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Combat Duty for Women ?

AUGUST 6, 1991

 

The Senate has now passed a bill permitting women who volunteer to fly combat aircraft to do so, and the movement to extend the rights of women to equality in the trenches is growing. Have a thought, please, to this demurral.

1. The practical arguments, in favor and against, have occupied most of the time of the jurists brought in to decide the question. It is observed that, on an average, a man is 40 percent stronger than a woman. Does that sound decisive to you? Perhaps, in which case you have given the subject insufficient thought for the simple reason that there is little correlation between human strength and military skill.

This is not to say that there are no situations in which sheer brute physical force isn’t critically useful: Of course there are such situations, but they are put in place by recalling that Napoleon was 5 feet 3 inches, and that T. E. Lawrence weighed less than 150 pounds.

2. A corollary of the above is the argument that women’s reflexes are every bit as fast as those of men, and that success or failure as a modern soldier, particularly in a fighter aircraft, depends on the speed of response. If Amy can read the dials and do the correct thing just as fast as Roger, why should the Air Force discriminate against her?

The answer, of course, is that the Air Force should not discriminate against her, if speed of response is the only criterion relevant.

3. To the argument that in combat conditions it is a burden to provide two sets of washroom facilities, the pleaders for what they call women’s rights argue to the effect that in combat situations, antimacassar niceties become simply irrelevant, and that, after all, even in the narrow confines of a foxhole it is possible to make token adjustments.

Both men and women go up in spacecraft, and mixed company has made long passages, plotted and unplotted, on small boats and even on rafts. Primitive cultures simply ignore biological differences at this level, and war making has a great deal to learn from primitive cultures, where the objective is the thing that rules, not the taboo, which is properly relegated to insignificance.

Very well then, the arguments in favor of women in the military are in. Here is the side to which I belong:

1. The attempt to equalize the sexes is going to be asymptotic. You think you have reached equality, but there is still a tiny difference there. That difference bespeaks an insight that is a hallmark of civilization.

2. It is a pity that the useless word “equality” ever got into the act, because one cannot in the nature of things make “equal” that which is not the same. You can play around with other words if you wish. Fungible? No, the sexes aren’t fungible. Miscible? Yes, but miscible elements retain their identity: If the sexes weren’t miscible, life together would be impossible.

But the point is overwhelmed, and that point is that men and women are different, and that it is of nature (ex natura) that one sex should be drawn to one pursuit (among many), the other to another pursuit (among many).

That a woman should aspire to be a poet or an architect, a doctor or an engineer, does no violation to the critical insight of separateness of nature. But that a woman should ignore what binds her to the newborn child or enjoins her to comfort men who cannot adequately be comforted by other men is a tug against nature. And that a man, himself a poet or a doctor or an engineer or an architect, should cease instinctively to gravitate to his responsibility to protect the home is a violation of his nature.

The awful, fanatical compulsion to perfect interchangeable sexes does violence to primary instincts that are wrong when abused. But to overcorrect an abuse is to commit a fresh abuse.

Because we know that women should be educated and should vote and should exercise their capacity to lead does not dissipate that tropism that assigns to the woman primary responsibility for the care of the child, and to the man, primary responsibility for the care of the woman.

Transplanting it all onto the battle scene, we need to wonder whether the machine gunner exposing his life to effect a mission isn’t dismayed at the thought of a young woman firing away at his side, causing him to wonder whether the fight he is fighting reflects a civilized order.