statement that read, in part, that the “possibility of opening additional combat positions to girls is being tested all the time.” As of today, “infantry and the armored corps were ruled out for women.”
“It turns out that the amount of stress fractures suffered by soldiers is dozens of percentage points higher among women than among men. As a result, the female soldiers are not required to carry as much weight,” he told Voice of Israel, according to IsraelNationalNews.com, a product of the Arutz Sheva media outlet.
“I think that women’s service in combat roles in the IDF should not be widened,” he said. “I cannot even imagine a female soldier serving inside a tank or in elite infantry units, mostly because of operational considerations. The army must not allow this thing to interfere with its operational ability.”
“Gen. Ron-Tal added: “Expanding female service will be a grave mistake that will damage the prowess of the army.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/25/womens-combat-roles-in-israel-defense-forces-exagg/
Women may handle household stresses better than men, but they don’t handle battlefield stresses at all.
Coed barracks work exactly like coed college dorms, but with extra added drama, and the chance of sudden death during the work day.
Women perform adequately in limited roles in a static defense. There have been successful women snipers, for example.
Women perform admirably in noncombat support roles, like intelligence, nursing, and the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned paperwork shuffling.
Women perform absolutely abysmally in any direct combat role. They are useless in the assault, and worse than useless when defending against an assault.
History lesson – In WWII, the Soviets fielded a few all-female large units. The Germans reacted to this development by acting as if those units were gaps in the Soviet lines. They weren’t wrong. The Soviets soon withdrew and disbanded these units, sending the women to support positions in the rear.
Men are irrational in the presence of women. Women utterly destroy the morale and cohesion of any combat unit they are in. Not to mention being completely useless at 90% of necessary tasks in the field, due to being too physically weak. There is a tradition of women “paying” men to do their chores out in the field, because they simply can’t, or don’t want to.
Personal story – When I was in 7th Army PLDC (Sergeant School), lo these many years ago, I was in a mixed squad. Oh, how the women told us that they were just as good as we men were at everything. No, they were even better! Then we went out in the field, and only one of the four females acted like a soldier. (The butch lesbian. Go figure.) When I was squad leader, I gave the M-60 machine gun to one, the tripod and spare ammo to another, and the PRC-77 radio and batteries to the third useless complainer. I made them carry their share of the load until they refused to go any further. That took all of about 20 minutes, during which we had marched less than a mile. Then I took everything from them. Their combined loads, plus what I was already carrying. And humped all of it the entire rest of the day without complaint, and without slowing down. (I weighed 142 pounds back then, and was carrying at least that much load.) I even had them give up their personal packs for other squad members to carry, since they were so tired and weak and frail. They didn’t tell us how wonderful they all were again after that. And nobody else put up with their malingering bull#@% after that, either.
“combat positions to girls” Girls? A Freudian slip? The speaker knows these are children wanting into an adult’s game?
McChuck: Excellent comment!
Women are not like men and no amount of lies will fix that. Mixed barracks mean STDs, pregnancies and less attention to actual battle which means lost battles. However, since the military is nothing but a SJW propaganda unit, it kind of figures.
Wonder how these stupid, stupid, stupid women will fare under Sharia law and violent gangs? Hint: Those invaders of the US do not give a wit about your idiot SJW philosophy. They are bigger, stronger and meaner than you and you are nothing but a stupid female to them. That’s what happens when you champion and try to pet wolves. Bad, bad, bad things that you do have coming.
She is just too darn cute! No wonder she put you in such a state!
Puts me in mind of the line from the Roger Miller song:
“The rosy red cheeks of the little children”
Way back when I was in the Navy I was a member of the Pearl Divers diving club at Pearl Harbor, HI. We had women in the club. When you suited up with a single air tank you carried about 50 lbs. of equipment and that was about all the women could manage. On a deep dive we used double tanks and your equipment load was about 100 lbs. Most of the women couldn’t even stand up with that load, much less walk. When I read that women make wonderful infantry I can only conclude the writer is living in fantasy land.
While much of what Mr. Briggs says is undeniably true, he is uninformed about the Israeli weapons industry. Not only do they produce excellent rifles/pistols/ammunition, but they have directly contributed technological expertise to many of our weapons systems: the Airborne Laser, the Particle Beam Weapon, etc. I know this because I was stationed at the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center on Kirtland AFB, NM for 4 1/2 years as the Operational Test Manager for the Predator UAV, and two highly classified (now deployed) medium-range cruise missiles. The Israelis were active participants in many of our programs.
