In arguing against female accession to ground combat roles and especially to the infantry, Anna Simons makes three valid observations. Firstly, fraternization between male and female soldiers undermines unit cohesion and that while male soldiers are equally and normally more responsible for this breach of discipline, it is an un-ignorable issue. Secondly, it is dangerous to lower physical standards to facilitate female integration. Infantry work requires a general physical robustness which is accurately, cheaply and easily assessed by apparently brutal tests such as marches, runs and pull-ups.
Finally, and most importantly, she recognizes that the possibility of female accession to the infantry relies on the existence of professional, or task cohesion. Professional forces are united not primarily by personal friendships but by their training, drills, and procedure. In a professional force, combat performance is immediately dependent upon coordinated teamwork. Doctrine, choreographies, and muscle-memories are crucial here – not inter-personal bonds. Standards of professionalism and performance engender better combat performance. It is precisely in this context in which these standards have been prioritized over arbitrary social characteristics like race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender that women have been able to serve in infantry units among Anglophone forces and to fight on the frontline. In Iraq and Afghanistan, many females who have performed their professional duties and conducted their drills properly, have been accepted into these once exclusively male groups. Their competence rather than their sex was the relevant variable. The impersonal cohesion of the professional force has been and will be critical to the accession of women to the combat arms.
However, despite recognizing the conditions in which female accession has been possible and honestly identifying some of the problems it may pose, Simons ultimately adopts a reactionary position. Notwithstanding the proven operational superiority of professional cohesion, Simons would nostalgically return to the warm cohesion of the 20th century because she believes that male soldiers must have their emotional and psychological needs salved by a comradeship, which can only be found in all-male groups. To preserve this special fraternity, she would willingly sacrifice female accession.
The pursuit is vain. There can be no return to the brotherly solidarity which she idealizes; it was the historical product of the 20th century army. The institutional culture, which generated such cohesion, has evaporated. Western, especially Anglophone, forces have themselves prioritized professional cohesion precisely because they have found it generates higher levels of operational performance from their small groups and has tied them into the chain of command more closely, even when operating independently of senior commanders. Moreover, in civilian society, gender relations and the family-work balance have also changed too much to allow a return to the dense communal solidarities of the past.
Furthermore, Simons mythologizes the reality of this cohesion. While dense male comradeship has provided support to male soldiers, it has also easily mutated into a hyper-masculine deviance in which the chances of bullying, abuse, disobedience, incompetence, mutiny, and atrocity are increased. The Australian Digger in the First World War, black soldiers in Vietnam, and Canadian paratroopers in Somalia were all, in quite different ways, examples of precisely this deviant, unprofessional cohesion. Moreover, ugly favoritism was a necessary corollary of prioritizing personal friendship in combat units. In citizen armies, individual replacements that were not personally known to the closely bonded veterans were offered little help and were far more likely to be killed – and, in fact, deliberately sacrificed – in combat. The “Fucking New Guy” phenomenon was not limited to Vietnam. Simons’ pure cohesion was only warm and supportive for the favored few.
Simons also vastly overstates the impersonality of professional cohesion. It is certainly true that in some special operations units, impersonal cohesion has been sometimes taken to an extreme because of intense training, high operational tempo, and the typically competitive and individualistic personalities attracted to and cultivated by these units. Extraordinary combat effectiveness can coincide somewhat unexpectedly with cool personal relations. Yet, even in special operation forces, from Tier 1 downwards, intense solidarities develop and play a critical role in motivating soldiers and allowing them to perform in combat as tightly bonded teams. Soldiers are integrated into close professional relations and are compelled to perform well lest they be shamed by their colleagues with whom they share long-standing relations. Impersonal drills and professionalism play a perhaps paradoxical and yet critical role in the development of these solidarities. Soldiers are valued, honored, liked and — indeed, in many cases, loved — because they are regarded as competent and trustworthy professionals, because they are good at their drills, and because they are indispensable members of the team. The grief professional soldiers have expressed at the loss of comrades in combat demonstrates the depth of these emotional attachments.
