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Women in the military
I'm watching Avatar: The Last Airbender: that kid show from 2005 featuring the bald boy with a Reddit downvote on his face. I'm sure you've seen the memes.
It's a mostly tolerable show from a culture war perspective, the early 00s being a more innocent time, except for extreme girlboss feminism. Every few episodes, the writers repeat the trope where a male warrior says it's inappropriate and against the precepts to train women to fight — always in the most sniveling, dismissive, chauvinistic way possible — then he proceeds to get his butt kicked by a girl. Said male warrior, embarrassed, learns his lesson that gender roles are bad, m'kay.
Am I the only one who finds this line of thinking incredibly dumb?
And no, I'm not talking about women strength or endurance or bone fragility or whatever. Let's ignore that. That's not the issue here.
Let's concede, for the purposes of argument, that women and men have equal potential for different tasks, such as soldiering. Or, to steelman progressives, that a meaningful fraction of women are equal to men, and so those ones should be trained. (This is probably more plausible in a universe where 1% of the population has magical combat powers, like Avatar-land, but whatever.) I don't think it's true even in the real world, with firearms, but let's concede it.
The main reason to direct men to become soldiers, not women, does not lie there.
Soldiers, like every other job, work for the health of society. Soldiering does not exist for the self-actualization of the soldier. Neither is soldiering an end in itself. We have armies for the security and continuation of the country.
But the career of a soldier coincides with the fertility window of a female. If she is getting married, becoming pregnant, and having kids — things that are necessary for both the health of society and the self-actualization of the woman — her soldiering and child-rearing will come into conflict, even in peacetime. In wartime, however, her dying in battle will prevent a new generation from being born, and leave her orphaned children psychologically crippled.
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers. Meanwhile, if 30% of young women die, the population pyramid of the next generation will crater, and society will be burdened by orphans with lifelong mental problems due to attachment disorders, triggered by loss of mothers during infancy.
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.
Then again, a lot of my arguments could also apply against training women to be medical doctors and other all-consuming vocations. We do that. So maybe our society really is insane enough to send millions of 20yo women to get mowed down by drones in WW3.
I think it was CovfefeAnon who stated "The most radical position you can hold in modern politics is believing people before the 1960s were sane and had rational motivations for doing what they did." Well, I think armies throughout history were perfectly sane for not sending women to combat, even in roles where women could have been effective.
I think the problem is in part a lack of real-world pressure testing of our military. We haven’t had a global conflict that fully engages the might of the military since the Second World War, and no major on the ground engagement with a military on the level of our own since view an (hard to count Iraq War I when the military surrendered to CNN news crews).
This leads directly to people thinking of the military less as a War-Machine and more of a low key jobs program. Which then creates the problem that it’s increasingly difficult to say no to ideas that obviously reduce military capacity. Women, gays, transgender people are now fully integrated into the military without a second thought as to whether or not this would affect the war-fighting capability of the military. Putting women in those positions simply means they’re in danger without any military advantage to the country. Putting gays in does the same (we go to war with Iran, what would they do with a captured American gay soldier? They kill their own gay citizens).
The military isn’t the only place where this happens. But once you stop pressure testing any institution for its purpose, it tends to turn into a projection of whatever the laptop classes think will make them popular at dinner parties or get them promoted at work. Making into a diversity group does both, and they don’t need that group to be at top performance, so why not? Or you can use it to score points by following the latest trendy ideas in the field. This actually happens a lot in education. The old boring ideas of teaching kids mathematical concepts like addiction, subtraction, multiplication, and division— then making them practice it until they can do it right — has worked for centuries. Teaching phonics has created strong readers in any language with an alphabet for millennia. But you don’t get credit for that, instead you need a trendy new idea that makes you look with it and hip and forward thinking. Who cares if it means kids don’t learn to read and write? If the main criteria were the results— the kids can read on grade level, the military can win wars, the programmers can produce a working product on time, most of these issues solve themselves.
I agree with most of your post but this point feels weird. Excluding certain demographics from the military just because your enemies really don't like them doesn't seem particularly productive. Would it help the US to get rid of all their black soldiers if they were fighting some white supremacist state?
See also: the US civil war, and the CSA opinion of black soldiers serving in the Union army.
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In fact, if US ever goes to war against Iran, it could form Gay Berserker Corps formed 100% of gay men, who will know that surrender is not an option.
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How would they know the soldier is gay? Are there pink triangles on their shoulder straps?
Check his social media?
Do you think they're doing this?
In any case, Iran is unlikely to be executing gay soldiers only. Either the follow the geneva conventions or they don't.
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