The Empire Strikes Back
Britain nixes girls in the ranks.

June 26, 2001 4:35 p.m.

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.