Is it a good idea for us to put our women in combat? What did the recent experience in Iraq teach us on this score? Isn’t the idea of putting the female’s body, with its gift to procreate, an obscene act? And in any case, aren’t women clearly just unable to perform as well as men physically? Or are these notions just archaic beliefs that have no place in our modern society? After all, if some women are suited for combat and want to be in combat to defend our nation, shouldn’t they be free to do so? 

To debate these and other questions related to the wisdom of  “GI Janes,” Frontpage Symposium welcomes Tammy Bruce, a former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW and author of The Death of Right and Wrong; Lory Manning, a retired navy captain who runs the Women in the Military project at the Washington-based Women's Research and Education Institute; David Gutmann, Emeritus professor of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences at North-Western university Medical School, in Chicago. As a clinician, he has practiced and taught intensive psychotherapy. As a researcher, he has studied universal or "Species" trends in human development across a variety of peasant societies; and Anthony Mirvish, a naval and military analyst and member of the US Naval Institute. His area of expertise is the role of women in the military, weapon system development and performance, and military personnel issues.

Interlocutor: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Frontpage Symposium. David, let me begin with you. Before we get to the issue of the performance of our women in Iraq, and the lessons that can be learned from it, what do you think of the idea and reality of women in combat in general?

Gutmann: I have just been introduced to my first grandchild. He reminded me of the special function and meaning of the female body. Compared to theirs, men's bodies are rather practical objects, tools hard-wired to give and take punishment. But the woman's body is the bearer of the Mystery - the power to bring forth life.  All other considerations notwithstanding, the idea of purposely putting the woman's body, the human womb, in front of machineguns or under shellfire, now seems to me quite obscene. Suppose teen-aged girls had, en masse, gone over the top on The Somme, or charged the massed artillery at Gettysburg? Even now, on into the next millennium, one shudders. My revulsion is shared, in the form of a basic prohibition, by most of our species: "When it comes to slaughter, you do not send your daughter." 

Interlocutor: Thanks David. Anthony, what do you think about women in combat?

Mirvish: Women in combat is a bad idea that should be discarded.  According to data collected by the military itself, women are physically unable to perform  numerous combat, damage control and casualty evacuation tasks that were previously considered standard requirements for soldiers and sailors.  According to the Navy, women are currently 4 times less deployable than men and anywhere from 5-15% get pregnant while at sea and have to be evacuated.  Women flunk out of basic training and suffer injuries at higher rates than do men (British army reports found 11.1% failure rate for women in co-ed basic versus 4.6% for women-only basic).  Current US army data supports these figures.  The services have lowered standards to accommodate the differences between the sexes.  This has also been the case at the service academies. 

There is no evidence that any significant number of women can perform to the same standard as the men, across the board.  The co-ed military is less combat effective, less robust, less deployable and less cost effective than a similarly equipped all-male force.  The reality and historical evidence of women in combat has also been greatly misrepresented, and that includes the recent war against Iraq.

Interlocutor: Tammy and Lory, what do you think of these arguments put forth by David and Anthony against having women in the military?

Bruce: Well Jamie, the same arguments used against allowing women into the military or into combat are almost identical to the archaic and insipid railings in the last century against racially desegregating the military. "Blacks are meant for other work," "blacks are lazy" "blacks flunk more than whites" "blacks require lower standards, they affect morale..." etc. The arguments against allowing women in combat are as specious, limiting and, frankly, intellectually lazy.

Let's be honest here--just as not every man is suited for the military, nor is every woman. But there is absolutely no reason to restrict women who *are* suited for it, who *can* perform, and prove themselves. Do we declare that men can't be in the military because some men have failed basic training? Of course not. Will more women fail than men? Probably. But we also have not had generations of girls trained through sport and told from an early age that the military is a viable option for them. The ego of many men like that. But this nation as a whole loses when we exclude a talent pool that reflects 53 percent of the population. Islamist societies do just that, and that's why they're failing culturally and systemically.

