WarSclerotic

Forcing military women into dangerous combat roles traditionally assigned to men is so potentially disastrous that the next president should waste no time reversing this wrong-headed Obama administration edict, a military advocate recently told Congress.

Of course, parachuting women into combat roles is what happens when fevered left-wing utopianism takes over the Pentagon. Radicals on the Left are animated by a morbid obsession with equality, not by results or even by helping people. To them rigid adherence to politically correct fantasies trumps all other concerns. If soldiers die as a result of nutty policies, left-wingers rationalize that –damn the torpedoes!– it’s just the price that has to be paid for their perverse vision of social justice.

Our bilious, perpetually angry Marxist president despises the U.S. military and everything it represents. Like any good radical leftist, Obama believes the only good American soldier is one who plays the role of social worker, not war-fighter. Putting women into combat situations is another way of weakening America.

Obama hates the military’s personnel, its traditions, its historical accomplishments, and its core mission. He has been gutting and gelding the military since taking office, allowing fleets, warplanes, and weapons to rust their way into irrelevance. He has been going on a human resources rampage by purging the military of ideologically hostile officers, and fundamentally transforming it into something other than a war-fighting force. Obama has been moving to reduce soldier pay and benefits and hollow out the military, reducing it to mid-century staff levels. He’s barely concerned with the continuing neglect of veterans and their health care. The more who perish on waiting lists, the more money that Obama can waste on an ever-expanding array of worse-than-useless social programs designed to buy votes.

The testimony by Elaine Donnelly came after Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter unilaterally decided last Dec. 3 to rescind women’s exemptions from direct ground combat. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and other left-wingers are demanding gender diversity quotas of at least 25 percent and that training standards be lowered for females.

“Current military leaders must follow orders, but the next president will have the power to change existing directives in the same way that the current president imposed them,” Donnelly said in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which, earlier this month held its first hearing on women in combat in 25 years. “Leaders of the next administration should be prepared to restore sound priorities, putting the needs of the military first.”

“Men and women in uniform, whose voices have been raised but not heard, are facing situations in which men in the combat arms will be less prepared for the violence of combat, and women will be targets of resentment they do not deserve,” she said.

“The administration is planning to assign significant numbers of minimally-qualified young women to small fighting units, on an involuntary basis, and to send them to fight ISIS and other vicious enemies under conditions that involve higher risks for women than for men,” she warned senators.

“This is being done even though officials are well aware that women’s physical capabilities are far less than men’s and their risks of injury are far greater,” said Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military/social issues.

“This is not a ‘pro-woman’ policy; it is a cruel deception, betraying the interests of uniformed women who deserve better,” she said.

And women don’t want combat duty, according to an official survey of Army women two years ago. It found that 92.5 percent of the respondents had no desire to serve in direct ground combat units.

“Women should not have to accept double-and-higher injury rates and other career disadvantages competing with stronger men, paying a higher price than men do for volunteering to serve their country,” Donnelly said. “It is also unfair to men – tantamount to telling Navy SEALs that they should execute HALO (high altitude, low-opening) jumps with parachutes known to fail 30% of the time.”

Women are physically ill-suited for combat. That’s just the way it is.

Former Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-Va.) classic essay, “Women Can’t Fight,” laid waste to the idea that putting women in combat was a good idea. The international community agrees: hardly any nations put females in combat roles.

By the way, not letting women fight isn’t an example of workplace discrimination. After all, in what place of employment do people shoot at you? Compare the plight of office workers with submarine personnel. What employees stay in the same office building with the same people for six months at a time with no one leaving the building, while they sleep alongside co-workers stacked three persons high in casket-like bunks?

And if women are up to the task of war-fighting, why don’t they participate in America’s leading contact sport (which is mild compared to combat)? “Since there’s no rule preventing ‘people of either gender’ from playing football in the NFL, why has no woman ever appeared in the Super Bowl?” Phyllis Schlafly wrote recently in a column opposing conscription for women.

But political correctness is more important to President Obama than military effectiveness. He is hellbent on forcing the women of the U.S. military into direct combat units at great risk both to themselves and their fellow soldiers. Military leaders have been cowed by radical feminism. They are promoting change for the sake of ideology, not because it is actually needed.

The same virulent strain of PC infects local fire departments across America, some of which routinely induct women as firefighters. Sure, it may be “equality,” but if you need to be carried down the stairs of a burning building, would you prefer to be rescued by a big strong man or a woman who probably doesn’t have the same muscle power or as much endurance? Some women may be drawn to the idea of fighting fires for a living but very few of them can meet the demanding physical requirements to become firefighters.

But when you’re a left-winger, Mother Nature is your enemy. Science must be brought to heel and subordinated to politics.

Seven years into this catastrophic administration, no patriot needs to be reminded that under this president’s kooky social engineering schemes, the military is becoming a social justice-dispensing expeditionary force, a vanguard leading the way towards the lunatic-left vision of what America and the rest of the world should look like.

Whether the collapse of the military is to be allowed to continue is up to American voters to decide in November.