Pentagon intends to lower standards for political points
Our buddy, Rowan Scarborough at the Washington Times writes that with complete disregard for the safety of the force, they’re plowing ahead with plans to allow women in all combat roles and the Republicans are complicit;
Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, won passage of language in the pending defense budget bill that says any standard lowered for women also must be lowered for men. The logic behind the measure is that the military does not want less-capable men staffing combat units.
Yeah, I’m sure that won’t work. The political forces that are driving this train aren’t concerned that there will be less-capable people in combat units, otehrwise would they be charging ahead. A moment’s thought would tell a rational person that altering the combat readiness of the most capable armed force in the world is madness.
I don’t want a lowered standard for anyone, regardless of their sex organs, because ultimately it will result in casualties. But the people who are pushing this don’t have any skin in the game. Neither them nor their children will hear a shot fired in anger, so what do they care?
“There will be a move to create a critical mass of young women in certain ground combat units,” said Robert L. Maginnis, a former Army officer with a new book, “Deadly Consequences: How Cowards Are Pushing Women Into Combat.”
And those of you women who think that it will be completely voluntarily, just wait until the politicians discover that volunteer rates are dreary. Yeah, so then they’ll be offering bonuses to attract women to the ranks of the combat forces, then you’ll get the ones who are in it for the money, meanwhile men won’t be offered the same bonuses for the same job. No one will get mad over that, will they?
Category: Military issues
They ought to rename our Government “Idiots R Us”
Opening the jobs should only mean to those who can qualify, not make it mandatory. Standards should NEVER be lowered for any group for ANY reason. Especially to further a political agenda. If the females can attain and maintain the same standards as the guys, more power to them. The men who can’t hack it should also be summarily removed.
So Glad I Am Retired.
Not that we didn’t see this coming, and mentioned it numerous times.
That’s ok, I don’t give a shit, anymore. Combat effectiveness won’t matter and will be replaced by feelings and false self esteem. A 92 pound weakling can squeeze a trigger; but can they hump a ruck day in and day out for months on end? Can they haul a wounded comrade, who weighs 200 lbs., on their shoulders 50 yards to safety? No, but they aced their PT test and bragged that they could smoke an infantryman in PT, so that makes them qualified to be infantry.
Here’s a thought: A lot of powerful women are involved in the push to see women in combat. I’ve always heard it said that women are in constant competition with each other, because women outnumber men something like 7 to 1. Maybe what this is, is an attempt to get rid of some of the competition?
What the heck. That makes as much sense as any OTHER reason to force the women to take these positions.
@3
So am I.
Sadly, I’ve seen this in technical fields for years, particularly when manning gets low…the pipeline which is supposed to be a filter becomes a pump, with the predictable results at the end.
@7 Saw it in tech fields in the 70’s USAF. Gals get through tech school, then on the job can’t carry the equipment. They ended up being put in supply or job control for the squadron. Then, with no practical field experience, upon discharge I had to compete with them in the job market, being considered “qualified” in the same field. USAF tech was one thing but infantry, SF, SEALS, Rangers? I don’t think so. This is the disaster we all see coming. NO common sense in Washington or the Pentagon anymore and I am sad to see a Republican behind this. This is only going to cost more lives on the front lines.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I served with some women, who I’d gladly go into combat with and some men who I wouldn’t even want on the same FOB, let alone go outside the wire with.
There exists a fundamental problem with using PT as the standard. It has bugged me since my first enlistment that the militry relies upon PT scores as how bad ass and fit for combat you are. Its a three event test, that while useful as a measure of general fitness that is all it is. It doesn’t measure how well you shoot, doesn’t measure how well you ruck (in the early 90’s SCOM found that ruck times were a better predictor of sucess in selction than PT scores were), or how willing you are to pull the trigger or if you are going to freak out when the bullets start flying.
My point is there’s a lot more to being fit for a combat role than your ability to do push ups, sit ups, and run two miles in shorts, t-shirt, and running shoes.
If women can carry their weight, pull the trigger, not curl up into the fetal postion when bullets start flying, and don’t require special accommodations, then by all means let them shoot bad guys in the face. And while we are at it, get those men who can’t pull the trigger, who can’t carry their own weight, hide under their bunks when bullets start flying, and demand their xbox, internet, cell phone, and stress cards.
Lets get back to everyone an infantryman mindset, no matter what the gender or MOS.
Thank goodness there is that D or R behind the names of the congresscritters. Without it, there would be no telling them apart any longer.
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“Hey, Manning! Guess what? It’s time we had women on the gridiron. So, this year your line will include a female center and a guard!”
