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.
The only difference is in respect to biological limitations of women. For example, very few women almost none will ever be able to do a pull-up. So having a pull up quota to pass the PT will disbar nearly all women and drive up the cost of recruiting enough soldiers significantly. It’s not necessary in any type of way. There are certain roles women aren’t suited for. Ones that require physical strength. Everything else they are perfectly suited for, many tasks they are more suited for. Roles which require understanding people, adjudicating power, anything aesthetic, jobs which require a higher average intelligence but not unusually high intelligence. Right now I think women make up nearly 20% of the U.S military. Pete’s effective ban on women will drive up the cost of soldiers by some amount, I would assume by a similar amount to women being disbarred, leading to a situation in which all soldiers will have to be paid more in order to compensate or using conscription which will greatly lower the effectiveness of the army to the extent that you will likely need 2-3 times the soldiers at a discount to get the same combat effectiveness, and will destroy the officer culture of the military, by making the U.S more like Russia. A military which is highly corrupt and political and staffed by career bureaucrats.
I don’t know why people are giving Kegsbreath shit.
Say it’s 11:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, you’re working on a nice buzz, would you rather be surrounded by fat slobby beardos or some smooth faced hardbodies? Easy choice, not weird at all. I hope we get pec size and bun hardness test for gen pop too, can’t have pete hoggin all the smooth hardbods.
I didn’t realize they were releasing the inmates from Horny Jail during the shutdown 😳
Oh weird, you mean they didn’t fact check to see if they even had any idea what was going on? So uncharacteristic of them.
IIRC there was a time when women had to have a higher score on the ASVAB to get the same positions as men.
Not true. I remember when they demanded feminine hygiene products while at war.
Unacceptable!
kegseth certainly doesn’t qualify, he’s a weak man
“Now for the penis portion of the test… Don’t worry, these aren’t big tests. Just little tiny testies.”
They’ll have to get creative for the super important “writing your name in the snow/sand” portion of the military exam.
Shewee ftw
Hopefully these people will reevaluate their life decision to kill people for imperialist power projection? Right?
Let’s not act like joining the military is a decision that exists in a vacuum (at least in the US). Many people (typically targeted young for recruitment in or straight out of highschool, primed on US propaganda by our education system) in the military are in it because that is the only option they have if they want to get any kind of higher education without putting themselves into ruinous debt in the process. Now, the system is absolutely configured to encourage that on purpose, but it is, in my opinion, reductive to universally blame the soldiers themselves rather than the system that forced many of them down this path, especially when there are a lot more roles in the military than being a trigger puller, even insofar as active combat is concerned. Pararescue is one example that is specifically mentioned in this article. Sure, you could argue that they are still supporting the US military apparatus, and are thus complicit, but the complicity is not equal across the board.
Plus, I’d rather that the people who have a conscience remain in the military at the moment. Otherwise, we risk all of the people who might potentially impede the current trend of domestic usage of the US armed forces leaving said forces, with only the supporters of fascism remaining. Not a great outcome, though I’ll admit that the hope of a significant mass of conscientious objectors impeding operations is, in all likelihood, cope on my part. The obedience to hierarchy that the military trains into soldiers is incredibly hard to truly break.
Being poor explains but doesn’t excuse the action. Just like me being poor explains why I say rob and kill my elderly neighbor to sell all their possessions. My poverty doesn’t somehow make my actions defensible. If they are part of the us armed forces they already lack a conscience given the mass suffering it causes worldwide.
If they are part of the us armed forces they already lack a conscience given the mass suffering it causes worldwide.
A lot of people cannot fathom a world outside of their own sphere of problems, emotions, ambitions and dreams, and live basically on autopilot through their lives.
I am not going to say there’s a difference between stupidity and evil, because material outcomes are what matter to me most so they’re basically the same, but I would make the point that until we bring everyone up in cognitive capability, we’re always going to have people who want to feel like the hero, and want to achieve that feeling by joining something larger than themselves.
As individuals, I firmly believe you can change people. I’ve done it countless times, in one-on-one discussion, you can make people feel new things, you can make people question what they know, you can change people’s direction.
But as populations? We are a liquid. We are water. You cannot contain water nor judge it for being water and seeking it’s level. The only thing we can do is try to change the conditions in which that water flows and settles.
You do realize most military members sit behind a desk right? The vast majority isn’t combat arms.
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?
