Panetta opens combat roles to women
Teege
Posts: 660 ✭
Just wondering what the rest of my BOTL and SOTL thought of this... I know alot of you have served or are serving and while I have no issue with woman in the armed forces I think this is a terrible idea! And it has nothing to do with if I think they can run or shoot. There are just so many reasons I dont like this but was just wondering how some of you felt about it.
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On the other hand, I think there are females who could be combat arms, but should be in all-female companies. Which won't completely stop that same problem. Also, we're mostly engaged in fighting Islamic Right Wingers these days, will they surrender to a female force? Surrender is good, when the enemy's doing it. Or, will they fight to the death, costing us more in casualties and time and effort.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
If high ranking Officers can't keep it zipped when they're not even in combat situations, (like Gen. Petreaus) how the hell can they expect 20 year old soldiers under intense stress not to take advantage of a situation? I really hope they think this through.
On the flip side of this argument is the fact that during WWII the Red Army had women serving in combat roles, and I think the Israeli Army curently has women serving in combat roles, and in combat winning is the only measure of success, so it obviously can be done.
In any case, some of the arguments against having women in combat roles echo those used against integrating the armed forces until Truman made it happen. All the naysayers thought that black soldiers would surrender or weren't smart enough to fight or that Russians and Koreans would never surrender to them, or that black and white soldiers wouldn't be able to share a foxhole without killing each other. All it took was one war (Korea) to demonstrate that all of these concerns were completely meaningless.
Anyone who goes into battle can be raped, tortured, or killed outright. Those who are in higher risk groups (Jews, women) fully understand this when they volunteer for combat duty. If there are concerns that having women in combat units will create distractions or cause 'paternalistic' attitudes among male soldiers who feel that protecting women soldiers is more important than defeating enemies, then that's an issue the armed forces need to address in training and protocols. Not easy to do, by any means, but it can be done.
It is true that, in the 1860's the south was dominated by the Democrats. They were conservative Democrats who supported the economic system of slavery and who believed that the states had the right to permit slavery to exist. They did not recognize African slaves as human beings. For the conservative southern Democrats, who supported and promoted Southern rebellion and Confederacy against the United States of America, a horse had more rights than a slave. The conservative Confederates chose to rebell against a Federal Government that would abolish the institution of slavery and their economic way of life, and it was their insistence that slavery be preserved that caused the Civil War.
The Republican Party of Lincoln was a liberal party in every sense of the word. It was the party of Abolition, and a Party that promoted the right of the Federal Government to eliminate slavery from the Union as a whole. It was a Party that did not recognize the States Right to continue to promote the evil of Slavery throughout the Union. Later, Under Teddy Roosevelt, it became a Progressive Party, advocating for an end to child labor, for a minimum wage, for an 8 hour day and a 40 hour week for labor, and for Federal oversight of our food for safety standards, and the establishment of large tracts of lands to be set aside as National Parks for the enjoyment of generations to come. Teddys Administration laid much of the groundwork for New Deal that his cousin Franklin Roosevelt put in place later. Taft continued much of Teddy's agenda, but under Harding, Coolidge , and Hoover, the Republican Party grew ever more conservative and began to identify itself as the party of business and corporations. Under these men, the Republican Party became the modern conservative party that was in place until 2010. It was under FDR that the Democratic Party became a liberal Progressive party, and the liberal policies of the New Deal are with us today. Southern Democrats voted for FDR almost entirely out of old Civil War anti-Republicanism, not because they were also becoming more liberal.
In the later half of the 20th Century, uber conservative Republicans like Barry Goldwater and conservative Democrats, like the ones you mention, voted against the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. During the 1960's, the conservative branch of the southern Democratic party reverted to it's conservative Civil War roots and emerged as a racist segregationist party, know as the Dixiecrats (or Dixie Rats, depending on your point of view) headed by George Wallace, Strom Thurmon, Bull Connors and Estes Faubus. The conservative southerners did everything they could, (often with the support of State and local police forces) including the use of violence and murder and terror to stop the Civil Rights Movement. It was during the 1960's and the Civil Rights Movement that the Democratic Party split, and the liberal faction remained in the Northeast and upper Mid-West, while the more conservative southern faction slowly began to withdraw from the Democratic Party.
Shortly after LBJ (a liberal Democrat) signed the Civil Rights Act he is famously noted as saying, "Well, we've lost the South for a hundred years." Later, Richard Nixon wrote about how the Republican party could convert the southern conservatives who populated the Democratic Party into Republicans by appealing to their conservatism. These writings are known as his "Southern Stragegy" for converting conservative southern Democrats into conservative Republicans. This strategy has proved to be remarkably successful because it recognizes that the South always has been and probably always will be conservative.
Just for the record, the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution was about Equal Rights for Women, it was proposed in the 1970's, was not ratified, and is therefore not part of the Constitution. I'm not sure what you ment when you referd to it.
