The Obama administration announced last week that it is rolling back Army and Marine Corps policies that have kept female soldiers and marines out of combat areas. “This,” said one unnamed officer quoted by the LA Times, “is the opening salvo in the debate over assigning women to combat.”
This is another illustration of Fullers Law: When the government is in control, decisions are made politically. In this case the military is being used, not for the defense of the nation from foreign enemies, but as an institutional demonstration of the Politically Correct doctrine that men and women should fill identical roles in society.
It’s easy to see how politicized the issue of women in the miltary is from the less-than-honest way the military brass treat the issue. In 1993, for example, the Clinton administration decreed that the US Navy must qualify female fighter pilots for combat roles. The first woman to qualify, with much fanfare from the administration, was Kara Hultgreen, who died tragically the next year when she crashed her plane while trying to land it on an aircraft carrier. The Pentagon went public with the claim that an equipment failure caused the crash, but soon someone leaked the Navy’s official Mishap Investigation Report, which stated that pilot errors were the primary causes both of the crash itself and of its fatal results.
Many observers both in and out of the Navy have claimed that Hultgreen had not met the standards used in qualifying male pilots for the airplane in question.
Suspicions about the methods used to “qualify” female pilots for aircraft carrier duty were further aroused when the navy had to retract the carrier qualifications of Carey Lohrenz, one of the handful of women the navy had declared fit for carrier service right after Hultgreen.
In 2003 Army Private Jessica Lynch was captured by Iraqi insurgents after a firefight. She was soon rescued by American forces. The Bush Pentagon released a phony story about the battle in which she was captured, claiming that she had fought heroically, despite her wounds, until running out of ammunition and being captured.
Lynch, who had had absolutely nothing to do with spreading this phony story, went public to set the record straight. She had, she said, been wounded and captured without firing a shot. (She went on to praise the valor and effectiveness of the Army Rangers and Navy Seals who rescued her.)
It seems that at least three successive administrations have been less concerned about building an effective fighting force to kill our nation’s enemies and keep America strong than they are about promoting Politically Correct theories about gender roles.