The outrage in Denver if that were to happen would be enormous. And the Broncos’ opponents would be dizzy with joy. But make it the US military and unnecessary deaths and injuries and…crickets.
Not sure I buy the charge of “being complicit”, Jonn. Seems to me that Rep. Hunter was trying to make the best of a bad situation – e.g., to include a “poison pill” that would make folks think twice before implementing something abject stupid.
Whether this will work or not is another story. I happen to agree with you that it probably won’t. But maybe some folks will grow a spine at the prospect of being forced by law into lowering standards for all. You never know.
An outright ban on women in combat slots by Federal law ain’t gonna fly. That went away in the 1990s and isn’t coming back any time soon. Whether it should or not is a different matter entirely.
IMO, it should; the mythical Amazons were exactly that: mythical. But I’m beginning to think it’s going to take the US losing a war – badly, and with massive casualties – before the folks in Congress, at 1600 PA Ave, and inside the 5-sided asylum get it back through their thick skulls that war is played for keeps, political niceties be damned.
@9 I agree with you, but the pint you made, “and don’t require special accommodations”, is the fly in this ointment. I think the Admin, Pentagon, and both sides of the aisle read that as “lowered standards”. That is what I see as the problem here. There will be lowered standards for women and men. I don’t want to serve beside anyone who can’t keep up with the ruck and the fight, regardless of their gender.
I wonder if what I heard is true, that the Pentagon will soon publish a training manual entitled, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Mars Too!”
Hondo, any rational person can see that these people aren’t going to be hindered by a little thing like that. In my opinion, Hunter made a bad situation worse, which might not have been his intention. But it makes it easier for the forces at work here to lower standards.
@9: As I have stated before; there are some women who can ruck up, however, they are the exception, not the rule. It’s not about machismo, but physiology. Men and women are built different for different tasks. the standards, as they are, were set through experience on the battlefield, not to keep women out.
Look at the Marine Infantry Officer School, for example. 4 woman have signed up and all 4 have washed out. So far, that doesn’t bode well for them, so the only logical thing to do is lower the standards so they can pass (there’s that self esteem thing I mentioned). It weakens the effectiveness of the fighting force, but politicians and feminists feel good about themselves and that’s all that matters.
@11 Losing a war because of reduced standards would never be honestly and transparently linked back to the real cause. It would be whitewashed, and just like the sexual assault problem, the talking heads and the spineless politicians would blame the easiest target. And we all know who that will be.
Jonn: sometimes the choices are “bad” and “oh sh!t bad”. Looks to me like Rep. Hunter opted for “bad”.
YMMV, and it looks like it does in this case. (smile)
PS standards already are lower for females than they are for males. Now that this language is in the defense bill, does it mean that the double PT standards has to go away? Am I am I going to now be able to max out my promotion points by doing 19 pushups (a score that would have FAILED the PT test on a male standard)?
For the life of me I can’t remember the title of this book someone told me about, but the plot goes like this. Some kingdom is under attack from a more powerful enemy, after struggling they come up with a defense, large magical bells, that when rung, destroy the enemy infront of them. These bells make this kingdom the best defended and strongest in the land with nobody daring to attack them. Fast forward a thousand years and this kingdom is ringed by a wall with bell towers. The only requirement now for military service is to prove you can pick up the hammer and ring the bell. One day a new enemy approaches the border of the kingdom with a massive army. One of the soldiers in a bell tower sees them and rings the bell to stop them. Nothing. What ever magic powered the bells, it is gone. So the rest of the book is this “military” trying to relearn the lost art of war and reestablish a higher standard to defeat the invaders.
See what ever symbolism you want in that story, I’m just glad I wont be around when someone try’s to ring that bell.
As a woman I’m appalled by this cr@p-sandwich. Gals are not guys! No matter what some taupe-clad wymynist in academia claims, I was never as strong as a guy my size and age, even when I was in peak condition. When I tried to join the Navy, it was in a field where I knew physical strength (and lack thereof) was not going to be a factor (languages and intel). Ye gads and little fishes, how many people are going to leave the service, get injured, or killed, before the clue bat finally leaves a mark on the policy perpetrators? *pant, pant, pant* OK, I’m done ranting.
As a woman I’ve always thought that you should be able to pass the standards to do the job. I always scored 100% on my push ups and sit ups, though I’ll admit my run was not as fast. In my class at DLI, we had a kid who FAILED his DLPT, he couldn’t speak, read or write in Russian to save his life. He should not have been able to move on, but because he scored a 300 on his PT test his DLPT scores were waivered. I was horrified, I didn’t want to work with a translator who couldn’t translate, and I’d feel the same in any other MOS. I think that men and women should be able to pass the same standards to do the job.
We’ve been over this ground many times before.