Should we tell him about Uzi?
Absolutely. The honor is yours.
Shall we remind readers this article has absolutely nothing to do with a small country’s weapons inventions?
Sure, remind us.
“Israel? That puny Mideast country that buys its weapons from foreign powers”
No, but it does have to do with a small, but powerful, country’s weapons production and its contribution to our own weapons development programs. Your very obvious disdain for Israel and its amazing military capabilities (not to mention the sound drubbing it repeatedly gave to vastly superior Arab forces on at least 3 occasions) begs one to question your objectivity being colored by perhaps a great deal of anti-Semitism. Given the facts, I can’t come up with any other conclusion because you are not a stupid person.
Stay on target Colonel.
I’d still bet, even given your squeamishness, that you, yes even you, could take the wee girl in the picture.
Israel has excellent skills in a number of areas. However, they excel at one thing: espionage and influence operations against gullible Americans.
Israel is the most prolific thief of American secrets–military, diplomatic, technical, scientific, and other–among all foreign countries who operate against us.
Israel has a rogue, unregulated, illegal stock of nuclear weapons. Their technology and fuel is a product of their massive, and massively successful espionage operations against us gullible Americans.
“The story revolves around a brilliant nuclear chemist and professed American Zionist named Zalman Mordecai Shapiro.
“Shapiro received a PhD in chemistry from John Hopkins University in 1948 and began working on the USS Nautilus, which would become the world’s first operational nuclear-power submarine in 1954. The project was planned and supervised by Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who cited Shapiro as one of the four individuals most responsible for the program’s success.
“On December 31, 1956, Shapiro incorporated the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), a nuclear-materials processing facility that began receiving a steady stream of government contracts to produce fuel for the Navy’s growing fleet of nuclear-powered vessels.
“The company’s start-up capital was organized by David Lowenthal, an American citizen who secretly fought for Israel during its 1948 war for independence alongside who would become the country’s first head of intelligence (Meir Amit) and its first prime minister (David Ben-Gurion). According to FBI files, Lowenthal traveled “to Israel on the average of approximately once per month.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-explosive-story-of-how-israel-received-weapons-grade-nuclear-material-from-a-us-company-in-the-sixties-2012-8
Briggs is not stupid, but it is stupid to belittle a country for buying some foreign weapons, when our own Secret Service has adopted that same country’s weapons to protect our own government officials. And when our various services use arms deigned and manufactured in Italy, Austria, Germany, and who knows what other countries. But most telling is countering a charge of antisemitism with an accusation of “squeamishness”. Yes, those who oppose Jew hatred and bigotry are being “squeamish”. We should just man up and be proper racists.
Though it’s clear that you, Lee, are almost certainly a pot-bellied jelly armed prematurely balding soy-eating Internet “warrior”, I’d still put my money on you slaying the upstart brat in the picture. I’m not saying you wouldn’t have to take a month off afterwards to mentally and physically recuperate. But I am saying even a weak man is better than a woman like that.
Of course, you can deny it if you wish.
Forgive me for making one more point that is far too easy to make, but that is also too tempting at the moment: a handful of regulars here are fond of warning us of the Jews and Muslims in our midst, who are not loyal to the U.S. but are agents of foreign powers (never Catholics, however). All of these deep thinkers are Trump supporters – and our president is now known, with certainty, to have appointed at least one man to a position of the very highest strategic importance who was in actual fact working as an agent of one or more foreign powers before and while holding the position.
I take this barrage of childish insults as an implicit admission of defeat on Brigg’s part. Nowhere does he defend what he has said, or how he has said it. But I object. At nearly 60, there is nothing premature about my shiny pate. And I passed “balding” by some years ago. As John Glenn so memorably pointed out, it’s a byproduct of a manly storehouse of testosterone.
60! Good grief. Your kind of hyperventilating (“You’re all racists!” he shrieked) is usually restricted to the young and think-headed.
Wow, was I off. Well, you could still take her.
Who shrieked? Must not be me, because the sentence you place within quotation marks is not mine. You do know what quotation marks are for, right?