Manning:  Reality: The US does not allow women in ground combat occupations (infantry, armor and special forces).  Woman in the US—and many other countries—do serve in air and sea-based combat.  They flew combat missions in the Bosnian air war, in Afghanistan and in Iraq and they proved the equal of their male comrades.  After the attack on USS Cole, women sailors worked shoulder-to-shoulder with male shipmates throughout the arduous, dangerous effort needed to keep the ship afloat—and more than one saved the life of a male crewmate.  Military nurses have been at the front since 1901.  They have been killed, wounded, and taken as prisoners of war while honorably serving their country.

Ideal: Social conservatives yearn for a return to a PC-free, all-male military.  Such a force is a fevered fantasy of boys’-own romanticism.  Remember the essentially all-male military of the Vietnam era?  I do, I was on active duty then.  I remember drug addiction, fragging, racial discord, good soldiers alienated by public attitudes.  I remember prostitution, soaring VD rates, and thousands of Amer-Asian children abandoned by GI fathers.  Barring women from the military will not mean a cheaper, more effective force—just different problems.

Gutmann: Manning and Bruce make some persuasive points. But their arguments would be stronger if they resisted the temptation to demonize the opposition as quasi-racists and romantic male fantasists. It is not only male chauvinists and hyper-macho adolescents who oppose combat roles for women. Across cultures and historic epochs, pretty much the whole human species, women included, are against such service.

Thus, recent Opinion surveys done by the Army Research Institute indicate that the great majority of military women are strongly opposed to combat assignments-especially if they are pushed into combat on an equal basis with men.

It is not blind prejudice or sentimentality that drives such opposition, but hard-won wisdom, gained over millennia, concerning the blunt realities of human warfare.

For starters, the calculus of population survival determines that men's lives are more expendable than women's. Women can bear only one child at a time, during a relatively brief window of fertility; but one man can inseminate many women, and keep at it well into later life. Accordingly, severe population losses, such as those resulting from war, can be made up in a generation or so by the enduring core of women, aided by the surviving men. Societies that put their women in the fighting ranks would soon disappear, victims of population attrition.

Then too, once the state goes to war, and assumes the responsibility for murder, ordinary men, much more so than women, can become enthusiastic killers. Women will bravely nurse the wounded under shellfire; but it is men who are loosing off the shells. It is the commitment to bloodshed, and not raw courage, that distinguishes the sexes.

Finally, there is the crucial matter of male bonding - the readiness on the part of soldiers to sacrifice for each other. But a few women in the fighting ranks can turn the Band of brothers into a gaggle of competing chimps. An example: during the Israeli War of Independence, I trained with a marine commando unit that included some women. These quickly linked up with the Alpha males, with the predictable result: the lucky winners - and their girls - were  cordially hated by the losers. Fortunately, this unit was broken up before action. Had we gone into battle together, the Alpha males might have fallen to friendly fire.

Should we weaken the all-important soldier's bond, the moral strength of the army, for the sake of the relatively few women who desire combat and are qualified for it?

The unrealistic romantic fantasies are held by the feminists, and not by those who oppose them. We could pay a bitter price in blood and treasure if they are ever acted upon.

Mirvish:  There never was any evidence to suggest that black men could not perform in combat as well as white men.  There was only prejudice clearly at odds with the evidence.  When the armed forces were desegregated, there were no changes to any of the tasks required of soldiers or sailors, nor to any of the methods used to train them. Had there been, desegregation would have failed. One has only to look at affirmative action in the civilian world to understand why. In the military, there are standard tasks that have been failed by 100% of women e.g. carrying another soldier, digging a foxhole in hard ground, lowering a P250 pump into a compartment amongst others. I'd say 100% is pretty conclusive. 

