Category: Military issues

The other day I wrote here that an unintended consequence of females being allowed to serve in infantry units was that their inability to keep up physically with their male counterparts could hamper their prospects for promotion. One of the commenters (I always read comments on my writings because someone inevitably points out something I’ve missed) noted that there could be a much more basic physical reason for women to avoid serving in the infantry. And as anyone who has ever served in the infantry well knows, he made a very valid point.

And that point is simply this: For anyone who wants to maintain a youthful visage, the infantry is probably your absolute worst career choice. The cumulative effect of all those years in the woods, the mountains, the desert, and always in the sun, leaves the average infantry senior NCO with a face that looks twenty years older than its true age. The accounts among infantry veterans abound of NCO’s in their thirties who look like they are in their fifties or even sixties. My own anecdote:

An old buddy from the 101st came to visit in Pensacola in the late 70?s. I’d gotten out after six years to get my degree on the GI Bill. He’d stayed in the intervening ten years and was now an E-8 first sergeant. When we met him at the airport, I was stunned by how lined and weather-beaten his face was at the age of 35, a year younger than me. He looked to be in his fifties. At the house, while he was unpacking in the guest bedroom, my wife’s first words when we were alone was, “He’s younger than you are? You’ve got to be kidding. He looks more like your father.”
Another commenter recounted the story of a hard-living, hard-driving, SFC platoon sergeant in his combat engineer company, whose subordinates were so convinced the old geezer had to be at least in his sixties that they got up a pool to pay whoever could guess closest to his age. The “geezer” won. He was thirty-seven.

Mind you now, this doesn’t happen to everyone but it does so frequently enough that such stories are quite common in the combat arms units, particularly in the infantry. When I joined the Army in 1959, I was trained by a series of NCO’s who had served in the Korean War and a few who were WWII veterans. Most of them looked like they could have been WWI veterans. The infantry is a hard, hard life that extracts a high payment from those who choose it. Perhaps recruiters should be required to issue an aging-related health warning of sorts to young female prospects:

We are required to advise you, prior to your signing this contract of enlistment, that a career in the infantry can result in your resembling this before age forty.

That should really shorten the lines…

Following in the footsteps of Richard Nixon, some Republicans in Congress want to end selective service registration calling it a waste of money. From Fox News;

The Selective Service has a budget of $24 million and a full-time staff of 130. It maintains a database of about 17 million potential male draftees. In the event of a draft, the agency would mobilize as many as 11,000 volunteers to serve on local draft boards that would decide if exemptions or deferments to military service were warranted.

The Selective Service is an “inexpensive insurance policy,” said Lawrence Romo, the agency’s director. “We are the true backup for the true emergency.”

Yeah, most of the kids I went to college with didn’t even know that they had to register for the draft. The draft had been in effect since World War II until Richard Nixon ended it in 1972 and then two presidents later, Jimmy Carter reconstituted draft registration when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and he suddenly realized that he made military service so unattractive that he might have to bring back the draft. This was just a few years after he’d given amnesty to the draft dodgers of the Vietnam era – effectively insuring that a draft would never work in this country again.

During the 2004 campaign, Democrats started a rumor that George Bush had plans to reinstitute a draft, even though it was Democrats (specifically, Charlie Rangel) planned to restart the forced military conscription as some sort of idiot way to prevent war. Yeah, if there’s way to save money, they should shut down the Selective Service Administration. Especially since it would never work anyway.

There is a great deal of discussion going on right now concerning whether or not women should serve in designated ground combat roles. Should women be infantry soldiers or not? Articles such as that posted at American Thinker by Elise Cooper present numerous pros and cons, but, as with most such writings, the comments by readers are almost uniformly negative. Most of those responding cite various problems that will arise if the Obama administration insists on pushing through this politically correct social experiment. And most of those problems they cite are quite likely to occur in the opinion of this old combat infantryman.

However, there is another problem that I foresee: senior female officers have pushed this issue of women serving in combat because they see the lack combat duty and combat command in their military résumés as an impediment to further promotion. They may be correct. But just because that is true in their situation, it does not mean that it will be so for female junior officers or enlisted personnel serving in infantry units. The reality may just be the opposite.

The lowest leadership position in an infantry platoon is that of fireteam leader — usually a junior NCO, corporal, or sergeant (and, too frequently in the real world, a specialist fourth class). The fireteam usually consists of the leader and three or four lower-ranking soldiers. To get that first leadership promotion to fireteam leader, a soldier must demonstrate performance that his superiors believe sets him apart from and above those other members of the various fireteams in an infantry platoon and company. While many criteria go into promotion decisions, such as intelligence and can-do attitude, leadership ability is the most sought-after quality.

And that holds true all the way up the promotional chart. For once a soldier has been singled out by his superiors as worthy of being a fireteam leader, from his very first day on the job, his performance is being observed to see how well he leads his team and how well he stacks up against the other two or three fireteam leaders in his squad, as well the three or four fireteam leaders in each of the other two to four squads in his platoon. That competition for promotion never ends, and the importance of the ability to lead only increases with each step up.

And therein lies the rub for young women aspiring to serve in direct infantry roles. Even the most ardent liberal proponents of women in combat will generally concede that it will be a rare female soldier who possesses the same physical strength as her male counterparts. The most important quality for promotion down at the ground level where the infantry operates (it is called ground combat, after all) is leadership, and that leadership means out-front physically leading, setting the example for soldiers operating at the very limits of their physical endurance. How is a physically weaker female soldier going to meet that leadership requirement?