Crucially, a small number of women have now been included into Anglophone combat teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes for entire tours; in the Canadian army, women have served successfully in infantry. They are not merely tolerated. They are respected as comrades and have directly contributed to group cohesion. Thus, Canadian soldiers, opposed to the accession of women in general to the infantry for fear of a decline in standards, have affirmed the legitimacy of proven women to their unit, as evidenced by responses in interviews I have conducted: “I don’t agree that women should be in combat units but I would happily serve with Trish.” They have corrected men who have dismissed these competent female soldiers: “Hey, leave Leblanc [a successful Canadian NCO] alone, she is good to go.” British paratroopers and marines have often expressed similar sentiments: “We had a female medic. She was awesome. She carried the same weight as the blokes. She was doing her job, performing as well or better than the men. Why should sexuality affect cohesion?” These female soldiers have not automatically undermined cohesion as women, as Simons claims. Moreover, precisely because gender remains a significant factor in the military, rather than undermining combat performance, these women have often encouraged higher levels of performance; male soldiers do not like to be beaten by and certainly do not want to appear weak in front of their female peers.
Simons is correct to highlight the special difficulties of integrating women into the infantry. It is a unique role. In order to ensure combat effectiveness, standards have to be enforced and fraternization avoided. That perforce means only a few exceptional women will be able to fight in the infantry. However, a blanket ban on the possibility of any women ever serving in the infantry, no matter how capable or willing, is as archaic as the obsolete form of social cohesion which Simons invokes to justify it.
Anthony King is a professor of sociology at the University of Exeter. His most recent publications are The Transformation of Europe’s Armed Forces: from the Rhine to Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press) and The Combat Soldier: infantry tactics and cohesion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Oxford University Press, 2013). His new book, Frontline: combat and cohesion in the twenty-first century (Oxford University Press) is out next year. He is currently working on the evolution of the divisional headquarters from the First World War to the present. He has been a mentor and adviser to the armed forces for a number of years, working in the Prism Cell of ISAF’s Regional Command (South) in 2009-10.
Tony 
03Vet 
ADM64 
Couv 
Mason 
Medic5392 
Mike 
RME71 
Raven 
Clint9 
Anthony King 
0311SF 
Ryan Evans 
So silly. Question – should we permit male and female professional boxers to compete against each other? How about male and female basketball players? Swimmers, runners, baseball players? No? Why not? Because if there is just one Universty of Maryland basketball team, rather than a male team and a female team, all the players would be male. Because there is not a single female on the planet who could have competed with, much less beaten, Mike Tyson. You want females in life-and-death struggles against males, but not on the same ballfield? Get serious.
Direct combat is about engaging and overpowering the enemy by all means necessary. Even if it means using your hands. It is a dirty and dangerous job that has nothing to do with academics. Do you really think a female is going to be able to overpower a male who is trying to kill her? Women can’t even defend themselves against rape. Not to mention throwing young females in a unit with young high testosterone males. How about carrying or dragging a male soldier out of harms with heavy equipment on.
Only thing I can say is, The liberal left has completely lost it. They need to stop. This is getting ridiculous. It is amazing that the ones who advocate forcing females into frontline combat will never allow their daughters to do it.
Would you professor allow your daughters to be forced into frontline combat?
There are many unsubstantiated assumptions in this article. The blunt fact is that the “success” of female soldiers and sailors to-date has been in either very limited combat engagements without the full range of capabilities being required or tested. Even Sgt. Leigh-Ann Hester, awarded the Silver Star, had to rely on her male comrade to throw a hand grenade at a key moment because she couldn’t do so. All of this stuff gets ignored in discussions (as does the actual mortality rate for Soviet women who served in combat during WWII) because it would offend women.
To get the women even as far as they have has required the adaptation of different physical standards – which one assumes Professor King understands means different physical capabilities – and the re-definition of combat, casualty evacuation, and damage control tasks. Underlying all of this is the belief that the women bring something so vital to our military that we either cannot do without it or can accept these other reductions. No one ever tells us what that thing is. And, they can’t. That’s because the entire “best person for the job” means the person who best satisfies ALL of the requirements: physical, intellectual and moral/psychological. A really smart, composed, mentally tough and tactically proficient woman who is nevertheless weaker than the average man is not the best person for the job. If she needs special gear or is still more easily injured, then she is inferior to a comparable man.
