Rick Santorum recently observed that President Obama’s decision to move women closer to front line combat positions was wrongheaded because of the “emotions” involved. Santorum made it clear in subsequent comments that he was not talking about the emotions of female soldiers but of male soldiers.
Santorum’s concerns are entirely valid. People mistakenly believe that Israel puts women in combat positions even to this day.
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore
They are wrong. The Israeli army experimented with women in combat for about three weeks in 1948 and quickly and permanently abandoned the idea.
The reason turned out to be quite simple. Male soldiers could not stop themselves from sacrificing military objectives in order to protect the women in their vicinity. The God-given instinct the Creator has placed in the male heart prompts him to use his strength to protect the women and children in his world. The Israeli army couldn’t bleed this instinct out of their male soldiers and gave up the effort as a lost cause.
Male soldiers were willing to stand soldier to soldier with their fellow male soldiers in order to protect Israeli women and children from a military threat. They understood that all of them were taking certain risks in order to do so, that it was entirely right for them as men to do so, and thus they were able to direct their focus and their fire on the enemy even while their male comrades were falling at their side.
But they couldn’t do it when the female soldiers at their side were put in harm’s way. They took their eyes off the military objective because their protective instinct was just too strong. The risk of this to Israeli national security was obviously too great, and the Israeli army bailed on this early experiment in political correctness as a gross error in judgment.
According to Brian Mitchell in his book, Women in the Military, the vast majority of women in the IDF now serve as secretaries, clerks, teletypists, nurses, teachers, and army social workers. “They are barred,” Mitchell writes, “from many jobs involving physical strain, adverse environmental conditions, or combat.”
In fact, Israeli law requires that women be evacuated from the front in the event of hostilities. Women in the military receive only cursory weapons training, and do not even practice marksmanship. The only time they carry weapons is in parades, so photographers can get their utterly deceptive snapshots of how wonderfully-advanced Israel is on the whole gender thing.
Bottom line: women in combat will jeopardize our national security.
The only way it won’t is if we train our male soldiers to be indifferent to the suffering of their female comrades in arms, and I for one do not want to live in a nation that does that to its men nor to its women. We have enough problems in our society with the way in which women are treated without incorporating neglect into our military culture as a virtue.
Our military opponents for the foreseeable future will be Muslims. Female soldiers captured in combat will be subjected to unspeakable sexual abuse and torture at the hands of their Muslim captors, who believe the insulting and degrading things Muhammad said about the fairer sex. It is unconscionable for a Christian nation to subject its women to this kind of risk.
Yet our president blindly pushes on in his mindless effort to impose secular and pagan values on our military, weakening the armed forces and putting women in positions where they not only will jeopardize military missions but be at risk of cruel and inhuman treatment in captivity.
It is just a simple fact that neither nature nor nature’s God designed the female body for the rigors of combat. Men have greater size, upper body strength and stamina for a reason: God’s intention is for them to use that superior strength to protect women and children.
The risks of women in combat are obvious. They do not have the stamina their male counterparts have when combat situations are arduous and demanding for hours and even days at a time. They do not have the physical strength to carry a wounded and heavier comrade to safety.
The Marines discovered in the 1990s that the average female soldier does not even have the arm strength to throw a grenade far enough to keep herself from getting blown up.
There is a reason why the military, along with fire departments and police departments, historically had certain standards of agility, stamina and strength which applicants had to meet. These weren’t arbitrary. Enlistees were going to be involved in dire situations in which human lives were at risk and it was simply unacceptably dangerous to put personnel in place who did not have the physical tools necessary to get the job done in these emergencies.
By “gender-norming” these physical standards the military, fire-fighting and law enforcement – making the standards low enough that even women can meet them – we have foolishly weakened our ability to defend our lives, property and our national security.
And while at the same time our culture is feminizing men, we are masculinizing women, all of which is a devil’s bargain. Our culture has lost sight of the priceless and unique role for which God has designed women: to bring new life into the world and nurture it to maturity.
The Israelis, according to Mitchell, understand this. “To most Israelis, a woman’s primary civic responsibility is to be a wife and mother. Her brief stint of military service is to free men to fight. As for the idea of women in combat…90 percent of Israeli women oppose the idea.”
America has benefited immeasurably from the Jewish people because of the spiritual truths we have learned from their sacred Scriptures. Perhaps it’s time we learned some military truths from them as well.
(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)
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Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association, where he provides expertise on a range of public policy topics. He hosts the “Focal Point” radio program on AFR Talk,which airs live on weekdays from 1-3 p.m. Central on American Family Radio’s nationwide talk network of 145 stations.