I gotta say, you have some blind spots. Like, it’s somehow not obvious to you that sputtering schoolyard taunts at everyone around you looks just like someone trying to cover up his embarrassment and insecurity.
“Israel? That puny Mideast country … on occasion it has to recruit women, who are not exactly feared by their enemies?”
Israel has nuclear weapons. Technology in many functions eliminates a basis for gender-based assignments when brawn is not a duty requirement.
The track & field stats posted on most school gyms document male strength and stamina superiority consistently, everywhere. On the battlefield genetic brawn matters. This becomes very apparent in actual situations, where individuals physically conditioned in secure well supplied areas may appear comparably fit for combat, but under stress and after sleep, food and water deprivations the realities of gender biological physical difference rapidly become apparent. Under such stress & deprivations male performance is often radically superior. Bring such groups back to safety, rest and good food and the apparent similarity in fitness rapidly returns….
As for combat units in co-ed living conditions — it certainly CAN, and often DOES work … HOWEVER … the inevitable/unavoidable biological attractions & “triangles” that can be so easily ignored for so long when they become impossible to pretend are not there typically do so by erupting geyser-like unpredictably and dramatically. Harassment may be low, but expect increased instances of fragging given the opportunity.
The kind of flawed logic presented in the NY Times article is commonplace — selective anecdotal examples, such one individual’s personal experience/observation in a very particular arena, are used in lieu of comprehensive analysis covering numerous or all such examples. Flowcharting the logic as a fill-in-the-blank sentence can be revealing:
I can show examples of [controversial activity] that does not result in adverse consequences, and even some advantages, therefore [controversial-activity] should be permitted, perhaps encouraged.
In today’s essay the “Controversial-Activity” is [co-ed military combat units]. If that’s the outcome one wants, the logic is appealing.
One can easily test the “logic” by substituting some other “Controversial Activity” such as “Driving Intoxicated” and suddenly the analytical rigor is seen for what it is — an overt exclusion of any consideration or even acknowledgement of the added risks.
Not squeamish in the least. I spent a tour (’70-’71) in Vietnam with 5th Special Forces. Only joined the Air Force after recovering from wounds received in the ‘Nam. And yes, I could without question take on the “wee girl” and many other not-so-wee men–even now at a very fit 70 y.o.
Look, I appreciate your articles because they are, in general, well-written, thought-provoking, entertaining, mostly (except in this case) well-researched, and timely. This combination puts you in rare air as far as most commentators/bloggers/journalists are concerned. But you made a mistake here, pal, and when the SHTF in the Middle East, we’ll see who the real bad-asses are. My money is on the IDF.
I look forward to reading many more of your insightful blogs.
Wow. Did you notice? That one little side remark of Briggs’ about Israel totally sidetracked the point under discussion and sent the usual suspect into a fit of ‘anti-semite!’ denunciations. I’m guessing even a criticism of Judas Iscariot would provoke the same reaction. Which, of course, would justify Lee’s own anti-Catholic bigotry. So, Lee, if Israel is so darn smart (and it is, I admit), why has it had to steal so much (weaponry data, in this case) from so many? Is it some kind of visceral anti-Americanism bigotry they suffer from? How’s that shoe fit, Lee?
Let’s face it. The instantly produced charge of anti-Semitism today is the knee-jerk reaction used by the crypto-Nazi paparazzi to bludgeon anyone and everyone into immediate submission. But it doesn’t work anymore. Why? Because crying ‘wolf’ at every Chihuahua has numbed us all to the tactic. And in fact, it makes real anti-Semitism easier to exist. Get over it, Lee. You’re not doing anyone any favors here.
And Lt. Col. M, yes, I agree, when the SHTF in the Mid-East, the IDF will more than hold its own. But it won’t be the females doing it. So then, can we all get back to the point that sparked the article?
Lt Col Mark Mayerstein – A troop of Boy Scouts (original version, not the current pedo-compliant knockoffs) armed with pointy sticks could defeat any two Arab armies you’d care to name. So touting the valor and competence of the Israelis in defeating them isn’t exactly high praise.
Especially when said accomplishments are more than 30 years in the past.
Lee – “Scan until offended.” “Hyper focus on irrelevant details.” “Ignore counter arguments and evidence.” “Construct straw men to burn.” “Change topic when confronted.” – Internet arguing for Leftists checklist accomplishment unlocked!