But, to address Ms. Bruce's point more directly, it is true that not all men are capable of serving in the military.  Those that can't perform aren't allowed to serve.  But, women who can only perform to the same level that disqualifies some men ARE allowed to serve.  How does that constitute equality?  Furthermore, let's say that 90% of men and 5% of women could qualify to serve, and we let them all do so.  What would conclusion would follow from those proportions?  That men are better suited to serve in the military or that men and women are equally suited to serve?  It is that sort of fact that drives opinion on this subject, not social conditioning or expectations as Ms. Bruce seems to think.  No matter what girls are told and how early they play sports, they'll still have lighter skeletons, 60% of aerobic capacity and 50% of the strength of men.  Those are hard cold facts of biology that won't go away, and facts are stubborn things, and motives don't alter facts. How is it "intellectually lazy" to consider the facts.

As to Ms. Bruce's other point about race, she is right to say that racists made many claims about what blacks could and could not do.  But, the standards were NOT changed and black men proved their critics wrong.  In the armed forces, the standards for women WERE changed.  It is a critically relevant distinction.  Whenever anyone suggests the women prove themselves to the male standard, it is the advocates of women in the military who object because they know what the results will be and don't want to acknowledge it..

Women do currently serve in the navy and air force. Neither of these services have faced a competitive enemy in battle since these changes were made, and the Navy none since WWII. Captain Manning can say that women flew "combat" missions over Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, but in none of these cases did the enemy have a competent  (or any) air force or a modern  (or any) air defense system. Rules of engagement kept aircraft well above the ceiling of what anti-aircraft weapons did exist.   How is it combat when the other side can't shoot back?  On the USS Cole,  the women stayed with the ship until it was out of danger. There is no record of which I am aware that any of the women directly and without assistance carried wounded men or handled heavy damage control equipment.  Captain Manning is right about the woman sailor who helped save a male sailor's life.  They were caught in a compartment and had to jump through a hole in the deck, through burning oil-covered water, to survive. It was brave, but it didn't involve physical strength.  Had the woman (who was quite small) had to carry the man out, would she have been able to do so?

As to the cultural and rights issued raised by Ms. Bruce and Captain Manning , it is true that some men are insecure, and some are sexist. If those attitudes changed, would  it change the  innate physical differences between the sexes and make the 100% of women who failed  some basic combat tasks suddenly able to perform them?  Didn't the 20th century prove that human nature cannot be rearranged to suit political fiat or arbitrary theory?  And doesn't the fact that only the Marines, who have single-sex training and the smallest proportion of women, met their recruiting quotas throughout the 1990s say something about what men who join the military want?  Captain Manning can dismiss it as romanticism, but how receptive will men be to an institution that now dismisses one of their reasons for wanting to join?  As to Captain Manning's comments about problems in the Vietnam era military, I would point out that the WWII military was almost 100% male and it didn't have those problems.

Bruce: Let me see if I understand the heart of Gutmann's argument correctly: women shouldn't be allowed to fight because we'll need them to make babies in the event of a catastrophe so monumental we'll need them to make babies. That's not even worth responding to.

But his next assertion is the most absurd and one made by many: the presence of women is so confusing, so disturbing, the American male soldier will dissolve into, what was his phrase? "...a Band of Brothers into competing chimps"? Well, let's hope the enemy doesn't find this out! After all, if the American male soldier is made into mush, his discipline eradicated, his training meaningless, and his focus as the instinctive killing machine (as argued by Gutmann earlier) totally destroyed by the presence of a female, all enemy armies need do is send their women to the front line!

Or gosh, maybe *we* should! After all, aren't all men ruled by the same testosterone? is it possible that the Saddam Fedayeen could have been made into "competing chimps" with a few American women in their midst? Hey! We could wipe out almost the entire North Korean military without firing a shot.

So, what are American male soldiers? Disciplined, instinctive killing machines, or drunk frat boys overdosing on Viagra? Which is it? I'm confused.

And I must say Mirvish is appropriately arguing against a shifting of standards and "affirmative action" as quotas for the military. I agree. But that is an entirely different point than women being capable and allowed into combat positions.