Then, there’s the assertion that there’s no going back because the nature of armies has changed. Historically, peacetime armies in the US and UK were small cadre forces expanded to mass levels during major wars. If the latter were again necessary, we would see the women swept aside. In the meantime, the forces as currently constituted (and this is true across the entire West, not just in the US), seem unable to actually win any wars. Perhaps this is because the same level of PC-think that lets us believe the differences between men and women are trivial also blinds us to thinking about the true nature of war, the true nature of our enemies, and what is required to actually win them.
Despite opening with a synopsis of Anna Simons argument, you go on to totally ignore the sexuality issue. Given all other things being equal (i.e. no degradation of standards or expectations for female physical limitations), sexuality (and the attendant disharmony it bring is close, emotional, dangerous confines) is the key that most combat veterans and many (psychological)professionals (Anna Simons for one) point to that degrade the overall unit/individual performance.
To your point that ‘professionals’ will act professionally and the mean of social interaction can be alleviated to allow women to serve in combat – what happens when a wholesale draft is again enacted?
A few thoughts.
As relayed by a social worker who used to work at Walter Reed, she worked with a psychologist who speculated that maybe most soldiers joined was a form of attachment disorder, the search for a place to be belong. This was just his personal theory, but certainly one I’ve seen in my own experience. The hand that guides the shaft of the spear may be doing so for king and country, but the men who make up the tip do so for each other. They join and stay because of their bonds to each other. They may be proud to be an American but they’ll dive on the grenade because of the man next to them.
One aspect of the moral failure theory of PTSD suggests that soldiers are suffering because they weren’t able to help their friends. People they know and care about aren’t coming home and they think it’s their fault, rightly or wrongly. Their bonds are profound enough to cause such pain.
Impersonal task organization treats the soldiers as interchangeable, as pieces to maneuver and administratively reorganize. Treating people as pieces forgets that everything is done by someone. The job wasn’t completed by a sergeant in the army, but by SGT James. He may be a part of a whole, and fulfilling a broader task. But at one moment in time, one specific person made choices and accomplished something. People treated as cogs will fail because they’re not machines. Industries that treat people industrially have enormous turnover, tremendous job dissatisfaction and chronically fail to identify, train, maintain, and retain talent.
This non-stop parade of obtuseness never seems to end.
Frat? You cannot end this and we already lose between 9-15% of females for up to two years operationally due to this. Have you read anything on the actual topic that did not embrace your premise? Go look up what happened to MG Cucolo when he tried to act professionally on just that subject. Below are some other examples in terms of physical differences and abilities that have been well documented for decades.
I will start out with some highlights though-
1.) Does this make us more combat effective? How so?
2.) Is this cost effective in terms of injuries and unplanned losses? Adaption of ship for different treatment of females?
3.) Is it fair to men to have quotas, as they currently do for females at the academies and in enlistment goals (Quotas)?
4.) Have we ever held females to the same standards? If we have not, then how will we now?
5.) If people were really serious then they would be paying attention to and monitoring the amount of losses due to pregnancy in theater and out of females and address it. Instead they shut down a MG who tried to stem the tide on that issue of losses.
The author and his apparent “defender” from SWAN, ignore the huge amount of pregnancies that occur every year and prevent female troops from deploying at a rate of 9-15% every year. Those females are taken out of the line and not returned to duty (full) for almost two years. Does the author think this will decrease or increase with the combat arms?
The author also does not know what he is talking about with regard to the use of females in SOF. The only place they were even touched on was in what was called Cultural Support Teams (CSTs) and they were almost useless. They had no real language, medical or cultural training that would have made them useful and they were not being used as combatants. The program was a failure, despite what many try to put forth and has been DC’d. They were just a SOF copy of the FETs and those too were plagued by the same problems, not to mention the huge amount of frat that went on in country.
