The same week that Middle East terrorists and the hostage problem dominated the news, the New York Times featured a front-page story headlined “West Point Picks Woman to Lead Cadet Corps.” The position of first captain of the Corps of Cadets, the academy’s highest honor, puts her in charge of overseeing virtually all aspects of life for the 4,400 West Point cadets.
The picture showed a casual T-shirted, straggly-haired 20-year-old girl. What do you suppose the trad guys of the world – the terrorists, the Soviets, the Chinese thugs, Qaddafi or Castro – think when they see this image of the one selected to lead West Point seniors?
West Point’s Superintendent, General Dave R. Palmer, said, “She does not have the position because she’s a woman.” He is correct, but not the way he meant it. She has this honor because he is a wimp who toadies to the feminists who are constantly breathing down his neck and demanding more “career opportunities.”
The Times article tried to reassure its readers that she deserves this position of leadership over all other West Point cadets, 90 percent of whom are men, by saying she has “a strong academic record, played soccer and competed in cross-country skiing.” And one more qualification: she “worked as speechwriter in the Pentagon.” As Queen Victoria would have said, “We are bit amused.”
The Superintendent who made this newsworthy choice must think his mission is to train young people to be paper-pushers in the Pentagon in a peacetime military, while keeping fit with athletics (but not the really tough men’s sports). But if that’s all the West Pointers are being trained for, the cadets can go to any state university at one twentieth cost to the taxpayers.
When General Douglas MacArthur, hero of three wars and most distinguished cadet who ever graduated from West Point, delivered his great “Duty, Honor, Country” commencement speech there on May 12, 1962, he gave it to them straight. “Your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication… You are the ones who are trained to fight.”
MacArthur continued, “Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed.” Times and weapons have changed, but the mission of West Point graduates is – or should be – the same as it ever was.
This is not a mission for girls (even if they excel in skiing and speechwriting), but a mission for real men. As MacArthur said, West Point must graduate men who, whether they are “slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads… blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain,” or, on the other side of the globe, in “the filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts,” in “the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails,” can be relied on to muster the strength and courage to kill the enemy.
Can we believe that this 112-pound, 5-foot-4-inch girl can do that and, in addition, lead troops of men to risk death under such circumstances? You have to be kidding!
If you want to know how America sank to this ridiculous situation, you should read Brian Mitchell’s new book called Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military. It’s the definitive book on how the radical feminists have caused our military officers to cower in fear and to acquiesce in policies that make the integration of females a higher priority than combat readiness.
Mitchell, who served seven years as an infantry officer and is now a reporter for Navy Times newspaper, chronicles how this happened and documents the profoundly disruptive effect, which women have had (such as ten percent of them being pregnant at any one time). Our top active-duty officers have bugled retreat on this issue and surrendered to feminist ideology and androgynous experimentation.
The official excuse for this catering to the feminists is that the baby boomers are now past military age, causing a shortfall of men who will volunteer for the All-Volunteer-Force. But the real reason why there is a short fall of male volunteers is not demographics; it is the feminization of the military.
Men are attracted to serve in the military because of its intensely masculine character. The qualities that makes them courageous soldiers – aggressiveness, risk-taking, and enjoyment of body-contact competition — are conspicuously absent in women.
Fighting wars is a mission that requires tough, tenacious and courageous men to endure the most primitive and uncivilized circumstances and pain in order to survive in combat against enemies who are just as tough, tenacious, and courageous, and probably vicious and sadistic too. The armies and navies of every potential enemies are exclusively male and no women diminish their combat readiness.
Pretending that women can perform equally with men in tasks that require those attributes is not only dishonest; it corrupts the system. It discourages men from enlisting and it demoralizes servicemen from developing those skills that produce Douglas MacArthurs and George Pattons in our country’s hour of need.
Mitchell’s book is must reading for anyone who cares about the national security of the United States.
