Archive for the 'Women in Combat' Category

Military.com:

One of the Marine Corps’ female infantry riflemen hit another milestone when she became the first woman to graduate from the service’s Urban Leaders Course.

Lance Cpl. Autumn Taniguchi, with 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, finished the three-week course that prepares leathernecks to lead troops in urban environments on May 3.

“This course is not easy,” Taniguchi said, according to a Marine Corps news release. “I didn’t expect it to be easy, but it also helps to show me that I can do more than I thought I could.”

The Urban Leaders Course, which is led by 1st Marine Division Schools at Camp Pendleton, California, covers room clearing, close-quarters battle and combat marksmanship. Students are taught to make challenging leadership decisions in an urban setting through realistic training scenarios and live-fire ranges.

None of the course standards has changed since women began serving in infantry roles, the release states, adding, “Every Marine who undergoes the training is expected to execute the mission regardless of gender.”

Seeing Taniguchi complete the course gives women in the Marine Corps another thing they can say they are able to accomplish, said Staff Sgt. Ken Rick, Urban Leaders Course chief instructor.

“Not necessarily begging for acceptance but proving to the males that they can do this,” Rick said in the release.

Well, that’s certainly reason for another celebratory glass of wine tonight, huh?  After all, that’s what the Marine Corps is all about – making it where people can say they are able to accomplish certain things.

Speaking of which, I have a quick question for Ms. Taniguchi.  Can you pick up a 220 lb Marine who has been shot and carry him over your shoulder for hundreds of yards to safety and medical assistance?  Without fracturing your pelvis?

If you can’t, do your Marines really trust you in combat?

Military.com:

“The NGSAR will address operational needs identified in various capability-based assessments and numerous after action reports,” according to the PON solicitation document.

“It will combine the firepower and range of a machine gun with the precision and ergonomics of a rifle, yielding capability improvements in accuracy, range, and lethality,” the document continues. “The weapon will be lightweight and fire lightweight ammunition, improving soldier mobility, survivability, and firing accuracy.”

It will also be able to go to the latrine for you, take you to the dance, find your car keys, and most important, can sprinkle magic pixie dust from unicorn farts as they fly over the moon.

Then there’s this.

“They have some pretty aggressive goals with respect to lethality and weight and size and some other performance characteristics,” he said. “All of those things individually may be relatively easy but, when you start stacking them all together, that is really where it becomes complex and you need a new design.”

“There is not an easy button here …”

Well, you’d better try, because it’s what necessary for the brass to tell the demons, gargoyles and pit vipers in the Senate that women can actually do what God didn’t design their bodies to do, i.e., go to war and engage in combat.

My former Marine strongly believes that we’re going to have to lose another war in order to be recalibrated.  This next one will be bloody, and girls will come home in caskets while their parents were told this would be easy and clinical because of all the unicorn pixie dust rainbow farts.

Live Science:

Before girls and boys hit puberty, their bodies are fairly similar. During puberty, however, boys experience a surge of testosterone. By adulthood, some men have up to 20 times more testosterone than women do, according to HealthLine.

Testosterone plays several roles, including telling the body to create new blood cells, keeping bones and muscles strong and prompting growth spurts, according to the Society of Endocrinology.

“Because [women] produce less testosterone, we are at a disadvantage in terms of muscle,” said Dr. Emily Kraus, a primary care sports medicine physician at Stanford Health Care in California. “Males have a greater amount of muscle bulk.”

A man’s leg is about 80 percent muscle, compared with about 60 percent muscle in a woman’s leg, Kraus said. That extra muscle can help men run faster, she said. Also, men’s muscles tend to have larger fast-twitch muscle fibers, which help with sprinting, than women do, Kraus said.

In addition, women have more estrogen than men do, which leads them to have a higher percentage of body fat than men have. “That can also lead to a small disadvantage for running performance [for women, in comparison with men],” Kraus said.

Body size is another factor. Women, on average, have smaller lungs than men do, meaning their maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max) is lower. The VO2 max for a sedentary woman is about 33 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body mass per minute, while a young sedentary man’s is about 42 ml/kg/min, according to a 1998 study in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise.

[ … ]

Women’s hearts also tend to be smaller than men’s, which means they have a smaller stroke volume, or the amount of oxygenated blood that the left ventricle pumps out in one beat.

[ … ]

To top that off, women also have less hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen to the body’s tissues, including the muscles, Kraus said.

