Emasculating the military: politically correct dictates are ever more being imposed on today's military, degrading morale, discipline, and combat effectiveness.

While serving in Baqouba, Iraq, last June, Lt. Dawn Halfaker was on patrol with several other members of the military police when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded inside their armored Humvee. She was evacuated to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, where she underwent surgery to amputate her badly infected arm.

Halfaker "is one of five American military women at Walter Reed who have lost limbs from combat injuries in Iraq, a war that marks the first time large numbers of female troops have faced prolonged exposure to daily combat," reported USA Today on April 28. "A decade ago--in the midst of a heated debate over which military jobs women should occupy--Halfaker's story might have ignited a battle over whether women should experience the hazards of ground fighting. Today, she and other severely injured female soldiers say, reality has overtaken that debate."

"Women in combat is not really an issue," Halfaker insists. "It is happening." Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico), a former Air Force officer, agrees that the "debate" over women in combat is essentially over. "There have been casualties, men and women, and we grieve for them," observes Wilson. "But I think we have gotten beyond the point where losing a daughter is somehow worse than losing a son." She contends that the critical question is one of social equality, arguing that "Americans have accepted that women make all kinds of contributions, as police, as astronauts"--and now as combat troops.

Women in Combat

As Wilson's comments illustrate, placing women in combat has nothing to do with improving the combat capabilities of our military, and everything to do with enacting the agenda of the radical feminist movement. From the feminist perspective, men and women are essentially interchangeable, and their physical differences are relatively trivial. For feminists, a military policy that takes into account the unavoidable physiological differences between men and women--such as the differences in upper body strength and other combat-relevant attributes--is indefensible; recognizing the time-honored duty of men to protect women is, for feminists, utterly impermissible.

Traditional Americans are appalled by the sight of mutilated female combat veterans, such as Lt. Halfaker, with her missing arm; Staff Sergeant Juanita Wilson, who lost her left hand to a grenade; or Major Ladda Duckworth, who lost both of her legs when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded inside her Black Hawk helicopter. To feminists, these tragic figures are pioneers, and icons of women's "empowerment."

In fact, notes Dr. Bryce Christensen of the Howard Center on the Family, Religion, and Society, feminist commentators have "celebrated--even exulted in--the battlefield death of 23-year-old supply clerk Lori Piestewa," a mother of two who was killed in the same battle in which Private Jessica Lynch was captured. According to syndicated columnist Ann McFeathers, a faithful exponent of the feminist party line, "the best way to honor [Piestewa] would be to remove the prohibition on women in combat."

"Never mind that the death of Piestewa itself resulted from the previous Clinton-era success of feminist ideologues crusading for the removal of restrictions on combat involvement of female soldiers," comments Christensen. Nor does it matter to such ideologues that Piestewa didn't seek a combat deployment, and (like Lynch) had been assured by recruiters that she wouldn't see battlefield duty. And of course, the feminists depicting the tragic Piestewa as a role model are indifferent to the plight of her two young orphaned children.

Promoting such social engineering schemes is a luxury incompatible with sound national defense. No nation serious about winning wars has ever sent their women off to do the fighting for otherwise qualified civilian men, and we should not pioneer this doomed concept. Consider: are women typically equipped, physically and psychologically, to deal with the realities of a pitched firefight? Could any but the most physically exceptional woman carry a wounded 200-pound man to safety during a battle?

Furthermore, there are social and emotional realities about the interaction of men and women that cannot be ignored or suppressed in the interests of ideology. Combat troops are generally young men at their hormonal peak. Living in close proximity to female soldiers in forward bunkers and on ships inevitably leads to love affairs, jealousies, pregnancies, and sexual assaults. All of these have occurred in the ongoing Iraq conflict, and have seriously detracted from combat effectiveness, unit morale, and camaraderie.

As the case of Private Jessica Lynch demonstrates, our nation has not made peace with the idea of female POWs. During the early 1990s, many soldiers reported that efforts were being made during escape and evasion training to desensitize them to the idea of female soldiers being held captive. Following Lynch's capture, the Pentagon's PR office spun a stirring tale describing how Lynch supposedly fought off Iraqi attackers until her ammo ran out. In fact, Lynch never got off a shot. She was taken to an Iraqi hospital, where she received decent treatment from civilian health care professionals.

After depicting the frail, blonde-haired girl from West Virginia as a veritable "Rambolina," Pentagon PR officials arranged Lynch's made-for-television rescue. Two days before a Special Forces team raided the hospital in Nassiriya where Lynch was being treated, her attending physician, Dr. Harith al-Houssona, had arranged to deliver the wounded American in an ambulance. On the day before the rescue, an advance team had confirmed that there were no Iraqi soldiers at the hospital. Nonetheless, the rescue team staged an event "like a Hollywood film," recalls Dr. Anmar Uday, an eyewitness. "We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital."

If the Pentagon would go to that much trouble to rescue a single female soldier who was being treated reasonably well, what would happen if several dozen ended up in the hands of terrorists? Is it sound policy to offer our enemies blackmail leverage of that kind?

Homosexuals in the Military

In 1993, over the outspoken objections of all the military services, Bill Clinton issued an executive order, beginning the "Don't Ask--Don't Tell" policy with respect to homosexuals in the military. Thus despite the fact that the Department of Defense still officially maintains that "homosexuality is incompatible with military service"--a policy dating back to George Washington's command over the Continental Army--it quietly countenances the presence of homosexuals in the ranks. In early April, the Pentagon moved another step in the direction of lifting the ban on homosexuality by quietly removing the offense from the section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice defining it as a criminal act, and moving it to a section dealing with violations of "good order and discipline."

Battles are usually fought by small units in which faith in others is crucial. Allowing homosexuals in a unit undermines unit cohesion and effectiveness. Professor Charles Moskos of Northwestern University points out that "just as most men and women dislike being stripped of all privacy before the opposite sex, so most heterosexual men and women dislike being exposed to homosexuals of their own sex. The solution of creating separate living quarters [for homosexuals in the military] would be not only impractical but an invitation to derision, abuse, and deep division within the ranks." Once again, social experimentation of this sort is a luxury we can't afford if we intend to maintain a strong, effective military.

Additionally, it must not be forgotten that homosexuality, by its very nature, abets the spread of disease. As a group, homosexuals display much higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases--such as syphilis--than the general population, as well as infections known as "gay bowel syndrome." And homosexuals also account for a sizeable percentage of AIDS cases. Combat medical emergencies involving blood transfusions are difficult enough without the added complications presented by people whose lifestyle makes them likely AIDS carriers.

It must not be forgotten that a government seriously committed to national defense would have nothing to do with the ongoing schemes to feminize and homo-sexualize the military. Yet these destructive social engineering initiatives continue to advance, steadily eroding the morale, discipline, and battlefield capabilities of our armed services. It's long past time that we put a stop to this nonsense and restore our military to its proper role and function.