NOT THE SPARTANS

Shock n' paw

Over at Taki’s, Pat Buchanan is lamenting the Pentagon’s latest kowtowing to the gender equality extremists by agreeing to integrate women into front-line and special combat units, like the Rangers and SEALs.

He must be taking it pretty hard as he’s even enrolled the likes of the Columbine, Ft. Hood, Virginia Tech, and Newtown killers to make his point that only men are – on average and in general – equipped to be uniformed killers.

“Sending women into combat on equal terms seems also to violate common sense. When they reach maturity, men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive. Thus they commit many times the number of violent crimes and outnumber women in prisons 10 to 1.”

Being the erudite individual that he is, he even calls the entire length of human history to the bar.

“In the history of civilization, men have fought the wars. In civilized societies, attacks on women have always been regarded as contemptible and cowardly. Even the Third Reich in its dying hours did not send women into battle, but old men and boys.”

Somehow I don’t think the feminist lobby is listening. But then they don’t have to. Nor do they even have to win arguments by refuting Buchanan’s carefully marshalled points. They have plenty of support, mainly from liberal and leftist males keen to rub the perpetually rubbed faces of conservatives in it once again, and something like this, which messes with their old-fashioned, chivalrous mental wiring is just the ticket.

The photo-copying & tea-making branch of the Israeli army.

But while so plausibly right, on another deeper and more profound level, Pat is actually completely wrong on this one.

He would still be right in most countries and any time before the acme of his own political career back in the 1980s, but not now and not in America. The US military is not the Wehrmacht, the Spartans, the battalions of Napoleon, or even the Zulu impis of Shaka. It has seldom come close to any of these outfits in sheer toughness, ruthlessness, indifference to pain, physical exertion, and readiness to die; and for the last sixty years it has been moving in the wrong direction, making it essentially a group environment in which the soft, flabby, feeble, squeamish, undisciplined, emotionally incontinent, unmilitary, and, yes, unmanly can flourish.

Even in World War II the US military was notorious as the pampered army of jeeps, lavish supplies, and overkill bombardments before any advance. All this was necessary to maintain the blancmange-like morale of the conscripted men and the wider public. With real hardship and heavy casualties – as the Japanese intuited – the Americans would not have the stomach for the fight. It was only when the much tougher Russians came into the war that the Japanese themselves lost hope.

Since then America’s indifferent military efforts around the world have only been maintained by liberally supplying the grunts with drugs, prostitutes, entertainment, and counseling, and by keeping casualties to a minimum. Whenever the GIs took a heavy hit, as they did in Lebanon in 1982, they soon threw in the towel.

Probably the crappiest imperial army ever.

Fast forward to today when this “great army of Empire” fights its enemies by remote controlled drones, or sits at checkpoints ensconced in Kevlar between trips in bombproof vehicles to heavily defended bases; an army where old fashioned military qualities like courage and hardihood are less relevant than the ability to press buttons and insert a femidom.

To the enemies of America, the US military has long been a metaphorical woman hiding behind its air power and technology while bewailing any tiny losses with a whole culture of soul-searching and tear-wringing. To actually bring women into the so-called “front line” units of this organization is nothing more than realizing the inner logic of this unmilitary military and non-imperial empire.