Lastly, the issue of frat is and will continue to be an issue in the non-combat arms and the fleet, introducing it into the combat arms is a recipe of waster man hours, losses to pregnancy and lack of focus on the mission. Anyone who thinks 18-22 year old kids, in their physical prime, in austere environments and working closely day in and day out are not going to have serious frat issues is either selling something or smoking something.
Here are some more tidbits cut and pasted from others on why this is a bad idea:
-1982, Women in the Army Policy Review reported only 8 per cent of women were capable of performing heavy work category jobs and recommended establishing a Military Enlistment Physical Strength Capacity Test (MEPSCAT). Army never implemented test because it would reduce the women eligible for those occupational specialties.
-1992, James A. Vogel in an article, “Obesity and Its Relationship to Physical Fitness,” reported Natick Laboratory research results noting that aerobic capacity is a function of body fat percentage and strength is a function of lean muscle mass. A lean muscle mass of 50 kilograms is required if an individual is to perform heavy work jobs. Because woman are smaller in stature and have a high body fat percentage, few women will have the physical stature to train to the physical requirements of heavy work jobs.
-1992, Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces unanimously recommended Services adopt gender-neutral muscular strength/endurance and cardiovascular standards for relevant specialties. Never adopted.
-1997, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine study, Effects of a Specially Designed Physical Conditioning Program on the Load Carriage and Lifting Performance of Female Soldiers, reports that in 24 weeks the women in the study increased their lifting capacity to 82 percent of that of average males but gained less than a pound of muscle mass limiting the potential for additional improvement.
-1998, because the British Army had found women in heavy work occupational specialties were physically incapable of performing the assigned job, the British Army instituted a standard set of physical test scores in relation to career specialties. The British Army expected that the number of women qualifying for heavy work jobs would decline but discovered that during training the injury rate among women
soared.
-1998′, Dr. William J. Gregor testifies to the Congressional Commission on Military Basic Training and Gender Related Issues that because of the physiological differences, men training with women do not increase their aerobic capacity. British Army study in 2009 observed the same results.
-2000′, “The rate of unplanned losses is 2.5 times greater for women than for men—25 and 10 percent, respectively. That is, a quarter of women and a tenth of men are lost from ships every year for unplanned rea- sons. The rate of losses due to pregnancy is 11 percent.”
“The loss rates of women exceed those of men for medical, family care, and honorable discharge reasons. Men’s disciplinary rate is higher than women’s.”
-2002′, (Reviewed) 2010′, UK MoD-“The Women in the Armed Forces report examined the differences in the physical abilities of men and women which are relevant to military performance and observed, unsurprisingly, that they differ significantly. Differences between women and men in their capacity to develop muscle strength and aerobic fitness are such that only approximately 1% of women can equal the performance of the average man. In lifting, carrying and similar tasks performed routinely by the British Army, this means that, on average, women have a lower work capacity than men and, when exposed to the same physical workload as men, have to work 50-80% harder to achieve the same results. This puts them at greater risk of injury. In load marching, another fundamental military task, and in all other simulated combat tasks, women were found to perform worse than men, and the greater the load, the greater the discrepancy. The study concluded that about 0.1% of female applicants and 1 % of trained female soldiers would reach the required standards to meet the demands of these roles.”
-2006′, Daniel W. Trone, MA, in a study of the first term outcomes of female Marine Corps recruits observed that 44 percent of female recruits suffer lower extremity injuries and that those who experienced those injuries were less likely to complete their first term enlistment.
-2010′, Military Medicine (Journal)-LTC Philip J. Belmont Jr. and others report findings of a study of disease and non-battle injuries sustained by an Army BCT during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The non-battle injury rate for women is 167 percent higher than men, and the skeletal-muscular injury is almost equal to that of men from all causes. (Read the report and how many pregnancies there were too, shocking.)
-2011, Laurel Wentz, et.al., report in Military Medicine a systematic review of medical studies of U.S. and foreign militaries and athletic teams that females have a greater incidence of stress fractures. The greater incidence of stress fractures results from anatomical differences regardless of general fitness and training.
