A recent article in the official U.S. Army Magazine called “Soldiers” promotes the radical notion that American women should be sent into combat to fight our nation’s battles. The article, entitled “The Army’s Assault on Sexism,” is obviously a trial balloon to test the air and see what kind of public reaction it stimulates.
The article states, “There are no legal restrictions against Army women serving in combat or in a combat MOS.” Then the article explains that women can now be “called upon to defend their unit or participate in a counterattack or something like that.”
After thus claiming the legal authority to use women in suth roles, the article says “we don’t envision women routinely in the trenches, participating in hand-to-hand combat or engaging the enemy with individual or crew-served weapons.” (emphésis added) The key word here is “routinely”; obviously, you must assume that it is permissible to put women in those roles or tasks just so long as it is not “routine.”
But now go back and reread the sentence in the preceding paragraph stating that women can be used to participate in a “counterattack.” This is one of the most demanding and dangerous of all military missions; to counterattack means to meet head-on and try to eject an enemy after he has overrun your defenses.
Perhaps, in the peculiar semantics of this trial balloon, a “counter attack” isn’t “routine”; that is, it doesn’t happen “regularly” or every day. But “counterattacks” can be necessary at any time, and they certainly do require “participating in hand-to-hand combat or engaging the enemy with individual or crew-served weapons.”
An analysis of this article, therefore, reveals that the Army is claiming that it can assign servicewomen to any job, including the defense of their units and counterattacks, but the Army doesn’t “envision” keeping women “routinely” or constantly in trenches or hand-to-hand combat. The distance between what the Army claims it can legally do to women, and what it doesn’t “envision” doing, is too small to fit a woman into.
This revealing article on “Sexism” is not just an oddball idea published in an unauthorized magazine. “Soldiers” is subtitled “The Official U.S. Army Magazine,” it carries the names of Army Secretary Clifford L. Alexander, Jr. and Chief of Staff Gen. E. C. Meyer on its masthead, and it boasts that its purpose is “to provide timely, factual information on policies, plans, operations and technical developments of the Department of the Army.” The article quotes repeatedly from Lt. Col. Robert I.C. Hawley III, who is identified as a “Department of the Army expert on enlisted women personnel management programs.”
The article on “Sexism” goes on to assert that its policy [of the non-routine use of women in hand-to-hand combat and in engaging the enemy in counter attacks, etc.] “coincides with the will of Congress … and probably the will of the overwhelming majority of the American people.” Not a shred of evidence for such an allegation was offered, and indeed it is a complete departure from all assurances given to Congress.
The assertion that there are “no legal restrictions against Army women serving in combat” falsifies the intent of the law. The laws specifically prohibit women from combat assignment in the Navy and the Air Force.
The only reason why the Army law passed at the same time didn’t specifically spell out the same prohibition is that it was unthinkable that the Army would place women in ground combat. The intent of Congress was certainly to exclude women from Army combat.
The article on “Sexism” completely dispels any illusion that women in the Army can be treated like ladies. It says: “Once in the Army, women are expected to undergo basically the same training as men. That runs from individual weapons qualification to unit defensive and offensive techniques normally included in basic training. The training is generally the same.”
What about privacy? “Men and women in the Army have the same living accommodations. Men and women are separated to provide a reasonable amount of privacy. Sometimes that’s a partition or a wall.”
The “sometimes” privacy and the “non-routine hand-to-hand counter attacks” are the realities of Army life for women today. If the Supreme Court rules that our young women must be drafted involuntarily into that Tife in the name of “sex equality,” the uproar in America will be far greater than that evoked by the Vietnam War.