As any infantryman can tell you, superior physical strength generally equals greater endurance. So if a female soldier lacks the strength and endurance to set the example for other soldiers, how is she to get promoted? Having spent six years in the infantry, serving from private to staff sergeant, I can tell you that being able to set the physical pace and set the proper example is essential 24/7 in leading soldiers. They have zero tolerance for weakness, physical or otherwise, in their superiors, and they are quick to exploit it. It then becomes a short path to disciplinary problems — and poor discipline is, in and of itself, the shortest road to poor unit cohesiveness and combat performance.

If, as we can anticipate, the Pentagon insists on socially promoting females in infantry units on a gender -quota basis, regardless of their ability to lead from the front, then we at some point in the future will have ground forces that have a sizeable portion of their leadership positions filled by people who were promoted without possessing the full ability to lead their subordinates. That will systematically redefine and degrade the role of unit leadership. In a future ground war, then, this nation will be at a disadvantage when engaging forces where the principle of strong, physical leadership has been maintained.

I mentioned senior female officers complaining of a lack of combat experience. Since we do now have female field grade officers commanding battalions and higher in combat zones, they had to arrive at their commands via promotion through support units, where female ability to compete with male soldiers is not dependent upon physical strength. However, under these new rules, many of them would begin their careers as second lieutenant/platoon leaders in an infantry company, where they must compete against the other, mostly male, lieutenant/platoon leaders in their company as well as all the lieutenants in the several other companies constituting their battalion. Since many junior (male) infantry officers are recruited from college athletics programs, this promotion-physical leadership discrepancy could become even more pronounced for female officers. Rather than facilitating female promotion in the senior ranks, this move could result in female officers being weeded out early in their careers because they simply lack the ability to physically lead.

This truly is a policy that needs to be thought through to all its unintended consequences by those politically correct liberal hip-shooters running our government prior to its implementation.

Crossposted at American Thinker

With sequestration looming on the horizon, cuts to Tricare, the Department of Defense raiding our Tricare surplus, the outgoing Defense Secretary calling for servicemember pay cuts, qualitative management severing heads, the Navy has decided to throw away more money on an “Office of Hazing Protection” according to the Navy Times;

The new office will be charged with issuing anti-hazing policy and tracking “substantiated cases,” which will now be documented and tracked through a Navy-wide database, the release said.

Further details are spelled out in a NAVADMIN, which was not immediately available on the Navy Personnel Command website.

The Navy already has an organization designed to deal with the problems they perceive to be running rampant through their service – it’s call a “Chain of Command”. I’m sure this new office will have a flag officer at it’s head and a flock of legal eagle underlings – it’s probably more expensive than it needs to be – especially since everyone in the Navy knows what is hazing, what is right and what is wrong without an expensive new office to tell them.

It’s just a way for leaders to avoid having to lead, an excuse to pass on blame to some formal entity instead of enforcing a simple and easy to understand policy. More of that “do something” shit that drives political policy these days.

Thanks to Kevin for the link.

The New York Times reports that two more women will attempt to navigate the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officers’ Course this Spring, says the Corps’ Commandant, General James Amos.

In March, two Naval Academy graduates will become the second set of women to enter the course. Over the coming years, General Amos is counting on dozens more female volunteers to provide him with enough information to decide whether women can make it in the infantry. The outcome, he says, is far from certain.

“I think there is absolutely no reason to think our females can’t be tankers, or be amtrackers, or be artillery Marines,” he said, referring to tracked amphibious assault vehicles. “The infantry is different.”

General Amos said that if too few women were able, or willing, to join the infantry, he or his successor might ask the secretary of defense to keep the infantry closed to women. The deadline for that request is January 2016.

“You could reach the point where you say, ‘It’s not worth it,’ ” General Amos said. “The numbers are so infinitesimally small, it’s not worth it.”

I wish them well. I take offense at the Times’ intimation that we infantrymen consider our branch a “boys’ club”, because to me, this has never been about keeping women out of the infantry. I really don’t care either way, like with the gay issue. But at some point we have to ask ourselves why we’re pushing this so hard. The United States military is better, operationally, than it’s ever been so are we doing this to make the military a more effective fighting force or are we just bending to the political wishes of the civilian masters who don’t understand the consequences of their actions?

I’d like to believe General Amos, that if putting women in the infantry doesn’t make sense, they won’t allow it. However, it’s been my experience that common sense has nothing to do with political decisions made by the generals. I’m sure General Amos means what he says, but as we’ve seen over the last few weeks, what happens in the military has little to do with what the generals say.

For example:

Even if very few women pass I.O.C., enlisted women should still be allowed to join male-led infantry units, said Greg Jacob, a former Marine officer who is the policy director for the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocacy group.

“Leadership is leadership,” Mr. Jacob said. “You don’t need a female leader to lead female Marines.”

Says the guy who won’t have to lead female infantrymen, just like all of the other peckerwoods who are advocating so hard for this purposeless change. It’s the “do something, anything” crowd that wants to plow ahead irrespective of the eventual outcome, regardless of the number of body bags that get filled in the next war. it won’t be them or their kids who will have to deal with that eventuality.