Combat

  

Why, here is the leader you must surely want to follow into combat.........

 Ol' Remus

VERBATIM (Too good to miss a second)

An article by Army Reserve Colonel Ellen Haring published in the Armed Forces Journal advocates lowering the physical training standards for female combat officer candidates. Colonel Haring, a 1984 West Point graduate and current War College "concept officer", along with Sgt. Maj. Jane Baldwin, filed a successful lawsuit against the Defense Department for denying combat roles to women. Now she says physical ability and combat training matter less than being creative and remaining calm. According to the Colonel, by "celebrating strength" we're filtering out future Audie Murphys. Miss Ellen's been misinformed. Murphy was a he. And today he'd be filtered out in the first day of sensitivity training. If anybody needs filtering out it's Colonel Haring.

What does she expect them to do, talk 'em to death? Bedazzle 'em with creativity? Make 'em die laughing? If the armed forces buy into this they forfeit respect from that moment on, the kind of respect that matters, earned respect. To put it almost plainly, a military riddled with transient opportunists and single moms, diversitymongers—the two biggest users of pictogram interfaces are McDonalds and the US military—predatory gays and other misfits, led by underachieving but oh-so-creative women is something we couldn't hide forever. Real armies would find out soon enough and take 'em all to the woodshed for a long overdue stropping. 

The quote below is extracted from an article by Rowan Scarborough at the Washington Times. Hankies and pom poms at the ready, Miss Ellen. You go girl.

Perhaps it is time to take a hard look at what really makes a competent combat soldier and not rely on traditional notions of masculine brawn that celebrate strength over other qualities. If the going-in assumption is that physical standards are the only thing that needs to be examined, then we are also assuming that we have everything else just right. This is belied by our less-than-optimal performances in many instances during the past 12 years.

Fixating on physical standards is a tactical-level approach that misses a strategic-level opportunity. We can’t be sure, but odds are that Murphy would have washed out here, as well. An obstacle course that relies on physical prowess tests none of the important qualities that Murphy possessed. We diminish the importance of what are probably more important traits in soldiers: the ability to remain calm, focused, creative and quick-thinking in times of extreme duress. These are the traits that we should be measuring as we assess soldiers for combat specialties.

Physical strength is important, but it shouldn’t be the most important trait that we assess, and it certainly shouldn’t become a way to filter out the Audie Murphys of our population.

The US military is probably the most traditional and honor-bound part of the government establishment, historically true to their calling and doggedly loyal to the country. In recent times it's been degraded by social experimenters, irrelevent futziness training, no-win political missions and cammy-pattern feminism. Set against this are credible stories of derailed promotions, rumors of blackmail at flag level and many lesser examples of hostility toward members whose loyalty to the country is unwavering. Instances of supplying intel and weapons to our putative enemies, and warrettes which end not in victory but in nation building videogames if not humiliating bugouts, make it difficult for conscientious members of the military to understand why they fight. 

What appears to be happening is this. The collectivists captured the permanent government at least a couple of generations ago. Having recently annexed the Republican party they now see themselves as settling into perpetual power, and not without cause, the days of orderly change are behind us. But no regime can rule, as versus govern, without the explicit backing of the military. Mere acquiescence is not enough, there must be positive loyalty specific to the regime.

Historically it's been done this way. First, the regular armed forces are permeated with a political cadre which monitors and supervises it at all levels. These cadre are assigned ranks within the military, or bring it with them. Military officers comprise one of the two most anxiety-ridden professions there are—university professors being the other. The political cadre plays the stalwart mentor before and after they buckle. Second, a parallel quasi-military security force is established which is superior in all instances to the regular forces, meaning a senior military officer is outranked by a junior security officer, in practice if not in appearance. Protocol is carefully constructed to suggest otherwise. Incidentally, totalitarian states typically create overlapping fiefdoms with muddled authority to ensure unquestioning compliance with any order from the top. 

What we're seeing is an armed forces systematically conflating loyalty to the regime with loyalty to the country. Knowledgeable observers put the number of country-loyal versus regime-loyal at about sixty-forty, with the sixty per cent country-loyal concentrated in officers below flag rank and the senior enlisted. It's said the ratio was nearly the reverse as late as the year 2000 just as an internal counterrevolution, goosed by committed constitutionalists, began to take hold. The country-loyal appear to be going from success to success. Given our daily dose of up-to-the-nostrils disinformation and psyops, all this is little more than speculation. 

Colonel Haring's part in this is that of a useful idiot, chic feminism apparently, who sees herself, and wants to be seen, as championing equal opportunity, ennobling both herself and the army in the doing. In fact, she's doing no such thing. What rankles Miss Ellen is all six female officers who have attempted the Marine Corps' infantry officer qualification course have failed. Oops. So, on to Plan B: the applicants didn't fail, the standards failed the applicants. Yeah. Dat's da ticket. To suggest it could be any other way is to demean some Really Deserving People, so let's do the Right Thing. And the Right Thing is to demean everybody by tainting achievement with a whiff of fraud. 

There are those who work to strengthen the military and those who work to weaken it. Which is Colonel Haring? Lowering qualifications to accommodate a subset of applicants isn't equal opportunity, it's the same demand for dishonest equal outcomes we've seen elsewhere. We shall do our very best to look surprised when, encumbered with playground rules, the armed forces become the lifeguard who couldn't swim.