I'm sorry the broad brush regarding how women have 50% strength of men, etc must against be addressed. Some men have 50% less the strength of other men, and some women are stronger than some men. To move into this argument again would simply be boring and useless. The women allowed in combat would be the women who could carry their comrades to safety. They do exist you know. It's funny how that "strength training" thing works the same on women's bodies as it does men's. And for those who still equate size with strength and killing potential, you should go take a look at the men of Mossad, many of whom are deceptively small in stature and can break your neck in one second. It's called training and discipline.

Manning: When a country is in an all-out war, all members of the population, old and young, male and female, are engaged in the struggle.  The Soviet Union in WWII is the most potent recent example of this.  National survival mandated that Soviet women in great numbers  engage in all forms of combat.  And they did; in fact, the first women fighter pilot ace—at least 12 combat kills—was a Soviet woman from this era.  So many of the arguments being raised assume that non-combatants are safely tucked away beyond the enemy’s reach.  This is no longer a good assumption.  All our citizens need to understand that they have a duty to defend their country if called upon.

So many of the arguments being raised—like male bonding—are rooted in anthropological theories of the Lionel Tiger variety.  These are fun to read but they don’t pan out when checked against reality.  Recent, in-depth research indicates, for example, that unit bonding isn’t a function of the sex of the unit members—units with both men and women bond just as effectively as all male units.  The effectiveness of military women is also borne out by empirical evidence.  Over the past 15-20 years,  growing numbers of countries on all continents have begun using women more widely in their militaries—including assigning women to combat units.  No country that has increased women’s roles and numbers over the past 20 years has rescinded the decision to do so—in fact, women’s success has spurred an expansion in women’s roles and numbers.  The women who serve demand and should receive the same respect and honor as their brothers in arms.

Mirvish:  I'm glad to see that Ms. Bruce agrees on the value of high and uncompromised standards.  Perhaps now she'll persuade her sisters in the feminist movement to endorse them, too.  Or perhaps persuade the vast majority of women officers whom Laura Miller's Harvard survey found opposed common standards.

Captain Manning's points are a mixture of fact and myth.  The USSR did have some women serve in combat (as opposed to simply being in the military) during WWII.  They represented much less than 1% of the total Soviet force, and they suffered proportionately higher casualties than the corresponding all-male units.  Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian, recently published a book (Men, Women and War) on the subject of women in the military and exhaustively reviewed the historical record of women in the military.  Manning is invited to examine it for further details on this subject. 

The anthropological research Manning refers to without citing is actually quite mixed:  some of it supports her conclusion and some does not.   Many military men remain very hostile to the presence of women in their midst, they just wait until after they leave the military to say so publicly.  Were they all older men, their views could be dismissed on the grounds that they are out of touch, but many young men seem to agree.  The CSIS Survey on American Military Culture in the 21st Century found that the percentage of men (in the Navy) who thought women could perform successfully in combat declined from 75% to 50% from 1996-1999.  The highest negatives came from enlisted personnel and junior officers.  If what Manning says is true, one would have expected the opposite i.e. greater exposure and experience would have changed minds.  It's sad because the numbers indicate the men were not hostile to start with.  These attitudes mirrored the military's experience with the service academies.  What is undeniable, though, is that trust between team members is the heart of unit cohesion, and trust is based on the confidence that everyone can perform to the same level.  If there is any doubt, or any basis for doubt, there will be problems.  

Fraternization also undercuts cohesion by creating primary bonds separate from those between the team members as a whole.  The military obviously agrees, since regulations prohibit fraternization.  Unfortunately, human nature can't be changed by laws and the ban doesn't work, which is why the coed force has been plagued with sex scandals, sexual harassment, rape and pregnancy problems since day one.  All of those things have been at least as widespread as some of the disciplinary problems Manning cited from the Vietnam era military.  So, now we have all of the disciplinary problems of an all-male force in addition to those of a co-ed force, and different standards for performance and training.  Presumably, this has had no effect at all on readiness, effectiveness, trust or unit cohesion.

