Women who served in the US military are pushing back against Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the requirements for combat roles will “return to the highest male standard”, saying the standards have always been the same for men and women.
“None of us have ever asked for special treatment,” Elisa Cardnell, who served in the US Navy for eleven years, told the BBC.
Speaking to hundreds of generals on Tuesday, Hegseth reiterated his beliefs that the military had lowered standards to accommodate women and put service members at risk. His new directives would bring them back to a higher level, he said.
“If it means no women qualify for combat jobs, then so be it,” he said.
Again, you’re being reductive and oversimplifying an issue that is more complex than killing and robbing a neighbor. Remember, veterans are (at least socially) widely celebrated in American culture, and the more morally abhorrent things the US military participated (and continues to participate) in are often glossed over or outright ignored by our education system. It is easy to immediately recognize murdering your neighbor for their stuff as inherently wrong, but it is much harder to do so when you may not even realize what the military entails at the time of joining, and by the time you realize what you’re complicit in (likely at the point of active duty/in your first deployment) there is no real recourse to leave unless higher command decides that they are willing to let you go, and they’re generally pretty resistant to that. You can always take the conscientious objector route, but they generally make that quite difficult, and the burden of proof is on you to show them that you truly believe this, so it’s likely that feet will be dragged and you’ll just get moved to light duty in the (very long) meantime. Even then, denials of discharge on these grounds are common. Once you take that oath, once you get assigned your first deployment, there is essentially no going back unless higher command allows it until your term of service is done. If, then, you decide to force the issue by intentionally breaking rules, you’d be likely to get an “Other-Than-Honorable Discharge”, which would show up on your record of for any government job applications going forward and would be visible as a red flag if an employer (any employer) chose to request records from your time of service. Additionally, you would lose out on the GI Bill, VA benefits, Healthcare benefits, etc., and would have to deal with social stigma for having not finished your term of service. All of that is doable, certainly, there’s nothing there that is the end of the world, but the system is configured to make leaving very painful, be that in a social, financial, or physical sense.
All of that also ignores that not everything the US military does is universally evil. Certainly, it’s responsible for immense human suffering around the globe, both throughout history and into the present. I won’t argue with you on that, because such a position is inarguable. I ask, however, if that same level of condemnation is warranted for a logistics officer whose job is to coordinate supply transfer to Ukraine, for an intelligence officer who collates and synthesizes information on Russian movements to Ukraine and the broader NATO alliance, or for an analyst offering recommendations to US Asia Pacific allies on how to better deter potential regional aggressors? Moving even one degree further away, is the same condemnation warranted of the Coast Guard? Of EOD? Of field medics?
Look, I can understand your view, certainly. I said so myself previously when I mentioned that they are complicit simply by being part of the broader US military apparatus, however I don’t think the level of complicity is the same, and most legal systems worldwide would agree. After all, a distinction is made legally between murder and manslaughter based on intent, foreknowledge, and degree of participation, with even that often being separated further by degrees of severity, so why shouldn’t people who may have joined the military not knowing the truth of what it was they were getting into (who may not even serve outside of US borders or in an active combat role at all) be given the same consideration?