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I think that the narrative that LGBT makes the US weak while rejecting LGBT is what makes the Taliban strong rings even less true than the usual version of the Fremen mirage. The US has the Taliban beaten by a mile on every civilizational and capability index I care about, GPD/person, infant mortality, education attainment, military capabilities, freedom of speech, etc pp. The Taliban clearly beat the US in TFR, but that is not all that hard to do if you are willing to subjugate half of your population and ban non-reproductive sex. "Don't sell your 15 yo daughter to some man twice her age who will breed her continuously for her fertile lifespan" is not a trans agenda. It is not even a feminist agenda, unless your definition of feminism is something wholeheartedly embraced by 95-99% of the US population.
I will not claim that transpersons will make superior frontline soldiers, having gone through male puberty and then continuing to produce male sex hormones is clearly advantageous physically, but I do not think that a few percent of trans people matter. Look, the obesity rate in the US is 40%, and even that is not an insurmountable difficulty for military capabilities. The US army tooth to tail ratio in Iraq was 1:8.1. Think about it as a pyramid. At the base, you have a ton of taxpayers. Then, you have people working in arms manufacturing, writing software for guided missiles and all that. Then, you have eight actual members of the military who are supporting one frontline soldier. Obviously you want that person to be fit, where your gender-neutral criteria may end up excluding many cis-males and almost all of the people who are not cis-males for the job, depending on the specifics (a commando has likely different requirements than a tank commander). But below this, your care for raw strength drops rapidly. Perhaps the person driving the supply truck is a cis-woman. And the guy operating the drone from 50km away is wheelchair-bound. And the person who wrote the software for controlling the drone is a trans-woman and so on.
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