The Conservative Case for Women in Combat

 The following from: American Spectator

Another Perspective 

The Conservative Case for Women in Combat

Let’s ensure that our military remains the world’s finest by drawing on the full spectrum of talent America offers.

by Ronald Beaty - November 28, 2024

In an era where traditional norms are under scrutiny, and the landscape of American defense policy is evolving, the integration of women into combat roles within the U.S. military presents both an opportunity and a challenge. As conservatives, we advocate for a strong national defense, personal responsibility, and the principles of equality and merit. It’s within this framework that the question of women serving in combat should be addressed, not through the lens of progressive agendas but through the conservative values of duty, capability, and national strength.

Merit Over Gender

First and foremost, the military must be a meritocracy. If a woman can pass the same rigorous physical and psychological tests as her male counterparts, why should she not have the right to serve in any capacity, including combat? The conservative ethos champions individual achievement. We must extend this principle to all who wish to serve, focusing on capability, not chromosomes.

This isn’t about changing the military to fit a social agenda; it’s about ensuring we have the strongest, most capable defense force.

Historical Precedents and National Security

History is replete with examples of women stepping into combat roles when the need arose, from the Revolutionary War to WWII. These instances weren’t driven by social experiments but by necessity. Today, with warfare evolving — incorporating cyber warfare, drone operations, and asymmetric threats — the traditional need for brute strength is less paramount. Intellectual acumen, strategic thinking, and adaptability are increasingly vital. Women, no less than men, can offer these attributes, thereby enhancing our strategic depth.

Addressing Physical Demands

The physical demands of combat are undeniable. Here, the conversation must pivot to address not just the capability but the specific physical requirements. The military has begun to adapt its training and standards to ensure that all combat roles are filled by soldiers who can meet the physical demands, regardless of gender. This includes:

– Adjusted Training Regimens:

Recognizing different physical makeups, training can be tailored to increase the overall strength and endurance of all soldiers. This isn’t about lowering standards but making them universally achievable through targeted fitness programs that might emphasize different muscle groups or endurance capacities.

– Equipment Innovation:

Modern military technology can also play a role. Exoskeletons, designed to augment human strength, and lighter, more ergonomic gear can help level the playing field. Research into such technologies should be accelerated to ensure that physical disparities do not hinder operational effectiveness.

While some critics have raised concerns that integrating women into combat roles could compromise unit cohesion and performance, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Studies conducted by the U.S. military have shown that units with women have performed just as well as units without women in combat roles. Moreover, the experience of countries like Canada, the UK, and Israel, which have successfully integrated women into combat roles, demonstrates that with proper training, leadership, and policies in place, gender integration can actually enhance unit cohesion and performance.

By fostering a culture of mutual respect, trust, and equality, military units can leverage the varied skills, perspectives, and experiences that women bring to the table, ultimately leading to more effective and cohesive teams. The military, like any institution, thrives when it can draw from the widest talent pool. If variety means having the best possible force, then conservatives should not shy away from this truth.

Call to Women and All Willing Americans

The addition of women in combat roles isn’t a concession or a compromise; it’s a strategic evolution that aligns with conservative values of individual responsibility, merit-based advancement, and a strong defense posture. By embracing this change, we’re not just modernizing our military; we’re affirming that the duty to defend our nation is not gender-specific. It’s a call to all capable and willing Americans.

Let’s ensure that our military remains the world’s finest, not by clinging to the past, but by drawing on the full spectrum of talent America offers. This isn’t about changing the military to fit a social agenda; it’s about ensuring we have the strongest, most capable defense force, which in turn strengthens America’s position in the world.

In this, we find not just a policy adjustment but a reaffirmation of our core conservative values: strength, readiness, equality of opportunity, and the honor of serving our country.

Here's a toast to our warriors in uniform.

The Biden/Harris Administration (Democrats) will spend million$ on these illegal immigrants by providing them with food, shelter (first class hotels), pre-paid cell phones, and /a monthly stipend while the soldiers at Fort Carson dine on a piece of.toast and lima beans. 

Soldiers were recently served toast and
lima beans for dinner at Fort Carson 

FOR SOLDIERS AT FORT CARSON FOOD IS SCARCE 

Military.com

 | By Steve Beynon

Published November 26, 2024 at 4:46pm ET

As Americans gather for Thanksgiving feasts, soldiers at Fort Carson, Colorado, are contending with a far less festive reality -- months of insufficient meals, confusing schedules, and limited food options at the base's dining facilities that have ignited widespread frustration among the rank and file.

Dining facilities -- critical for sustaining the health and readiness of troops -- are reportedly offering fewer options, with some meals falling short of basic nutritional standards. Earlier this month, the issue was exemplified by a meal in which soldiers were served a single piece of toast and a handful of lima beans for dinner, according to one soldier stationed there who shared imagery of the meal. Even getting access to those limited rations can be hard, given confusing dining hall schedules and seemingly random closures that make it difficult for many to access hot meals.