-2011, Dr. William J. Gregor reports the results of a study of cadet physical performance of all Army ROTC cadets from 1992 to 2011. The report observes that over that period only 72 women bested the lowest 16 percent of men in aerobic capacity and that the 72 women stood four standard deviations above the female mean. Such women are exceptional and their performance cannot be replicated through training the general population of women. Additionally, male aerobic capacity exceeds female capacity regardless of the weight to height ratio, BMI.
I could care less about the psychological reason for yes or no. I spent 30 years in the Army in MI. Females have a place at the table in my world. They may not have the physical capabilities to serve in the infantry in combat and if they do the down time creates situations that BOTH males and females desire (saw it happen in Iraq and the peacetime army before Iraq). Nope the place at the table in blood letting is in the dark side. Women attract men to do stupid things, things that can and will kill. I do believe that women should be assigned to tire 1 units specifically for the “honey trap”. The honey draws the fly in and cuts his throat or sets him up for ambush or snatch. It has worked for the IDF for the last 50 years. But… it takes a woman with balls, brains and strength.
Dr. King, understand you are Canadian by birth. Please check your statistics on the percentage of Canadian infantry that are females. Last information I had (may have changed, but not significantly) was that only .55% of Canadian armed forces infanteers were female. I find that not exactly a highly successful rate. When you interpret that into force strength that would mean only 2 or less of a rifle company are females, unless large numbers of women are bundled into certain units. That, sir, is not a successful integration of females, I would think.
I love these ridiculous assumptions that females can’t do a job that men can do, as if ALL men are exactly the same and ALL women are exactly the same. For the Mike Tyson example – I guarantee there are women who could beat his a$$ just fine, but not many – just as there are few men who can beat him! What a ridiculous example. If ALL men could were the same physically and mentally, there would be a 0% dropout and failout rate in boot camp, special ops training, all tech schools, etc. This is obviously not the case. If you don’t want to serve next to a female, don’t join the f*ing military. If you are not IN the military, you have no right to even express an opinion on the subject, and as far as I’m concerned, you can go f* yourself.
Raven,
Unfortunately biology and the real world do not back up your wishes or statements. If you are not in the military, you still have a right to express your opinion, it is kind of part of our compact with the Nation State, Military Service and our oath.
BLUF: 1% of females will meet the male averages in performance and then that same 1% will be broken quicker and for longer due to no fault of their own. If I have 100 males and 100 female and train them together only 1 or 2 will meet the male averages in performance, that was tested in the 80s’, 90s’ and 2000’s in both the US and UK. You have about half the VO2 Max, upper body strength and have a far higher rate of injury in your ankles, ACL/MCL, Hips due to a more drastic Q Angle. In short, you are not designed to do the same amount of things we are physically.
The Mike Tyson comment was just funny though, thank you for that.
When the President displays enough confidence to allow only all-female Secret Service teams to protect him and his family his entire 4-8 years in office, as well as for all others authorized protection privileges…then we can begin having rational, adult conversations on this topic. Until then, it’s clear women are not capable or trusted to defeat serious threats in direct engagement by themselves.
When questions arise regarding male-to-female ratios needed to maintain effective gender-integrated combat units…those very questions clearly validate women are not equally capable to the task. If our nation is forced down this road, then all-female combat units ‘is equality’ and will provide opportunity for those women capable and inclined to be in combat units the chance to serve there. However, no one in the Pentagon would order an all-female combat unit on its own into the heart of Islamic State territory; or into war with North Korea, Russia, or China as they would an all-male unit. No one will risk that blood on their hands or career.
Someone recently expressed this concern very well: If your loved one was wounded on a battlefield, exposed to continuing enemy fire, and the only Soldier or Marine close enough to run out, shoot returning fire, and try dragging your loved one to safety was male or female…which gender would you want there?
Non-deployability of female servicemembers in ‘non-combat’ positions due to pregnancy is around 12%. In a war with high casualties…the number of ‘non-combat’ non-deployable females due to pregnancy and other reasons could easily climb to 40-50%. Injecting those unnecessary personnel-loss rates into combat units during war is human and mission suicide.
