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 his
week, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon will be briefed on the
results of a joint-services study of women in combat that found
female soldiers unsuited for the physical demands of direct combat.
The British services' "Combat Effectiveness Gender Study" concludes
that women should continue to be barred from serving in "direct-fire
close-combat roles." Such a revealing study would never be permitted
in the U.S. military, where the Pentagon's feminist lobby forbids
a discouraging word about women's capabilities. Secretary Rumsfeld's
team might want to request a copy be forwarded in a plain brown
wrapper before getting hen-pecked into adopting more destructive
social engineering in the name of equality in the ranks.
A senior military official explained that the study concentrated
solely on testing whether women "can carry the load." And the answer
was: Only if it's not as heavy as the guys' burden. Seventy percent
of women, in contrast to 20 percent of men, were unable to carry
90 pounds of artillery shells over a measured distance. While 17
percent of men failed a test requiring a 12.5-mile march, with 60
pounds of equipment, followed by target practice simulating conditions
under fire, the female failure rate was 48 percent.
Women soldiers came up short in these field tests of strength and
stamina despite complaints that performance on certain tasks had
been "gender normed" to mask differences in performance. Earlier
this year, Brigadier Seymour Monro, the Army's director of infantry,
claimed that tests had been watered down, and certain particularly
difficult tasks eliminated, in the interest of enhancing women's
performance. Still, enough demanding tasks remained to reveal the
potentially deadly differences.
It won't be easy for the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Committee on
Women in the Services (DACOWITS) to hide from the latest evidence
that their goal of full integration risks the lives of men and women
in uniform. The British field tests revealed that women were unable
to dig into hard ground while under fire.
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