As far as biomechanics, men usually have longer legs than women do, meaning they have more room for muscle, as well as a longer stride length, said Dr. Miho Tanaka, an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery and director of the Women’s Sports Medicine Program at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Moreover, because women tend to have wider hips, their running stance is not as efficient as a man’s is, Tanaka said.

So in other words, it’s a fool’s errand to deny that God makes men and women differently and for different purposes, and to insist that women be integrated into infantry because “they can do everything a man can?”

Who would have thought it?  I guess you learn things every day from the field of science.

Military.com:

Mattis, now a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution in California, has questioned whether women are suited for what he called the “intimate killing” of close combat, and whether male commanders would balk at sending women into such situations.

Mattis also said he was concerned about “Eros” in the trenches when young men and women live in close quarters in the “atavistic” atmosphere of combat. “I don’t care if you go anywhere in history where you would find that this has worked,” he said of putting “healthy young men and women together and we expect them to act like little saints.”

In periodic speeches to the Marines’ Memorial Club in San Francisco, Mattis said that the U.S. military is a “national treasure,” and it is inevitable that women would want to serve in every MOS.

“The problem is that in the atavistic primate world” of close-quarters combat, “the idea of putting women in there is not setting them up for success,” Mattis said. He stressed that he was not talking about whether women could perform the required amounts of pushups, pullups and other physical requirements — “that’s not the point.”

Commanders must consider “what makes us most combat effective when you jump into that room and you’re doing what we call intimate killing,” he said. “It would only be someone who never crossed the line of departure into close encounters fighting that would ever even promote such an idea” as putting women into close combat.

If nominated, Mattis would almost certainly be challenged on women in combat in confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which has six women on the panel.

One of them is Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who retired as a lieutenant colonel after 23 years in the Army Reserves and Iowa National Guard. Ernst, who served a deployment in Operation Iraqi Freedom and is the first female veteran in the Senate, has applauded the opportunity for women who meet the standards to serve in the combat arms.

Joni Ernst isn’t qualified to shine shoes for Mattis.  And Ernst never engaged in combat, so I don’t give a shit what she has to say about anything on this issue.

But there are progressives in the GOP just like the Democratic party.  Women, if I have any reading this column – and I hope I do have female readers for all of my columns – always remember this.  Never forget.  Progressives want to see women perish in combat and have a deleterious effect on combat effectiveness of the unit because of physical differences between men and women.  They want to see you die, and they want more men to die because of you.

Progressives don’t care about the military, and they don’t care about women either.  But everyone already knows that.

It’s probably common knowledge by now that the pathetic Ashton Carter forcibly opened all military billets to females over the objections of the U.S. Marine Corps.

I will have more to say later on this, but for right now you can visit my previous discussions on the subject.  It isn’t hard to figure this stuff out even without first or second hand knowledge of the physical differences between men and women.

In 1998, Karsten Braasch, at that time ranked 203rd in the world among men’s tennis players and a man who has never won a five-set match in his career, got drunk, beat both Williams sisters on the court, and did so while smoking a cigarette between matches.  Serena said, “It was very hard, I didn’t think it would be so hard,” she sighed after the game. “I hit shots which would have been winners on the WTA Tour, but he caught them easily”

Ashton Carter has said that even though all billets will be opened, there may be be equal representation by men and women among billets.  This is a misdirect, and I’ll explain later.  In the mean time, Carter said “Studies conducted by the services and SOCOM indicate that on average there are physical and other differences between men and women.”

Studies.  Right.  I could have saved them time and money by telling them this without studies … except for my previous life studies.

From reader Ned Weatherby, Liberty News Now:

Transgender mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Fallon Fox is the target of criticism after brutally injuring an opponent.

Fox defeated Tamikka Brents just two minutes into the first round of the match. Brents suffered a damaged orbital bone, which required seven staples, and a concussion.

Brents summed it up: “I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life.”

“I’ve fought a lot of women,” Brents stated. “And never felt the strength I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because [he] was born a man or not, because I’m not a doctor,” she stated. “I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life, and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right.”

The video of the Brents-Fox fight was pretty brutal: Fox threw knees to Brents face and torso right at the beginning, to kick off the fight. Brents ultimately turned her back to avoid more damage–and took almost a minute of hard strikes from Fox’s elbows and fists, before the referee stopped.

But wait?  I thought women can do everything a man can do?  That’s what I’m led to think about Ranger school.

It’s down to three now — three female soldiers, out of an original 19, that refuse to give up their dream of earning the coveted Army Ranger Tab.

