This month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter decreed that there will be 220,000 combat military jobs offered to women — including in Army special operations forces and the Navy SEALs. He said, “They'll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat ... and everything else that was previously open only to men.”
But what if track pads or a tank track has to be repaired in the field and under enemy fire? Such repairs pose a significant physical challenge to men, who generally have far greater strength than women.
Will our military leaders relieve women from such a task, claiming that demanding equal performance creates a “disparate,” sexually discriminatory impact?
Then there's hand-to-hand combat training, which comes near the end of the Army's basic training. Recruits spend a few hours facing off against each other in pugil stick bouts.
Pugil sticks are padded training weapons used since World War II by each branch of the military to train service members for hand-to-hand rifle and bayonet combat.
The object of the training is to subdue your opponent. Women are at a severe disadvantage because upper-body strength really counts.
Even if our military leaders fudge this aspect of training, what happens in actual combat when hand-to-hand skills are called upon? I wouldn't be surprised if today's military leaders call for an amendment protocol to the Geneva Conventions to make the hand-to-hand killing of a female fighter a war crime.
What about other training standards? The Army's physical fitness test in basic training is a three-event physical performance test used to assess endurance. The minimum requirement for 17- to 21-year-old males is 35 pushups, 47 situps and a 2-mile run in 16 minutes, 36 seconds or less.
For females of the same age, the minimum requirement is 13 pushups, 47 situps and a 19:42 2-mile run. Equal fitness standards would wash most women out. “USMC Women in the Service Restrictions Review” found that the average woman has 20 percent lower aerobic power, 40 percent lower muscle strength, 47 percent less lifting strength and 26 percent slower marching speed than the average man.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of military social engineering is the cover-up of failure. Officers who criticize double standards or expose official lies and deception about servicewomen's performance risk their careers. Those official lies and deception will eventually reveal themselves with unnecessary loss of lives on the battlefield.
Finally, the Selective Service System's website (http://www.sss.gov) reads: “While there has been talk recently about women in combat, there has been NO decision to require females to register with Selective Service, or be subject to a future military draft.
Selective Service continues to register only men, ages 18 through 25.”
How can that, coupled with reduced performance standards, possibly be consistent with the Defense Department's stated agenda “to provide a level, gender-neutral playing field”?
Walter Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
