One of the legacies of the Carter Administration was the sharp upward curve showing the percentage of women in the U.S. Armed Services. In 1972 the percentage was 1.5%; in 1980 it was 8.5%; the 1986 projection is 12.5%.
The Reagan Administration this year announced a “pause” in order to review this unprecedented increase of military women. Field commanders had indicated that, with 95% of all army skills open to women, combat readiness is being affected by female attrition, pregnancy, single/in-service parenthood, physical stamina requirements for job performance, and morale and leadership problems.
The Defense Department recently issued its first report on “Women in the Military.” It’s clear from this 149-page piece of bureaucratise that feminist experimentation in the U.S. Armed Services isn’t working well, but nobody dares to say so.
The report contains the facts to prove the innate differences between men and women which affect their performance in the military, but it takes a diligent search through tedious jargon and tables to find them. One must read all the way to the final appendix for the evidence (given apologetically) that women are, indeed, different from men.
One of the studies, called “Medical Considerations for Employment of Women in the Canadian Military,” concluded: “The average female strength [is] 63.5% of the average male. With size kept constant, the female has only 80% of the strength of the male. … Men have a greater capacity for endurance that cannot be matched by women, and, at sub- maximal workload levels, women have to work much harder to accomplish the same amount of work. The overall effect of the male’s larger cardiovascular system is that female endurance is approximately 67% of the male’s.”
Some cherish the illusion that “training” will enable women to perform military jobs as well as men. Another study, called “The Influence of U.S. Army Basic Initial Training on the Muscular Strength of Men and Women” by the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, found that “for all muscle groups, males were significantly stronger than females before and after training, … the upper extremity strength of women was 57% that of men before training, 60% after training; lower extremity strength of women was 65% that of men before training, 67% after training.”
In order to avoid admitting the obvious male-female differential, the Defense Department is laboriously trying to develop “gender-free” physical strength standards. It has created something called the X-Factor in three grades, 1, 2, and 3. X-Factor 1, the most demanding, requires the individual to demonstrate the ability to raise 70 pounds to a height of 6 feet. Test results indicate that approximately 99.5% of the males and 29.4% of the females meet the strength requirements for X-1 skills.
The report examines the considerably higher attrition rate of women as compared to men’s. The attrition rate is the percentage of those who do not cdmp]ete their term of enlistment. The army women’s attrition rate is 42.1% as opposed to 34.4% for the men.
Why? The report concedes that “increased representation goals and Affirmative Action Plans have led to large numbers of women being assigned into traditionally male occupations.” It’s rather obvious from the report that most women don’t like the non- traditional jobs they are forced to take after they volunteer.
In a masterpiece of understatement, the report says that “it appears that increasing the representation of women in the military and particularly in non-traditional female occupations as an end in itself may have been overstressed.”
The report tells about a Defense Department poll on “perceptions and attitudes of active duty personnel.” In modern survey technique, those polled were given an assortment of statements and asked if they agree, disagree, or have no opinion.
When given the statement “Women in my primary work unit can supervise as well as men,” about 30% of the servicemen were reported as having “no opinion.” That doesn’t mean that the men had no opinion; it just means that they didn’t dare to give their opinion. Enlisted men by a wide margin said that women do expect favored treatment.
The Defense Department ought to continue in its present “pause” until it has the honesty to report the facts in a straightforward way, without apologizing for disagreeing with feminist foolishness. After all, the purpose of the Armed Services is to defend the United States with the best soldiers available.
