11/21/2019 / By JD Heyes
Barack Obama hasn’t been president for going on three years, but many of his policies live on, including some he pushed on the US military.
Worse, the policies are having a deleterious effect on women who are trying to serve in combat roles they aren’t suited for because of their gender, according to a new report.
The Center for Military Readiness, which supports traditional gender roles for men and women in the military, notes that 84 percent of women who take the new Army combat physical fitness test do not pass it.
The group says that’s merely one of the signs that Obama’s “social experiment” with the military is not effective.
“In December 2015, former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter overturned policy and authorized women to serve in direct ground combat (infantry) units. These are the fighting teams that attack the enemy with deliberate offensive action – missions beyond the experience of being ‘in harm’s way,'” the report said.
Mind you, Cabinet secretaries serve at the pleasure of the president and they are there to enact his policies, not their own. So this decision by Carter was not made in a vacuum; it came from the then-commander-in-chief.
CMR, in its report, noted further that women “are serving with men as they always have.” However, “in two major categories — unequal physical capabilities and sexual misconduct — signs of a failing social experiment are increasingly obvious.”
The new Army PT test was only recently implemented; it is a policy enacted during the Trump administration. The test is administered semi-annually to active duty (full-time) forces and annual to Guard and Army Reserve troops. It was approved by former Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis as a more realistic representation of the physical conditions troops face on the battlefield.
But of course, the current commander-in-chief, President Trump, and Mattis have not reversed the Obama-era edict that women can serve in front-line infantry, engineer, and special operations units.
“During the Obama administration, Pentagon officials bought into false promises of a ‘gender-free’ military. Men and women would be equally capable, immune to sexual attractions, and interchangeable in physically challenging missions. Instead of this fantasy, the caisson’s wheels are starting to fall off,” the CMR report found.
That should not be surprising, the report noted, because “at least a dozen major studies warned of serious problems before the social experiment began, and in 2012,” said the report.
“Among other things, Marine proxy tests with hundreds of volunteers confirmed significant physical differences in weight-lifting exercises simulating heavy armor or artillery rounds. Most men could lift progressively heavy barbells above their heads, but 92 percent of female participants could not accomplish the ‘clean & press’ with a 115 lb. weight,” said CMR. (Related: Why Marxist feminism in the military could leave America unable to defend itself.)
Also, injury rates for women are much higher than they are for male soldiers and Marines — two to six times higher. At the Marine Infantry Officer Course, only two of 30 female officers passed even after there were adjustments made to scoring requirements, WND reported.
And while there have been some women who have completed the Army Ranger School, one book that studied the progress of adding females to the program noted “the first two women … received special treatment and concessions” in order to pass, CMR wrote.
Additionally, in studies, all-male units performed better than gender-mixed units 69 percent of the time, the group reports.
Unofficial Army Combat Fitness Test pass/fail rates of 3,206 soldiers across 11 battalions found that 84 percent of female trainees and 30 percent of males failed the six-event exam.
“Four years after the grand women in the infantry experiment began, the Trump administration should reexamine ideological goals and consider taking up the challenge stated by James Hasson in his book ‘Stand Down’: ‘The time to roll back the misguided Obama-era ‘reforms’ to the military is now,” the CMR report recommended.
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Tagged Under: Army Ranger School, biology, combat, combat physical test, front-line combat, Marine Infantry Officer Course, Pentagon, physical test, President Obama, President Trump, social experimentation, US military, women in combat
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