The one female major and two female first lieutenants failed at two attempts to make it through the first phase of U.S. Army Ranger School, but the trio has still earned the respect of the gatekeepers of this grueling, two-month infantry course.

The female soldiers had been at it for 29 days when the two top leaders at Ranger School offered them a choice – start over from day one with a new class or go home.

All three agreed to start over on June 22.

“Anybody that takes a day-one recycle — be it a male or female soldier — it displays an incredible amount of grit and determination; they want to earn the Ranger Tab,” Col. David G. Fivecoat, commander of the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade, told Military.com during a June 5 interview.

Fort Benning, Ga., held its first co-ed course of Army Ranger School on April 20. Nineteen women and 380 men were pre-screened for the combat training course.

Three of the women failed to pass the Ranger Physical Fitness Assessment, a requirement to enter Ranger School. Eight out of 16 female soldiers completed the Ranger Assessment Phase, or RAP week.

But the remaining eight females weren’t able to complete the first phase and advance to the second phase of the course. Instead, they were allowed to repeat the Darby Phase along with 101 male candidates.

Fort Benning officials announced May 29 that none of the eight passed the Darby Phase on their second attempt. Three of those females, along with five males, have been invited to start over on day one.

No female has successfully passed the Marine Infantry Officer Course either.  You can’t have it both ways girls.  You can’t claim unfairness if you have to fight men on the one hand, and claim you can do anything a man can do on the other.

That doesn’t pass even elementary tests of consistency.  And to reiterate what I said earlier, God has made men and women differently, in case you missed that growing up.

Stars and Stripes:

Surveys find that men in U.S. special operations forces do not believe women can meet the physical and mental demands of their commando jobs, and they fear the Pentagon will lower standards to integrate women into their elite units, according to interviews and documents.

Studies that surveyed personnel found “major misconceptions” within special operations about whether women should be brought into the male-only jobs. They also revealed concerns that department leaders would “capitulate to political pressure, allowing erosion of training standards,” according to one document.

Some of those concerns were not limited to men, researchers found, but were found among women in special operations jobs.

Dan Bland, force management director for U.S. Special Operations Command, said the survey results have “already driven us to do some different things in terms of educating the force.”

Well, there you go.  If the force believes that women can’t do the job, the only recourse is to educate them differently, because surely, surely, surely they must be wrong.  Otherwise the advocates of gender homogeneity would be wrong, and that couldn’t be the case because command says so because the administration and God-hating, elitist, Marxist liberal arts colleges around the nation say so.

Dan Bland responded the way he did because he has lost his soul and joined the dark side.

See category Women in Combat.

It isn’t necessary to recapitulate what we’ve discussed concerning women in combat since it is so well rehearsed here on these pages.  But occasionally something comes out that needs correction.

David Martin: Now you’ve been through this training, what’s your own opinion about whether women can serve in the infantry?

Nisa Jovell: My opinion would be that it would be pretty difficult for them. We’re just, unfortunately physically, we are not built for it. And I’m not saying that we can’t do it, what they do. But our body structure is different.

David Martin: So what is it really, physically that you think?

Nisa Jovell: Honestly, it was really just carrying a lot of weight. And learning how to move as fast as you can with it.

David Martin: It’s what? Bone density that wears you down over time?

Nisa Jovell: It’s mainly hips that affect us.

David Martin: Hips?

Nisa Jovell: For females, yes.

David Martin: How does that play out on a 15K or a 20K?

Nisa Jovell: We had to learn how to put on the pack a certain way to like — relieve the stress off of our hip, so the hip problem is definitely a big deal.

No, no, no, no, and a thousand times no!  Any backpack that places the weight primarily on the shoulders will cause spine damage and ultimately cripple a man over the long haul.  Proper designs can be seen in the civilian market, and they place the weight primarily on the hips, not the shoulders.

While trying to emphasize that there is a “workaround” of sorts for the fact that females are designed differently than men and suffer from mechanical disadvantages unique to their structure, Ms. Jovell has in fact highlighted and emphasized those differences rather than the workaround.  And women still aren’t designed for combat, no matter what the progressives want to believe and no matter how much they would like the military to be the grand experiment in gender-neutral homogeneity.

Fox News:

Two female Marine officers who volunteered to attempt the Corps’ challenging Infantry Officer Course did not proceed beyond the first day of the course, a Marine Corps spokesperson confirms to the Free Beacon. The two were the only female officers attempting the course in the current cycle, which began Thursday in Quantico, Virginia.