None of which affects this discussion.
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I have only included this response to beatnick because he was so blatantly wrong. I didn't know Barry Goldwater was a NCAA fan or supporter. BTW, dude, what does being an advocate for college athletics have to do with being conservative or liberal?
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0619.html
This article is a news account of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and discusses the voting that resulted in passage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater
In 1964, Goldwater ran a conservative campaign that emphasized "states' rights".[15] Goldwater's 1964 campaign was a magnet for conservatives since he opposed interference by the federal government in state affairs. Although he had supported all previous federal civil rights legislation and had supported the original senate version of the bill, Goldwater made the decision to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His stance was based on his view that the act was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and that the Act interfered with the rights of private persons to do or not do business with whomever they chose.[16]
All this appealed to white Southern Democrats, and Goldwater was the first Republican to win the electoral votes of all of the Deep South states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana) since Reconstruction[17] (although Dwight Eisenhower did carry Louisiana in 1956). However, Goldwater's vote on the Civil Rights Act proved devastating to his campaign everywhere outside the South (besides Dixie, Goldwater won only in Arizona, his home state), contributing to his landslide defeat in 1964.
http://www.biblio.com/barry-goldwater~106698~author
Goldwater had a controversial record on civil rights. Locally he was a supporter of the Arizona NAACP and was involved in desegregating the Arizona National Guard. As a Senator, he was a supporter of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960. However, he opposed the much more comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that it was an inappropriate extension of the federal commerce power to private citizens in order to "legislate morality" and restrict the rights of employers. Although conservative Southern Democrats were the main opponents to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and previous civil rights legislation, his opposition to the Act strongly boosted Goldwater's standing among white southerners.
http://usconservatives.about.com/od/thinkersanddoers/a/Goldwater.htm
Goldwater supported desegregation and civil rights to varying degrees. He got himself into political hot water, however, with his opposition to legislation that would eventually turn into the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Goldwater was a passionate Constitutionalist, who had supported the NAACP and had backed previous versions of civil rights legislation, but he opposed the 1964 bill because he believed it violated states rights to self-govern. His opposition earned him political support from conservative southern Democrats, but he was detested as a racist by many blacks and minorities.
In the Senate, he strongly supported both the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts. Although he eventually regretted his vote, his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was based strictly on constitutional grounds. As a matter of rights, he believed that two of its sections, Title II and Title VII, unlawfully overextended the role of the federal government. The first says you could not refuse service by race or religion, and the second that you could not refuse to hire likewise. He thought there ought to be a limit to federal intrusion is all. Whereas you probably are convinced the feds are right to force me to buy curlicue lightbulbs and pay for Justin Bieber's electric sports car.
Try here: http://www.nationalblackrepublicans.com/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
or here: http://wikipedia.qwika.com/fr2en/Barry_Goldwater
or loads of other places you can google as easily as I
It wasn't particularly the Civil Rights thing that cooked his campaign. Johnson waged a vicious campaign of hysterical smears and lies. Had BG won, for example, we would not have endured LBJ's Viet Nam debacle, which nobody but Johnson appeared eager for at the time. BG frankly said we did not belong there period. LBJ claimed that if Goldwater was elected, we'd be bombing North Viet Nam inside six months; while for six months Johnson had been secretly bombing North Viet Nam already. Lies like that. "Nervous finger on the nuclear trigger" kinda horse pebbles. Certainly not the first nor the last Liberal Democrat to tell whoppers.
But go ahead. Still nothing to do with women in battle.
A few excerpts from The Wall St Journal; it's a pretty good article, and it looks like this move is something that probably should have been done a lot sooner, but better late than never.
Combat Ban for Women to End
"...The change is an acknowledgment that women on modern battlefields already are in the fight152 women have died in Iraq and Afghanistanand that military rules need to be updated to reflect realities of the current-day war zones. At the same time, the shift establishes a process that could take years to complete.
The new policy should allow women to serve alongside infantry troops as battlefield medics, special-operations pilots and in other dangerous roles, officials said. But officials are divided about whether women will ultimately serve as infantry troops or in elite special-operations units. Some military officials, citing the difficulty of completing infantry training courses, believe that most women would be unable to meet the physical requirements. ..."
"...The policy shift follows a study by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that determined the military could become much more aggressive at allowing women into excluded roles. "The time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service," Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a Jan. 9 memo to Mr. Panetta.
"Does that mean that women are going to be full-up Navy SEALs? Probably not," said Maren Leed, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served until last year as a senior adviser to the U.S. Army chief of staff. "It probably means there will be sub-specialties within the SEALs for which they are eligible."
Women regularly have found themselves in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether in supply convoys or in military police units.
A number of other countries allow women in some combat roles, including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.