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​DUNLOP: Women can fight, just not in the special forces

Standards should not be lowered for women to enter some service communities

Opinion writer Nora Walls recently wrote a piece entitled “Women can fight, too” which contends gender shouldn’t stop women from entering the special forces. The article focuses predominantly on the Marine Corps, a curious decision considering that the Marine Corps is its own service branch, and not a special warfare community. However, this was just the first of many factual inaccuracies, misinterpretations and omissions that demonstrated the author’s ignorance of military realities and led her to draw the wrong conclusion. In fact, while Walls is correct in asserting women should not be precluded from combat roles, the fact remains that women will always be physically unable to meet the standards of several of the service communities that she highlights and that lowering these physical standards to include women would be a perilous decision that would ultimately result in more American deaths on the battlefield.

The crux of Walls’ argument rests on criticism of a recent Marine Corps study that found all-male units outperformed gender integrated units at 69 percent of the assigned tasks, predominantly due to physical capabilities, and that women suffered injuries at a rate of 40.5 percent as compared to men who rated at 18.8 percent. She attacks the legitimacy of the study by speculating that there may have been “reluctance on the part of male group members whose positions are about to be opened up to female candidates,” and questions why no entirely female groups were asked to participate in the study. There is a simple answer to this question. Women comprise just 7 percent of the Marine Corps, and if they were to be deployed with combat units, they would have to serve interchangeably with principally male units. Asking any branch of service to accommodate such a small subset of an already minute percentage by creating all female units would be a logistical nightmare that borders on the realm of impossibility. Likewise, Walls’ failure to further address the question of injuries represents a convenient omission for her part. Injuries are an enormous hindrance to a ground combat unit that can take substantial time and resources (both of which can mean life or death) to remedy. They are also purely physical in nature, and so criticisms of biases influencing group cohesion do not apply. The fact that nearly half of the women who attempted to perform these tasks suffered some significant injury should have prompted further analysis from Walls.

While Walls’ subsequent point that the Marine Corps should have vetted the male participants for gender bias could have been valid, she does not mention that some females involved in the study continue to stand by it. Several participants have spoken out since the results were distributed and supported the study’s legitimacy, stating unequivocally that they were given a fair opportunity to succeed. When Walls suggests otherwise, she implicitly criticizes their judgment and competence, which is tantamount to insulting the female Marines who were courageous enough to volunteer for the study.

In regards to the question of whether women can fight, the answer is yes, but that does not mean that every service community should be open to them. While I support some combat specialties adapting to the evolving role of women in society, there are other jobs that are quite plainly too physically demanding for women to perform. Take, for instance, the role of a Marine Infantry Officer. Twenty-nine women attempted to pass the Marine Infantry Officer Course, and all 29 failed (and all but four failed on the first day). The “gender neutral” standards Walls proposes are fine in theory, but the reality is that there are some basic physical limitations that are inherent to females. I also doubt that Walls knows that when the Marine Corps attempted to implement a small change in the direction of gender neutral standards by ordering females to conduct pull ups on their physical fitness tests as males do, 55 percent of female recruits could not do the minimum of three, while the male maximum remained at 20.

Some might then posit that, given this paradigm, the standards ought to be reviewed. But any change must be considered within the context of a given service’s specific needs. There may be women who are well suited to the Army Infantry, but do not possess the expeditionary readiness that characterizes the Marine Corps or the supreme physical might of a Navy SEAL. Our military is multifaceted so as to confront the maximum number of threats, and it is inane to suggest that every single community can be integrated when there are already considerable data proving otherwise. Women have fought in combat. Women will fight in combat. But trading a physically qualified warrior for one who is not compromises security in the name of faux-equality. Any serviceman, male or female, will tell you that mission accomplishment is always priority number one. If we as civilians want to support that priority, we need to respect the informed judgment of commanders, and allow servicemen to continue their ardent defense of our homeland without the added burden of hyper politically correct thinking.

Malcolm Dunlop is a third-year in the College. He is in the Reserved Officers’ Training Corps but his views are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of any part of the armed forces.

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