The enemy also has a say in all this.
The comments section is not the ideal place to engage in proper debate – especially when some of the responses are so intemperate.
But let me try to address four key issues:
1) Female accession is now a fact. My piece is written in the spirit of offering some advice on how it might best work; and indeed the only way it can work in my view.
2) I do not dismiss the difficulties (including the question of fraternisation i.e. sex).
3) Female accession will be voluntary: no one will force women to fight in the combat arms.
4) Using elite sport as the analogy is a canard. As the armies and marine forces constantly reiterate – they are not looking for elite athletes but robust, motivated individuals. Below the elite level, there is a small population group of women who tperform some men and exceed the standards required for the combat arms. It seems odd to suggest that these exceptional women, stronger than some of the men now in the infantry, would be any worse in a knife fight.
5) Pregnancy is an issue. I discussed it here: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/Parameters/issues/Summer_2013/2_King_Article.pdf.
2) I do not dismiss the difficulties (including the question of fraternisation i.e. sex).:
You do essentially dismiss them and almost ignore the easily accessible rates of pregnancy in the Navy as an example of the problem. MG Cucolo was taken to task for attempting to enforce equal treatment and you think this will be looked at honestly? It is not currently, why would that change?
3) “Female accession will be voluntary: no one will force women to fight in the combat arms.”:
This is simply not true. We already have a quota in the Army and Navy for 30% of the force to be females, we have to wait until we get females from the recruiter before males can go. The same happens at the Academies, regardless of their class ranking, there are set asides for branches in both the Army and Naval Academy post graduation for women. Thinking that there will not be a push to have a certain percentage in the combat arms is not being honest or being intentionally misleading.
4) “Using elite sport as the analogy is a canard. As the armies and marine forces constantly reiterate”– they are not looking for elite athletes but robust, motivated individuals. Below the elite level, there is a small population group of women who tperform some men and exceed the standards required for the combat arms. It seems odd to suggest that these exceptional women, stronger than some of the men now in the infantry, would be any worse in a knife fight.”
-Actually, your take on the comparison is a canard. Those women are stronger than untrained men, but every study that has been done has consistently shown that those same women who if they had men among them and trained would be average at best and that only one percent would be in that average, maybe 1.5%, but that is it. None of this is hard to find. Even the UK did it’s own study.
5) “Pregnancy is an issue. I discussed it here:”
-It is beyond an issue, we lost up to 15% of females to it every cycle, they are out of circulation for almost two years. That is beyond a problem, if that same amount of female population was lost to combat people would be up in arms. This is connected to the frat issue, which you skipped over like you were playing hopscotch.
Nothing in your article is backed up by anything other than conjecture, wishes and hope. You are not informed on the many issues that are going on in the military in this area and yet continue to post on it.
Look Anthony, you are either a pure idealist who does not want to look at the reality of combat arms and the studies that do not support your view or you are being disingenuous.
Mr. King, please review the below video and respond. I am assuming you never served in Combat arms and am as Medic5392 stated, “A pure idealist.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9zp6kyIcWo
Everyone: There is one rule and one rule only in the War on the Rocks comments section: Don’t be a jerk. Please abide by that rule.
How have I or 0311SF been a jerk Ryan? Please, explain that to me now. What is it that I or 0311Sf wrote that is being “jerky”? Are we not allowed to question his article? I do so bit by bit on several posts, 0311SF merely links to a youtube video that calls out some of the claims that Mr. King puts out. So, what constitutes being a jerk in Mr. Evans? Has a matter of fact, the only person who I have read that was what Raven posted, yet you do not call her out and seem to call myself and 0311SF out, why?
My message, if you look at the board, was not a response to a specific person. It merely came after your comment, which was the 12th or 13th on this article. It was addressed to “Everyone.” The tone was getting needlessly hostile and antagonistic. Beyond substantive disagreements, which are worth considering, some participants in this thread (including you) were objecting to the fact that Tony has not served in combat arms and implied his opinion is therefore invalid. Tony has done a lot of research on military affairs – particularly on units like 16 Air Assault and 3 Commando Royal Marines over in the UK. In fact, I was first introduced to Tony’s work by a Royal Marine Colonel in charge of an elite unit. Not everyone who expresses an informed opinion on different aspects of this debate needs to have served in combat arms.
