Friday, April 06, 2007

Any chance of stopping the nonsense about woman in combat?


The generation, raised on the mythical celluloid pretend world of Star Trek, controls the military and political establishment in most of the West. Inclusion and diversity was all part of "beaming up Scotty."

Propaganda, intense media indoctrination and education are all forms of mind melding. The “coming together” one of the byproducts of the outcome based, concluded that woman needed to be everywhere from clubs, locker rooms and most unfortunately combat units and warships.

All that provides some interesting distractions and distortions of some hard cold facts. The presence of woman in these roles distorts politics, propaganda, tactics and the survival and well being of the unit personnel. The recent events in Iraq are instructive. This from a Telegraph article this morning:

Two women were among four soldiers killed in Basra yesterday in an unprecedented day for the Army in Iraq.

The women, a nurse and a member of the Intelligence Corps, were in a party of four patrolling the southern Iraq city in the early hours.

The Warrior armoured vehicle in which they were travelling was torn apart by a "colossal" bomb.

A fifth soldier was "very seriously injured" and is being treated in the military hospital in Basra.

Iraqis were pictured waving one of the soldiers' battered helmets while children held aloft fragments of the shattered vehicle collected as trophies.

The nurse, from Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps, was the patrol's medic. The men were from the 2Bn The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment. A civilian interpreter was also killed. The patrol was returning to its base in Basra air station after providing protection for a "strike operation" that had seen British forces arrest a man said to be a senior member of the insurgency.

The deaths come at the end of one of the deadliest weeks for the Army since the invasion of Iraq and follow the shooting dead of two soldiers by a sniper earlier this week.


But it is the death of the women that will reinforce the danger faced by troops in southern Iraq.

Never before have two women died in the same incident on the front line.

Their deaths also come at a time of heightened debate about the wisdom of putting female personnel into dangerous positions.

Only yesterday Faye Turney, a mother of a three-year-old girl, returned to Britain after she and 14 other Royal Navy personnel taken prisoner by the Iranians were released.

Col Bob Stewart, who was the first British commander of UN forces in Bosnia, yesterday said that he was against women being close to combat as their deaths or injuries had a debilitating effect on male soldiers. "It's disquieting for a lot of people in this country when women are put into the front line because when they are wounded or killed, the men around them find it very difficult to operate," he said.

Col Stewart, who commanded the Cheshire Regiment, said he had twice been present when women soldiers died.

"One was in my arms after a bomb in Northern Ireland and I was inconsolable afterwards. I could not operate.

"If you put women in the front line because they are equal then you have to expect that there will be operational casualties."
more here at The Telegraph, where 2164th is now banned, and his previous comments expunged. Oh dear, was I bad again?

15 comments:

  1. Well, where is your account of WHAT, EXACTLY they expunged?
    ---
    Assault of the Transnational Progressives

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  2. About women in front line positions: Kathleen Parker writes:

    When a pretender to sanity like Ahmadinejad gets to lecture the West about how it treats its women, we've effectively handed him a free pass to the end zone and made the world his cheerleaders.

    Not only does the Iranian president get to look magnanimous in releasing the hostages, but he gets to look wise. And we in the West get to look humiliated, foolish and weak.

    Just because we may not ``feel'' humiliated, doesn't mean we're not. In the eyes of Iran and other Muslim nations, we're wimps. While the West puts mothers in boats with rough men, Islamic men ``rescue'' women and drape them in floral hijabs.

    We can debate whether they're right until all our boys wear aprons, but it won't change the way we're perceived. The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable.

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  3. I said it then, I'll say it again; it was a huge mistake getting rid of the WACS, WAVES, and WAFS. In fact, it helped to promote the "feminization" of all the military. (a tried and true use of "PC")

    Whit, guys like Deuce, Doug, and I would not be welcome in today's military.

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  4. I'm not sure how welcome we were on the first round.

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  5. You go to war with the army you've got.

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  6. Elephant bar archive photo of some of the veterans from the bar.

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  7. 2164th, I sent you a pic that might be better for this thread.

    Does anyone remember the phenomenon of the 9-11 mom, who was the Dodge Caravan driving soccer mom on September 10, but turned into a war monger after the events of the following day? She put the Pubs back in control of the Senate in 2002 after that Jeffords nonsense, and started signing up in droves to trade in her purple SUV for an olive-green HMMV. Woe to the intruder who discounts the she-bear and molests her cubs.

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  8. Good points on the propaganda victory for Iran.

    Tiger,

    You all would be welcome with open arms in today's military; as for the military being feminized, I beg to differ.

    Spend time with a typical Infantry or Special Forces battalion and you'll observe a distinct, even crude lack of femininity, especially if you are deployed forward somewhere. Make sure you bring a few "rolls" of Copenhagen with you if you come to visit, though, that is a good way to build rapport quickly!

    I never served in a military sans women (although I have spent almost all of the last sixteen years in combat arms units where there were few, if any, females assigned), but I honestly don't believe that the way women are assigned in the military currently is a drain on readiness or morale. Again, this is an Army-Centric viewpoint, I can't vouch for the other services.

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  9. T, whit has the mail box keys. he is very controlling.

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  10. A point that has probably been made (although I confess I haven't yet found it in print or on the internet) about the whole Iran/Sailor propaganda thing is that the sailors certainly didn't seem to have been trained in how to conduct themselves in captivity. My guess is that the British military is revamping pre-deployment requirements for its Soldiers and Sailors heading overseas so that they are a little more prepared when they find themselves in this type of predicament.

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  11. If fault is to be found in this sorry episode, it lies with the British government. Doubtless, the hostages behaved according to SOP as they understood it. Since all 15, including an officer, followed the same script, the script tells the tale.

    All the above assumes some degree of courage on the part of the British government. To my mind, there has been little evidence of that in this instance. Consequently, I expect no more from the military of that government.

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  12. Why don't we get Rosie O'Donnell on one of these missions to protect us from these religious fascists? We do have boats sturdy enough to support her? Don't we?

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  13. trish,

    I don't know if you have seen this article yet; but this snippet says so much, I think.

    "As for Britain's government, perhaps the harshest comments issued during the entire fiasco came from British Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. The object of her ire? Prisoner Turney's smoking. 'It was deplorable,' Hewitt tut-tutted. 'This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.'

    Not exactly. Being taken prisoner, forced to "confess" to a noncrime and humiliated before the entire world is what's "deplorable." Smoking's a bad habit."

    Is The Sun Starting To Set?

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