Dropping standards to lower levels is a bad idea.
Endurance is what counts in hiking with a heavy load, not how fast you can run in gym shoes and shorts. If that isn’t recognized, then what is the point of having standards of any kind?
I do believe that if there are not enough female volunteers for combat infantry positions at all levels, the result will be ‘you just volunteered for combat infantry, join that line over there’.
Some women will be tough enough to make it through training, eventually, but I don’t like this social engineering method. It’s all wrong and it will end in disaster.
Maybe if some you would talk to a few of us older Korean veterans and ask us what it was like to run up against a North Korean Women Inf. person, knowing that it could be some guys wife or mother of 4 or 5 small young ones waiting for their mother to return back home. No Fellows, say what you will, its still a free country, but I will continue to say, “keep our ladies out of HARMS WAY”
I’m taking an American Culture Class now, being taught by a lady who specializes in Women’s studies.
She is a nice lady and a good teacher but completely lost in anything to do with the Military.
Some of her homework assignments lean heavily on Sex and Gender idendity.
There is a big push on to “clean up society” as far as sexism.
In a way it’s not a bad thing. Most of it revolves around changing the language we use to identify those who fail or show weakness.
As a DI or even a SNCO in the fleet I and others used “bitch” “fag” and “pussy” to call out those that couldn’t hack it.
By doing that we sent to message out that females were “weaker” then us.
Which they are, for the most part.
But even beyond physically it sent out the wrong message out.
It implied that ALL female Marines were less capable at ANYTHING they did (or at least not as good as males).
The military has led the way in a lot of positive social changes.
This is a bit off the original subject. By the way I think lower the standards is total bullshit, and Duncan Hunter knows that, hes just trying to kill the plan.
Back to my rant, If the services just clean up terms we use can help ourselves, teach our young men to respect servicewomen and do away with excuses for the politicans to neuter us.
When you have the Chief of Staff of the Army backing the 1% raise over the 1.8% raise…that speaks volumes. He will roll over and take anyone’s bone. Is he trying to make five stars? Wait a minute, that’s impossible!
What a joke.
Chances are most of the Colonels (Navy Captains) in the Armed services and up got promoted during the current administration.
That garantees we have a bunch of mewling suck ups hanging off the PC politico’s nutsack.
@24. Behind that nice exterior is probably a seething manhater who loathes you. Give her what she wants to hear, take the B+ (unless you are the one male eligible to receive the A), and move on. Changing language is the first step in changing thinking. When the thinking changes, the laws which compel behavioral changes under penalty of imprisonment follow. The nice lady is a change agent. Better you than me. To be ignorant opf things military is to be ignorant to the greatest agent of change in world history: violence.
kinda makes me wish i was still in. so i could witness the circus. lowering standards for men too ? i would do 70% on push ups and situps (which would probably be like 50 and 60) and dramatically fake muscle failure, and follow it up with 2 miles of cheetah flips.
So what’s next, assignment of body guards for female grunts? Say two males per female to carry their ruck loads and spare ammo. Will the body guards be required to shield the female from enemy fire with their bodies? The loss of two effectives for each social experimental non-hacker. Sounds like a good trade from here, NOT!
What bothers me is the deafening silence from the senior leadership. Duty, honor and country are mere words…CYA and careerism is the norm. Not one general has the balls to question the big lie-social experiment?
@26 No doubt she is a liberal, very. She definately has an agenda, but its not all bad.
I’m not worried about my grade, There really is no shenanigans possible as every assignment is graded and posted on blackboard.
I’m at a 97.8 Average right now, with just the final to take, which is open note and open book.
A lot of the class Materiel has been a lip biter for me.
It’s not that she deliberately lies about anything, its just the “selective” materiel She selects.
I will hand it to her though, along with the typical harping on slavery and mistreatment of Natives she taught a good section on Irish immigrants.
Another thing she covered really well was the pre-columbian civilizations, They were much larger, complex, and diverse than I realized.
Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, won passage of language in the pending defense budget bill that says any standard lowered for women also must be lowered for men. The logic behind the measure is that the military does not want less-capable men staffing combat units.
Derp-a-derp-a-derp.
So, instead of lowering the standards for one gender (cause you know they bloody-well will), they’re going to lower them for both genders. That’s brilliant, and by brilliant I mean the exact opposite. That’s a fucking intellectual black-hole, sucking in anything vaguely resembling IQ points in our elected leadership.