Military.com's interviews with eight soldiers and review of photos from Fort Carson facilities found recurring problems. Food runs out quickly, and portions often fall short of the macronutrient requirements needed to sustain soldiers' demanding physical regimens, likely running afoul of service regulations on feeding requirements for troops. Some soldiers reported and shared photos of food that was undercooked or stored at dangerous temperatures.

"This has been a division-wide issue with the [dining facilities] on workdays and kiosks on the weekend," said one soldier stationed at the base, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press. "The people who deal with it the worst are the soldiers who live in the barracks and don't have a car."

The issue is twofold. Troops reported being served food that was either improperly prepared or unavailable by the time they reached the end of the line. Kiosks, intended to replace dining facilities in some circumstances with grab-and-go options, are frequently empty, particularly during peak times when soldiers finish their shifts.

When kiosk shelves are stocked, they're often filled with chips, sugary snacks and other items that soldiers say fall short of the nutritional standards required to maintain physical fitness as demanded by their jobs. Frustration over food issues has prompted some unit leaders to instruct troops to document the issue, capturing photos of the low-quality food or barren shelves to escalate concerns to higher-level leadership, though it's unclear what official complaints have been filed.

"We recognize that we've had some challenges with consistency in the quality of our soldiers' dining experiences at our warrior restaurants and kiosks," Lt. Col. Joseph Payton, a base spokesperson, said in a statement to Military.com. "We're committed to ensuring our soldiers receive quality and healthy meals and can take full advantage of their meal benefit they are entitled to receive."

Payton added that the issue has been brought to brigade-level leadership, which is investigating methods to boost the quality of food options for soldiers.

Fort Carson has 4,600 meal card holders, mostly junior enlisted soldiers who would normally rely on the dining facilities for meals. In most cases, barracks do not have cooking appliances, and soldiers are generally forbidden to have kitchen tools such as hot plates. Other food options, which soldiers would have to pay for, are mostly less healthy fast food restaurants such as Pizza Hut, Dunkin' Donuts and Arby's.

In 2024, the base served food to 591 soldiers on average each day, according to data provided by the service. That number also includes meals purchased and consumed by non-meal card holding troops -- meaning the raw percentage of junior soldiers living on base who use the dining facilities may be in the single digits some days.

Compounding the frustration is the financial strain hunting for alternative food options can cause for troops. Soldiers contribute an average of $460 per month from their Basic Allowance for Subsistence (BAS), a mandatory deduction that collectively totals approximately $22 million annually at Fort Carson. However, the base's food budget this year was just $5 million. How the remaining funds are allocated remains unclear. A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office found that the Army does not adequately track how often its food services are used by service members.

Some Army officials have pointed to soldiers using dining facilities less and less in recent years as driving decisions to cut spending. It has produced something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with less investment in quality food and infrastructure pushing even fewer soldiers to see those food options as viable -- despite automatically paying for that food out of their paychecks.

Soldiers have reported waiting in line for up to 30 minutes at Fort Carson dining facilities, only to be served small portions that fall far short of a full meal. In one instance, a soldier recounted being handed just a small bowl of soup and an apple.

On Hots & Cots, a Yelp-style platform where soldiers review barracks and dining options, complaints about food quality and availability at Fort Carson are significantly higher than at other installations, according to the app's internal data.

However, the issue is not isolated to Fort Carson. Last year, Military.com reported on similar struggles at Fort Cavazos, Texas -- in which junior enlisted soldiers had few options for food as the garrison struggled to juggle a severe shortage of food service workers. Soldiers also frequently report issues with undercooked food or inconsistent dining facility schedules on Reddit and other social media.

Senior officials have often pointed to difficult logistics in mapping out how much food to supply soldiers and getting them quality nutrition. However, it's unclear why those challenges have persisted in the force for years.

"Are we gonna fumble? Yes, but we're learning," Renee Mosher, deputy chief of staff, G4 HQ Army Materiel Command, which oversees logistics for the force, said when asked about food issues at Fort Carson in October at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, D.C.

Related: Army Pumping Millions into Food Kiosks, But They May Soon Be Obsolete

WHY TRUMP WON (Because the 'has been' lost.)

Back in 2012 at the Democrat National Convention, the Party literally voted God off the Democrat National Platform.  God went without being mentioned in the years that followed.  I don't recall hearing them speak about God anytime since.  Deep down I felt that was a losing strategy regardless what promises of a future utopia they had planned for us.  And along came 2024 and my strategic forethought became a reality.  The Democrats lost not only the electoral college vote, but the popular vote as well.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, spoke of religion and Christianity as the biggest things missing from America today.  Surely the sound of God. - N.E.H.