Gutmann: Second only to subsistence activities, including procreation, warfare is the most common human activity. I mentioned earlier that, by and large, our species tends to reserve women for procreation and wastes the more expendable male sex in warfare. My rather commonplace observation seems to have gotten to Bruce: she twists my phrases into nonsense, and then dismisses her version of my words as not worth responding to. Okay: if she wants the last word on that score so badly, she can have it.

Bruce also disputes my observation, based on personal experience during the Israeli War of Independence, that the presence of even a few women in a unit training for combat played hell with the necessary male-bonding. If the data don't fit ideology, she seems to say, then the data must be wrong, and the conclusions laughable. In this merry vein, Bruce goes on to suggest that enemy armies on the attack should feature women in their front ranks, so as destroy the cohesion of the opposing US units. 

Truth spoken in jest: the Israeli army, which is chronically at war with misogynistic foes, removed women from the front a long time ago, in part because of their undesirable effects on Arab troops. In Israel's Independence War, when Arab soldiers knew that they were facing Jewish women, they tended to fight more fiercely, incidentally mutilating and raping any female captives.

It appears that our women captured in Iraq, including Jessica Lynch, may have been raped. Those armies - e.g., the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Canadians, etc. - that do put women in combat formations, are reasonably sure that they will not see action. But the Israelis, who started out in 1948 with all kinds of egalitarian, socialistic ideologies and practices, have learned from hard experience that women in battle bring on problems, for themselves and their units, that a hard-pressed army does not have the luxury to address. Nations survive when lessons drawn from experience trump ideology.

Interlocutor: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s slightly switch focus. How do you think our women performed In Iraq? What did the war teach us in this area?

Manning:  Over 25,000 U.S. and British military women have served to date in the on-going conflict in Iraq.  They are superbly filling all roles short of infantry, armor and special forces—from which they are prohibited by policy in both countries.  Thousands of women are serving aboard US and Royal Navy ships and as pilots and crew members of combat aircraft.  On the ground, they live and work in the same austere conditions as their male comrades.  They have shown they have the “right stuff” to handle everything in the environment—the harsh desert heat, the blowing sand, the desert fauna and field sanitation.  They ably defend themselves and their comrades when called upon and one has been held as a prisoner of war.  In fact, there are certain jobs—such as searching Iraqi women—that our military men can’t do, so we would be more vulnerable without military women.

Women have shown they belong in the military—in the widest possible range of roles.  We are also learning lessons that will improve field health and sanitary conditions in the future for both sexes and result in better equipment and doctrine for preventing dehydration and heat stroke.

Bruce: I think our women in the armed forces have served as valiantly as our men. Obviously, they're still restricted when it comes to the roles they can play, but a soldier is a soldier. I like the fact that most people, when thinking about our military, automatically think and speak about the men *and* women in uniform.

There's also a realization, especially with the Jessica Lynch case, that no matter what position a soldier may hold, in or out of combat, all are at risk. With today's high tech weaponry, and the fact that our men and women in uniform are also no dealing with terrorists in addition to legitimate enemy soldiers, we can't count on certain rules of war being followed. War theatre parameters are obviously now increasingly vague, essentially placing all soldiers in the war theatre, whether or not they're designated for combat.

Considering the new risks our new world and the war on terror present to our military, it's obvious, once again, that the men and women who serve this nation, prepared to offer the greatest sacrifice, are once again saving civilization. One reason why we're able to do this is because we don't shut out the talent women, over half our population, offer.