With the two most recent drops, there have been 29 attempts by female officers to pass the course since women have been allowed to volunteer, with none making it to graduation. (At least one woman has attempted the course more than once.) Only four female officers have made it beyond the initial day of training, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test, or CET. Male officers also regularly fail to pass the CET, and the overall course has a substantial attrition rate for males.

Regular readers know what I think about women in the infantry, so there is no need to rehearse all of it again.  Just to give a quick reminder, remember this?

Marines in Helmand, water transported by helicopter with it so hot by the time it got there it would scald their throats, full kit, body armor, mortar plate, no showers for seven months, sleeping by two’s in “hobbit holes” in Now Zad, and so on.  Need I say more?  No, but I will.

WeaponsMan:

The standards have been evaluated and will be lowered where necessary, but ALCON will deny that any standards were lowered. They are calling this an “assessment” and when the “assessment” is complete and its success is announced, they will move forward into the bright sunlit uplands of making room for the next group of “victims,” those confused or mistaken about what sex they are. Such is progress in the Year of Our Lord 2015.

Coddling of the women attendees includes a pre-ranger prep course, and a shadowy sisterhood made of dozens of appointed female commissars called “observer/advisors” who are to mentor, encourage, (and not incidentally, prevent male instructors from giving failing grades to), the Unique and Special Snowflakes. The commissars do not have to attend Ranger School themselves. Good intentions suffice, and good intentions are defined by their conformity with what the suits in the E-ring, and the generals purring in their laps, desire.

Yep.  Sounds about right for post-modern America, children of the enlightenment who have rejected everything decent and good.  There isn’t much left any more except for the circus and clown show all around us.

And to summarize, I’ll convey a conversation I had with Daniel on this very subject (allow me some latitude, since it was multiple conversations over many months).  His view: it’s about more than just a PT or a “school” or whether you can make the grade in a fixed set of conditions with known boundary conditions.  Daniel went four days without sleep at times in Fallujah.  If he didn’t carry enough water on patrol and made the mistake of drinking the local water, he got dysintery (or at least the runs very badly).  He went without food on many occasions, during training and in Iraq.  All of this and more, while being shot at.  It’s like the camping trip from hell that never ends while people are trying to kill you.

Just the training can kill you (as it did with some of the Marines in my son’s Battalion during squad rushes with live fire).  Or perhaps the women want to be with the boys after they have visited every range in America during pre-deployment workup, finally during winter in the mountains when the sadistic sergeants removed more and more and more equipment from the company, the last few nights being the fleece, sleeping bags and tents.  The Marines slept against and on top of each other, an entire company, covered by leaves and branches trying to stay alive.

It’s not an issue, for example, of being able to lift a certain amount of weight, or run so far so fast.  It’s an issue of having had nothing to eat, no sleep, no water, and weak to the point that you can hardly stand, and then having to handle munitions (or sand bags, or heavy weapons, or fill in the blank), over and over and over and over and over again, off body axis and twisting so that there is maximum opportunity to hurt your back, and then when you’re finished, doing it again, and then trying to keep a fellow Marine alive who has just been shot, and then doing it all over again.

I didn’t make any of this up.  I’ve never been in the military.  All of this is from my son.  And God has made men and women differently, in case you haven’t already noticed.

Military.com:

The U.S. Army’s top officer said he expects between 70 and 80 women to apply to become the first-ever female students at Ranger School.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno cited the figures on Wednesday during an interview at Atlantic Media’s Defense One conference in Washington, D.C.

When asked how many women will apply to the historically all-male combat training course, Odierno said, “We’re still waiting to see. By December-January, we’ll know the number of women who have asked to actually participate in Ranger School. I expect it will be somewhere around 70 or 80.”

Like the other military services, the Army must open all combat jobs to women by 2016 or seek a waiver and explain why any must remain closed. The Pentagon last year lifted its ban on women serving in such roles, but gave the services time to integrate female troops into male-only front-line positions.

The Army recently picked 31 women — 11 officers and 20 noncommissioned officers — to undergo training to become observers and advisers for the course, most of which takes place at Fort Benning, Georgia. The punishing two-month ordeal is designed to train future infantry leaders. More than three dozen women had applied for the positions.

The so-called observer-advisers underwent a week of modified training last week to give them a sense of what the program is like so they can work alongside male instructors and help observe the female students selected for the first-ever co-ed class, known as the Ranger Course Assessment, tentatively scheduled for this spring.

[ … ]

“It’s going very well,” he said. “We still have some final assessments to do. For me, it’s about talent management.

Uh huh.  If it’s all about “talent management,” then why the “modified training?”

Prior: Women In Combat