@15 “The standards, as they are, were set through experience on the battlefield, not to keep women out” is a statement that I could support, if the standards were set based upon battlefield experience. They aren’t. The current standards were established in 1980 in order to streamline and make the test easier to administer. The events were selected not because of any reflected value in combat, but because you only needed a stop watch and two miles to run. Pretty much anyone anywhere could do it. It was also easy to train for, and cheap, and as such it was everything a Cold War army could ask for. I keep coming back to it, but the World War II PT test is the shit. No lie. As PT one morning while teaching reclass I administered it to the students. Not one passed, and that was even with swapping out the straight leg situps with cruchies and replacing the squat jumpers with body weight squats. It smoked them all (and as an aside I wasn’t allowed to ever use that for PT again). And that is the problem I think. The Army looked at changing its PT test, and soldiers blasted the change, because it was too complicated, took long, and we’d see a huge increase in PT failures. So we kept the three event test and all of the baggage that comes with it. Men and women are different, yes, as evidenced by the fact I’d rather spend all day looking at an average looking woman that I would a pretty looking man. That doesn’t mean they are unsuited for modern combat (we are rarely swinging battle axes at the heads of our enemies this days), the problem is that the PT test is such a bad way determining combat fitness that its hard to justify keeping women out because of it. @12 I agree. I sure as hell don’t want anyone at my back that can’t ruck or shoot. To be completely honest, that’s what the PT test should be. A 10K ruck, plus stress shoot (300 meter shuttle… Read more »
I always maxed out push ups and situps but I couldnt run for shit. But you give me a hundred pounds of gear and tell me to road march 15 miles in 3 hours and I’d do it in two. Even when I came back to the infantry after becoming a fat body from recruiting duty I still dominated push ups and sit ups and could ruck forever. But the run always killed me. Because of that some of my superiors used it as an excuse not to send me to the promotion board even though I had more combat time than 95 percent of my battalion. I always hated when they used PT scores as a gauge for combat effectiveness. Push ups situps and running for two miles doesnt tell you anything except that a soldier with high scores is more capable of getting himself off the ground and running during a fight than a soldier with lower scores. Thats fine for pogues remfs and fobbits but not grunts.
By the way, I’m hearing all this talk of lowering standards and I’m still not hearing anything much about a female draft…
Hell, I’m 45 years old, I came back in after a nine year break in service, and my APFT numbers pass in the twenty something age groups. I also leave most of them behind me in the run, and I make them hate me with my ragging on them as I leave them behind during a ruck march!! I’m in a Combat Arms unit, and when we got deployed to Kuwait, we had females attached to us.. Among them were Soldiers that proved themselves, but we also had a batch that used their Gender to avoid as much work as possible, and we DON’T NEED that crap in our ranks! But alas, the latest crop of sniveling suck ups in DC can’t wait to kiss liberal ass!!!
I have maintained that if the standards remain unchanged for males, and the women who wish to join us in the Infantry got on our standard, that any attempt using our standard would be a fair shot for the women who truly want to be Infantry. I feel this defense bill language is a victory, albeit a small one,in an effort to force a second look at how the standards (for males)should remain in place, forcing females who truly believe they can make it to be at the relatively simple* male standard.
*Simple as the standard is, it would not be such a hot-button topic if some of those in charge really do believe that females would have a tough time passing consistently at the male standard.
i hear a lot of excuses from PT failures here. i never had a PT test i didnt max, it isnt a test of combat readiness, it is a test of physical performance. ive been out of the army for 7 years now, i still take a PT test every other saturday, and still max it at 21 year old standards. when those bullets were flying, i was glad that my team could all max their PT tests. it tests your muscular endurance for upper body, core, and legs as well as lung capacity. i never had a soldier that couldnt run pass the EIB ruck, its still leg strength and endurance. news flash, a 2 mile run isnt how fast you move your legs, its how long you can keep them moving. you can sprint faster than my 2 mile pace, you just are not strong enough to keep up the pace i do. dont make excuses and claim you “cant” run, train and get better at it! just because you are weak, doesnt mean the standard should be lowered for you either 11Bvet. hold the standard, dont cave because you think you are fit enough. i wouldnt have sent you to the promotion board either. Infantry NCOs lead from the front, if you cant lead your team/squad on a run first thing in the morning, what makes you think you will be leading them when you have to run in combat? your team will be having to drag your ass, great example to set as an NCO. id like to see that 15 miles in 2 hours ya claimed. let alone the 100 lb ruck, do it with 50. quit making excuses and meet the standard! that goes for women too, i dont care if you want to join the infantry, prove you belong there. it doesnt matter what you want or you think is owed to you, meet the standard! the standard is set and has worked pretty damned well, it shouldnt be changed just because some split tail with an axe to grind says so. limp… Read more »
“im sure i said something in here that everyone can find offensive, if not let me know and ill add to it.” It’s still early but right now that is the frontrunner for today’s internet award.