Mirvish:  Let's speak to the points actually made.  It is not my argument that women are incompetent or that they can't endure primitive conditions.  Even an all-female military would retain significant combat capability due to technology and the intelligence/attitude of the personnel.  Those aren't the issues relevant to this debate, they're simply convenient straw men.  If we're going to compare and assess performance, it has to be against a clear standard, and in this case, that standard is the known performance of an all-male force.  We know what level of training was required to prepare men to fight first class enemies in two world wars, Korea and Vietnam.  We also know that many WWII veterans later said that their basic training was not hard enough to prepare them properly for what they faced.  Current training is a lot less intense, physically and mentally.  If the women can handle all jobs as well as the men, then why do they need lowered standards and modified training methods?

As to the current situation in Iraq and women "ably defending themselves and their comrades when called upon", let's note that the only coed unit to engage the Iraqis in direct combat on anything like even terms was completely and totally defeated.  I am speaking of the 507th Maintenance Unit, Jessica Lynch's unit.  It is a well-documented fact that the coed combat support troops receive much less intense basic training than the all-male units, and the sorry performance of this unit attests to it.  During Gulf War I, a Marine transportation unit was ambushed by Iraqi regular army troops, and the Marines just blew them away.  No doubt we'll discuss this incident in more detail later.

As to lessons learned regarding field health and sanitary conditons, Capt. Manning inadvertently makes my point.  We are having to devote time and money to figure out how to support two sexes, duplicating efforts and equipment.  Hence, my comment about the coed force not being cost effective.  We didn't have to do any of this when the forces were desegregated.

Gutmann: I agree with Lory and Bruce that female GI's - who are enduring summer postings in the deserts of Iraq - are probably as valiant and tough as the average male trooper. But as Lory's post makes clear, these qualities are for the most part exhibited in support rather than combat ops. women GI's are mainly "tail" (no pun intended) rather than "tooth." Despite the attempts by Lori and Bruce to blur out the distinctions between those equally essential military organs, there are very good reasons for setting these gender boundaries between combat and support assignments, and for keeping men up front, with the teeth.

We have heard about the sex differences in upper-body strength and muscle mass, and their bearing on combat effectiveness; less is made of the crucial sex differences in the combat-related motives. Women can be as brave as men, but what they tend to lack is young men's testosterone-fuelled appetite for killing Those who put millions of dollars into each Abrams tank will want them to be manned (personed?) by soldiers who are not only competent drivers and repairpersons, but also eager killers. 

Skeptics don't have to embed with the Third Armored to witness the male taste for violence. Just visit your nearest video-game parlor. There, your observations of sex-typed behavior will almost certainly match those of my (female) graduate student, who did a field study of boy's and girl's preferences for the most gory interactive games. There exists no social protocol mandating that games featuring the virtual reality of bloody, scattering guts are reserved exclusively for boys; nevertheless, girls had no use for them. At the most, they watched quietly while their boy friends pulled the triggers. Such games may train boys to raise hell in their neighborhoods, but equivalent simulations are also used to train officer-candidates for combat, and for messing up the enemy's neighborhoods. Male aggression is evolved; hard wired, shared with male chimps and baboons. Better that it be deployed in combat than in crime, and against legitimate enemies.

Bruce: I want to thank Mirvish for making one of my points--albeit no doubt inadvertently--it's not women who are incapable in combat, it's the fact that training methods are inadequate and patronizingly dismissive of women. Of course, inadequate training leads us into the vicious (but convenient) cycle of complaining that women can't perform.

There seem to be two different arguments at hand here--one is whether women are capable in combat and the other being the methods used to incorporate women into the military. Let me make one point clear right now--it's not that *women* "need lowered standards and modified training methods" it's that the men in charge *believe* women need lower standards, because gosh, just like blacks, they're less capable human beings. I've never seen such a clearer example of begging the question in my life, "Women aren't capable because they can't perform because the standards have been lowered because they can't perform." Please.

While I believe women should be allowed to compete to be included in the military and in combat, I for one do not believe that standards should be lowered. Any women who wants to be in combat wants to be able to save her own life and the life of her comrade. Any woman who enters that arena isn't going in there because she really wants to be a waitress or an actress. They want to kill the enemy as much as anyone else.