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I don't think it's necessary to mention the loser's name for she herself often said, "What can be, unburdened by what has been."  So we shouldn't be burdened by a 'has been'.  Everything about this Democrat Party’s run up to any preconceived victory was purely delusional. 

How is it that hateful people are happy being hateful?

 

Do you pray?

There's a sense that we have that's unexplainable to others until one day someone comes along and tells us what it is.

"...those of us who know in our bones that there’s something deadening about the way we live but not how to set about fixing it." - Mary Wakefield 

Count me in as a member of 'Those of us who know in our bones club" - N.E.H.

Mary Wakefield

WE MUST LEARN TO PRAY AGAIN

God is real, Rod Dreher insists, and we’re born to be in communion with him. But the focus and mental commitment that prayer requires are impossible if we’re forever doom-scrolling.

Saturday, November 23, 2024

In The Spectator’s basement kitchen a few weeks ago, I cornered a young colleague, Angus Colwell, and asked him what he made of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder. The thrust of it is that we are not in an age of enlightenment so much as “endarkenment” (Dreher’s term) and that, having turned our backs on God, we have become easy pickings for demonic forces.

“Oh Lord,” said Angus, turning wearily away, “I’m so sick of demons.”

This delighted me then and still delights me, both because it’s so surreal and also because it rings so true. If you’d told me ten years ago that young political types in 2024 would be talking knowingly about the ancient devil-gods of the Mesopotamian region — Moloch, Ishtar and Baal — I’d have said your vape was spiked. But sure as Donald Trump is back in the White House, serious talk of angels and demons is now almost normal in conservative circles.

Tucker Carlson, the former talk show host and a friend of Trump announced recently in an interview with Dreher that he had actually been “mauled by a demon” when lying in bed one night. The attack left him bleeding, he says, and with scars from the demon’s claw marks. And almost the strangest thing about this story was how very little attention it received. The new vice president, J.D. Vance, is a friend of Dreher’s too, and did a fascinating interview with him for the Lamp magazine in which he explained that he’d converted to Catholicism in response to the “civilizational crisis.

It’s easy to sneer, but, as Dreher points out, the humanist worldview that honors liberty and natural rights all emerged from Christianity and the haunted world of faith, prayer and demons. And it’s far from a given that our ethics, our “kindness,” will survive Christianity’s decline. “Put simply,” Dreher writes, “we really are living in a crucible, as the fourth century was for the pagans of Rome. Either we will recover enchanted Christianity or we will succumb to chaos and cruelty.”

Dreher himself is a convert to orthodox Christianity, by way of Catholicism, and Living in Wonder is a sort of sequel to his best known book to date, The Benedict Option. In that, he urged fellow Christians to follow the example set by Benedict of Nursia and form self-sufficient communities — little pockets of resistance to the prevailing culture. This latest book addresses a wider audience: those of us who know in our bones that there’s something deadening about the way we live but not how to set about fixing it; those of us who’ve quite forgotten how to pray.

To describe the state we find ourselves in now, Dreher borrows a term from a Harvard anthropologist, Joe Hendrick, who has labeled us WEIRD: Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. We WEIRDos have until recently imagined ourselves to be at the very cutting edge of human existence: advancing, inventing, and banishing suffering. But the optimism of the 1980s has now given way to despair. Liberalism has collapsed into nut-job narcissism and the po-faced mania for choosing your own “identity.” The young are anxious and the old are lonely and it’s hard to argue with that.

The consensus solution emerging among the middle classes is that the West can recover if it only learns to live without smartphones again. We must limit their use for children, ban porn and “let kids grow” — meaning, let them briefly out of our sight.

For Dreher, this is a pitifully inadequate response. Living in Wonder is a great blast of a book, an exhortation with the urgency of biblical prophecy. God is real, insists Dreher, and we’re born to be in communion with Him. We’ve become like fish flopping and gasping in the open air, living in the wrong medium. We need to flop back into the water. In other words, we need to learn to pray again properly and meet our maker in prayer.

Smartphones do actually come in for a kicking in the book but in a slightly unusual way. Prayer requires focus and mental commitment, says Dreher. But because God is a being, not just a fix, his presence cannot be commanded. “The best we can do is to keep ourselves in a state of watchful waiting.” But how can you wait watchfully, or even pray, when you’re doomscrolling and your brain is trained to require constant stimulation? You can’t. I’m a smartphone addict and this much I really do know.
So if Dreher’s right, and the devil is abroad, then he’s played a blinder. In hooking us on smartphone-scrolling, he’s well on his way to destroying our ability to pray. Like a psycho in an old-fashioned thriller, he’s severed the landline before he enters the house. This thought has chilled me almost more than all the exorcisms and demonic clawing.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine.