9 Comments

Robert Cheeks
January 27th, 2013 | 8:06 pm

Yet, another indication of the decline of civilization brought about by these derailed ideologues. First God must die, now women. Insane!

djf
January 27th, 2013 | 9:46 pm

Good point, Pete.

Of course, the “surge” we’ve been having in Afghanistan over the last four years was not IMHOP primarily intended to accomplish a particular result on the ground over there, but to project a certain image of the current president to brain-dead swing-voters. So the surge served its purpose, and can now be terminated, allowing the administration to inflict this crippling mandate on the military.

Non-Rhetorical Question | CATHOLIC FEAST
January 28th, 2013 | 2:28 am

[...] If we were having a surge rather than a drawdown in Afghanistan, would we still have gotten last week’s announcement opening the ground combat arms to women? Source: Postmodern Conservative   [...]

John Lewis
January 28th, 2013 | 6:16 am

Two ridiculous comments. I think if you have a surge in afghanistan the policy makes even more sense.

That is the greater the demand stress for combat troops the more the policy makes sense. In order to understand this you have to think of the army as a giant bureaucracy. Bureaucratically the distinction between combat troops and non-combat troops can be sustained, and yet everyone wears army green, and even the national guard and army reserve have been called up to take a considerable role. There is no different soilders creed between the sexes or between the various administrative divisions of the U.S. Army (including here RA, reserves and National guard).
At the unit level you get a mission, at a squad level you implement it.

In general I suppose I am sexist/realist/naturalist enough to concede that men in general are more physical soilders(On PT tests women get a different scale), and there is a great deal of nonsense tied up to this exceptionalism involving lewd comments about getting sand in your pussy et al.

In terms of trainning the RA is also far superior to the reserves and national guard, which often times is out of shape clueless civilian type people with a greater proportion of females. Still the bureacratic army seeks to topiarize all of them into the mold of soldier. It is actually fairly sucessful. Now the army is broken down into specialities known as MOS’s. Some are specialty “combat” some are “not”. Personally I mainly believe in the exeptionalism of Rangers and SF units…all the rest is unit level bull/ethos, and exceptionalism from specialty that is essentially broken down by occupational specialty/function. Still RA is better and men are better….BUT… that is hardly a narrowly tailored principle.

There are a lot of individuals in the reserves who can function in a unit and bring a lot to the table, the same with the National guard.

Now it would be hard to break down all the various distinctions in the political economy of the U.S. Army, but in truth this policy more or less sacrifices sexist exceptionalism (which is supposedly stamped out by EO NCO’s, and all sorts of administrative policy.) for greater administrative flexibility and interchangeability.

The commander in chief does what he wants to do and the army goes rolling along. But this is actually a sort of Lochner type question. Do we protect the fair sex from certain forms of labor contracts? Or do we allow them any MOS they can chew?

One very important this to consider with all laws is how they are enforced, in the case of criminal law the DA+judge enforces the law by deciding what to prosecute and how much to punish. While I won’t necessarily get into details a Captain (0-3) has fairly wide latitude to manage HR questions at the unit level. Thus anytime you lift an administrative barrier to the alienation of labor, you actually expand a commander’s latitude. If there are soilders who are problems commander’s can administratively process them out of the armed forces, or ship them off to different units (if they are not MOS constrained/shortage).

Also some women can shoot better than some men. Or they are just better tools for certain jobs because they know them better, or because instead of thinking themselves natural mechanics they read the Op standards and do the work bureaucratically to standard. Most great mechanics are men, but some women are really good, in fact the 2nd best mechanic in my unit was a woman…but she couldn’t ride out with us on convoys into Iraq. I remmember one convoy where we would have certainly taken Spc flowers (the woman) over PFC andrews, only we couldn’t because of the administrative barrier to the alienation of her labor, as it was one truck got hit by an IED and our spare truck had some sort of mechanical difficulty on the last leg of the trip around Scania which “couldn’t be fixed”, yet when we got back to arifjan, flowers fixed it in under an hour.

So lifting the arbitrary sex based “combat” restriction basically is a combat multiplier, because it adds labor flexibility. All the NCO’s knew she was a better mechanic and we would have put her on Bravo team in a heart beat. But we couldn’t.

Of course in some ways the barriers to the alienation of female labor are actually “perks” if you are about playing the game. (and a lot of folks are, but no one is quite honest about it.) It is the way I feel about Lochner generally…sure if you have been unemployed for a while, you might begin to mythologize work and be all gung ho about working 10 hour days (the early part of a deployment, as well)…but after a while you wish you had a “sex” restriction. (or you wish you didn’t have to work so much overtime…but you are sort of glad you get paid extra for it!(which you don’t in the army).

That is in my opinion this is a pro-commander policy that is arguably anti-labor. Or at least just as plausibly and via similar mechanics as Lochner is a pro-employer+anti-labor.
Women put into potential combat type situations loose a plausible administrative arguement for Shamming (the army term for slacking). In practical terms with the functions under taken by the reserves and the army national guard sometimes women ended up in “colorable” combat situations, and NCO’s aren’t exactly judge learned hand. This actually meant that women could take certain missions and then argue themselves out of ones when they got bored/scared or wanted to eat Mcdonalds surf the net and drink more Starbucks or otherwise ply feminine wiles in the welfare war game. In the army if you don’t want to do something and you can make a legal or policy argument you win, especially when NCO’s+some commanders pressed for labor might have enlarged the discretionary grey zone of combat.

I take a similar stance on getting rid of Don’t ask don’t tell. I think it was basically a policy that gave homosexuals a chance to ply feminine wiles and selectively alienate their labor. Technically I think the policy converted the U.S, Army contract into an option contract for homosexuals. i.e. if you were tired of deployments and homosexual you could force your commander to administratively seperate you. Here I could again give examples, only it was also bad for morale because one commander might be a huge functional HR person(i.e. a liberal bureaucrat), and another might be a bit too hopped up on conservative dogma. So while the homosexual did have an option contract and the majority of the time it had to be him who forced it, there is always the risk it could happen like Lawrence v. Texas. So don’t ask don’t tell was a boon for first term enlistees and a big risk for careerist homosexuals(often times the ones most proficient…because stigma still exists and you don’t flourish unless you actually are a notch better than average.) So DADT was in part messing with money (retirement is a big deal).

But in general getting rid of DADT and the combat restriction essentially gives commanders and senior NCO’s more flexibility in crafting teams for specific missions. Commanders with the notice and comment discretion of senior NCO’s can make HR decisions with greater efficiency. And make no mistake a commander can still administratively seperate soilders for almost anything they can find legal backing for (which is a hell of a lot). In fact as we see that General Petraeus didn’t quite follow General Order 1A, it is uncontestable from my experience that over 70% of soilders did not follow it either. So commanders have such a large tool box for crafting a unit, that the comparison to a DA is in my opinion apt. As a general principle I favor Commander discretion with a heavy dose of administrative notice and comment from senior NCO’s.

I thus support the end of DADT and the removal of barriers to the alienation of female labor, i.e. MOS and other colorable grey area mission oriented disctinctions as combat multipliers.

Due to career concerns for homosexuals and dishonorable imputations I can see how the end of DADT is arguably pro-gay. Still it is the end of an option contract for homosexuals, so that is administratively a loss of valuable consideration. (An option contract will always have a premium over a fixed contract…in the context of alienating a home your option contract will often times require an earnest money deposit.)

Just as I have come to distrust the “freedom” of Lochner, so too do I think Lochner was a clear victory for the baker(agent) who directed labor imputs. In the army the agent who directs labor imputs is the commander with the notice and comment of senior NCO’s. The glut of women in the quatermaster corps has really unballanced the NCO promotion points system, in the “non-combat” MOS’s. So on the basis of economic materialism lifting this barrier to the alienation of labor might also rectify part of this problem. If you want career advancement in the army it is much easier for you to be in a combat MOS. I am not sure how many women will want this, but certainly some will. I have no doubt that some women can hack it, and if they can’t why not let commanders decide?

On what basis do you actually object to this other than a reflexive anti-team Obama mandate. Can your sexist views survive intermediate scrutiny? Are they mission orientated objections? Are you a commander or a senior NCO?

Notice that in my opinion moving away from engagements and deployments abroad might actually be a reason not to open up certain MOS’s to competition. That is in a state of peace, commanders have more discretion to craft units according to utopian command philosophies (about the next big foreseeable/progressive engagement)…but that this policy is actually pragmatic since it increases the flexibility of labor imputs and reduces sex and sex orientation based option contracts.

Rational Basis: 30 soilders, 25 male, 5 female. Need 25, take 25 males.
intermediate Scrutiny: 30 soilders, 25 male, 5 female. Examine range cards and take the bests shots. Examine PT scores and take the highest. or a combo.
Strict Scrutiny: Intermediate scrutiny plus attention to MOS distribution for mission specific purpose. (might still take 5 females even if 3 are lowest on intermediate scrutiny if one is your interpreter, et al.)
Strict Scrutiny plus: all of the above plus chemistry considerations from actual issues brought to your attention from notice and comment with senior NCO’s (your best shot/PT score recently had a death in the familly, getting in fights with wife, mental health, et al.)
True scrutiny: This is an administrative question, not one to be decided from afar. Commanders are smart people they weight a lot of evidence.

Brian
January 28th, 2013 | 11:32 am

Yes. Obama doesn’t care at all about Afghanistan. Imposing leftist “egalite” ideological idiocy, especially when it can be done so in such a way as to rub conservative noses in the fact that they’re “losing”, IS something he cares about. Deeply.

This doesn’t have to be a huge deal, IF the leftist grievance lobby can accept that a) women will volunteer for combat positions in disproportionately small numbers, and b) women will pass physical muster for said positions in disproportionately small numbers. Of course, they won’t accept that, and within a few years there will be massive lawsuits and enforced accommodations imposed by folks who don’t know or care about the military. Oh well.

JDP
January 28th, 2013 | 11:39 pm

who cares? it’s a bad idea period, now, tomorrow, yesterday, period.

Kate Pitrone
January 29th, 2013 | 2:47 pm

General Mattis and other outspoken critics within the military are being let go. Defense budget cuts look likely to reduce combat forces anyway. Perhaps John Lewis up there knows more about women than I previously would have guessed, but most people know women are not physically the same as men. That should make a difference in how they function in our military. None of this is going to mean a more effective American military, does it?

To Brian’s point, Leon Panetta says that if there is ever again a draft, this decision means women will be drafted. Now, that’s equality.

Brian
January 29th, 2013 | 4:17 pm

From the chairman of the Joint Chiefs: “Importantly, though, if we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high? With the direct combat exclusion provision in place, we never had to have that conversation.”

So, there it is, confirmation from the very top–standards WILL be thrown in the toilet to satisfy the grievance mongers.

John Lewis
January 30th, 2013 | 9:09 am

Alright fine, Con Law 101. What standard of review do you want for Sex based discrimination?

The actual standard is intermediate scrutiny.

Brian’s quoted message from the Joint Chief’s of staff is actually pitch perfect Con Law.

Basically if the U.S. Army can give a reason for excluding females from a particular MOS it can get a waiver (pace the exclusion provision). The criteria for the waiver or exclusion sounds like intermediate scrutiny.

For reasons mentioned above I honestly think it is good policy.

While I joke with Carl Scott that there is no such thing as constitutional law (or administrative law) that can be guaranteed, it seems to me that if… a) women will volunteer for combat positions in disproportionately small numbers, and b) women will pass physical muster for said positions in disproportionately small numbers.

Then there won’t actually be a legal case that is “Consitutional law”… On b) if there is a particular commander who is really pushing the tailoring of his unit to get rid of females, then on a sort of case by case basis you could probably win an administration seperation board.

“massive lawsuits” (unlikely…by what mechanics?) and enforced accommodations imposed (by folks who don’t know or care about the military)…

Well Standing is a threshold req.