I realize this is an issue that arouses a great deal of emotion on both sides of the debate. Everyone should be courteous. We have published on both sides of this debate and will continue to.
Ryan,
My mistake, assumed due to position of the post that it was directed at myself and O311. As for his lack of service, it is not the end all be all, but when added in with his obvious emotionally based and ideological driven views it matters.
The fatal flaw in this piece is: “Doctrine, choreographies, and muscle-memories are crucial here – not inter-personal bonds.” Had the author had significant – or any – combat experience he would have known better. Sadly War on the Rocks published this piece at a cost to its reputation. I provide but one quote to support my – which is supported also by my personal combat experience – from William Manchester’s book: Goodbye Darkness, “And then, in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man’s real motives are revealed to him in an electrifying vision, I understand, at last, why I jumped hospital that Sunday thirty-five years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front and almost certain death. It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them. 1 had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. Any man in combat who lacks comrades who will die for him, or for whom he is willing to die, is not a man at all. He is truly damned.” I guess the moral of the story is to not ask people to write about a subject they can’t know anything about.
Mark:
Please attack arguments rather than authors. We have one rule in the comments section and it is “don’t be a dick.” We have published articles on every side of this argument and will continue to do so. Whether you agree with him or not, the author of this piece has done considerable research on the topic and is well-regarded in the field of civil-military affairs (http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/sociology/staff/king/). I know Tony well enough to be certain he respects your combat experience, so please at least pretend to have some respect his scholarly experience in the comments section here.
Best,
Ryan
Ryan,
While I wholeheartedly agree that “don’t be a dick” is a great guideline for the blog and for life, I have to disagree with your view on the author. It is clearly not true that he has done considerable research when so much information is left out of his articles on the topic. Even his inability to see that the integration of women into combat arms will come with considerable lowered standards and hence ruin the cohesion that makes those units tight and effective. The males will reset them for it. He also is not very well versed in how women have been used in either theater when attached to combat units. He ignore the pregnancy issues, dances around the realities of frat and totally ignore the vast physical differences between men and women. On top of that he falls into the age old red herring argument of comparing this to other integration by race, religion, sexual preference, etc…Guess what though? A man, be he purple, brown, black, white, red, gay, straight, or whatever…is still a man. I suspect the things that are left out are done so because they do not support his premise and I would also look at his article and what he says in them and think again on the legitimacy of him being “well-regarded”, well regarded by who exactly?
Also, you say you publish articles from all sides, yet I have only seen one against and several pro women combat integration.
Medic,
We have published two against. Several responses were submitted to Anna Simons’ article and I published some of them. I believe Anna has some more planned on the topic.
Best,
Ryan
Ryan,
I did not see the 2nd article, did a search, please link it if you can. Responses via posts, such as this, or actual articles?
On King, I question his credentials because he obviously has not researched much outside what supports his thesis. One can not have served and still study, be informed and present logical arguments. King does not do much of this and if he studied so much on UK units, why not bring up the issues that the MoD UK Study showed on just this topic? The guy has an agenda, not based on reason or the political facts in the US. He has an idea and then publishes “studies” to support that idea and it is pretty easy to spot.
http://warontherocks.com/2014/06/the-mission-goes-first-female-marines-and-the-infantry/
@Ryan, I have no problems with your rules for this site but suggest a level playing field. King presented the sentence I quoted not as an opinion but as a fact. From my personal experience I know that not to be a fact. The more I read the more I come across those with a shared experience like mine. Perhaps the editorial guideline to contributors should be something like this: “you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.” For the record I read much of King’s writing on the Brits in Afghanistan and found myself mostly in agreement with his opinions and conclusions. His book – The Combat Soldier – at 70 odd pounds is too much for what it promises and again with all honesty coming from a man with zero personal military (and combat) experience. It would take a Keegan to get away with that.