I was also disappointed to see Gutmann resort to referring to the way boys and girls play video games to make one of his points. Again, the question is begged here. Girls are conditioned to *not* compete with boys, lest they be accused of being "dykes" or turning off boys who want a passive partner. Boys have also have been conditioned to believe that unless they exhibit the supposed testosterone need for "splatter" their masculinity may be in question. To have obvious shallow social role playing be playing a major factor in this argument is indeed disappointing, but not surprising. To look more deeply into the matter might actually require some adjustment regarding the conclusions.
Perhaps the fear is seeing what would happen when a woman's full potential is unleashed, and she has a machine gun by her side. Too bad we can't ask the Germans, Japanese, Italians, Koreans, Vietnamese, and now Iraqis who have been killed by female American soldiers. One thing is for sure--they're still dead, whether or not the soldier shooting at them stood quietly by her childhood boyfriend or not.

Manning: For 40 years, the US (and other countries) did not allow women to engage in air or sea combat.  All the usual reasons were cited about why women couldn’t do it and yet, it turns out, women are just as effective as men in air and sea combat.  Perhaps our assumptions about what it takes to fight effectively in ground combat need to be re-examined, too.  If those who have written about their experiences in ground combat—like Robert Graves, Paul Fussell and James Webb are to be believed—there is no training, and no level of testosterone-fuelled aggression that can prepare anyone for the reality of ground combat.  Sure physical strength is essential but mental toughness and emotional endurance are more important over time and those traits are not sex specific.

We have a professional, volunteer military now, not a draftee one.  We cannot sustain this volunteer force unless we use the full talents of all those who serve—including the women.  Compare the professionalism and success of our forces today with the draftee force of the 60s and early 70s.  It was hardly cost effective or efficient—but it was virtually all male.

Gutmann: I agree with Bruce that the male preference for virtual-slaughter video games is at best indirect evidence of the ferocity that befits warriors. Nevertheless, these games must have some relation to real war, otherwise why does the army train with expensive video-simulations of combat?

The finding, that girls do not play these games is brushed aside by Bruce with the usual feminist victim-rhetoric: "Girls are taught not to compete with boys.." But my student found that girls do not avoid the competitive games, e.g., car racing, only those that featured graphic bloodletting.

Bruce also demonstrates the tendency, too common among feminists, to warp reality in the service of ideology. From whence her idea that female GI's wasted significant numbers of Germans, Italians, Japanese and Koreans in direct combat?

I saw some action in War 2, and followed the campaigns closely, but never heard any reports of female combat veterans in the US ranks. If they did fight, they must have taken casualties; where then are the graves of their dead?

Mirvish: Ms. Bruce has misunderstood my point:  the standards were changed because the women were unable to meet them without the changes, not because men thought they couldn't meet them.  The women can prove me wrong at any time by meeting the male standards.  No German, Japanese, Italian, Korean or Vietnamese solider was ever killed by an American woman soldier.  Saying otherwise won't change history.  James Webb argued for the toughest possible level of training precisely because even that wouldn't quite match the reality, a point that I made earlier in this discussion in connection with WWII era training.  The difference between what midshipmen at the Naval Academy endured in plebe year when Webb was there (ca 1964) and today is enormous.  The differences date from the admission of women in 1976. 

We have had enormous trouble sustaining the all-volunteer force in recent years.  If we emphasized the martial aspects more, we might have more success.  The Marines have done this quite successfully precisely because the men identify with it and its ethos.  During the 1990s, the number of women increased in the other services while the military said no qualified men were being turned away.  That says that the men are voting with their feet and every exit survey taken has cited cultural and command climate as the primary reason, not pay.

Interlocutor: Ok, we are out of time. Why don’t each of you make a concluding statement?

Manning:  Thanks Jamie. Not since I took logic as college freshman, have I seen such a gathering of syllogistic fallacies as those mustered here to argue against women in the military.  Most of these fallacies are of the A happened, B happened therefore A caused B variety:  Women are in the military; something isn’t to my liking; therefore, that something is caused by women in the military.  Baloney!  I also refuse to buy into the assumption that any and all changes to any and all training standards made since women began serving in larger numbers in the 1970s have reduced combat readiness.  Baloney!  Our military’s successes over the past 20 years refute those charges.  It’s time to drop them.  The social conservatives’ fixation on women as the source of any and everything wrong with the military blinds them to the real causes of the things that can and do go wrong.

As a student at the Naval War College, I was among the fortunate few enrolled in Vice Admiral James Stockdale’s ethics course.  Vice Admiral Stockdale, a combat pilot, was shot down and held for years as a prisoner during the Vietnam War.  He won the Congressional Medal of Honor for actions he took during that captivity.  Afraid that the enemy would finally break him after repeated torture, he slashed his own wrists—almost dying in the process—to keep himself from breaking.  When this man, who had seen the worst of combat, later became president of The Citadel, he was appalled at the brutality he found there and at those who insisted it was necessary to train future combat officers.  Vice Admiral Stockdale knew better.  Combat leaders are not forged through submission to the cult of brutality.  Professional competence, deep discipline, mental toughness, emotional endurance, and real concern for their troops forge them.

It’s time for social conservatives to throw out their ideology and pseudo-anthropological theories and start supporting ALL our troops—not just the ones they approve of.  Our men and women on active duty deserve nothing less.

Bruce: I’d like to conclude by saying that any statement which suggests that all of one group or another is one certain way, must simply be dismissed. Standards were not changed because "the women" couldn't compete. They were changed in an effort to bring in women who perhaps weren't as qualified to please Leftist bean counters. I'm opposed to that kind of engineering, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that it gives those opposed to women in the military a false place to hang their hat.

It's worth saying one more time--there are women who can meet the standards men  meet--fewer, yes, but they're out there. Let's recognize that, bring them in, and give them complete access to all the opportunities the military has to offer, including the opportunity to face our enemies in theatres of war.

And for Mirvish to insist that no enlisted woman in the US Military ever killed an enemy combatant is so ridiculous, well, it speaks for itself.

I suppose one thing is clear--those who oppose women in the military should just be honest about why. Those who support women in combat should also be flexible enough to realize that it will not be something every woman can do, any more than it is something every man can do. Lowering standards for women is insulting enough, but then to use that insult as an excuse to keep women off the field is intellectually dishonest and damages every American who wants this great nation to be as strong as possible.

We're a tad more advanced than the failing Islamist theocracies--let's start acting like it.

Gutmann: After the tumult and the shouting die, we seem to agree that some women can serve in combat. I would say between 5 - 10% of women now in service. Bruce and Manning would no doubt say more. The unresolved issue: should those women who desire combat be accommodated?

Do all the problems that Mirvish and I have alluded to outweigh the good that might result?

At this point, I can think of no pressing military need that might be met. The Soviet army did put women up front, but only after they had lost close to 10,000,000 male troopers. The US is nowhere near those desperate straits. We are not critically short of the male recruits that most of our combat equipment is designed to accommodate.

Just in order to appease the feminist establishment, plus a small minority of servicewomen, do we really want to design woman-friendly Abrams Tanks? And at a time when our major enemies are likely to be chauvinistic Muslims, do we want our foes getting high on the fantasy that the US Army is decadent, a host of women? When Arafat developed a similar delusion about "weak" Israelis, he started the Intifada.   

A final question. Why are the feminists so eager to send other women into the hell of battle? The feminist leaders see their younger sisters proving that women are as good as men; but the price of that demonstration would be, for too many, death in a burning tank.

We have seen that, in the service of ideology, feminists are willing to distort reality. That's for starters: like many radicals they are also too ready to sacrifice human life to some GREAT CAUSE, some Final Solution.

For what it's worth, I vote NO.