Women Don't Belong in Combat
The suggestion that women should be able to join all front-line combat units of the Australian Army, including the Special Air Service, infantry rifle companies and the tank squadron, is the single stupidest idea I have heard in my life.
If implemented it will contribute to the obnoxious dynamic in our society that denatures women and men. It will also diminish the effectiveness of the Australian Army, which will be less deployable, and less likely to be deployed.
It is wrong on practical grounds, and in principle. First, the practical. Even the Israeli army, which, out of bitter necessity, has been at the forefront of integrating women, does not allow them to serve in combat infantry units or in tanks.
The situation in the Australian Defence Force is complex. In the navy and air force, where close personal combat is not a core part of the mission, women can serve in most roles. In the army, women cannot serve in roles that have personal combat as part of their core task and in some other jobs where the physical demands are too onerous, such as field artillery. Following a change in 2005, they can serve in infantry headquarters and logistics, including in combat zones.
The practical limitations often relate to strength. An artillery shell can weigh 48kg. Very few women can easily lift such shells. As the systems become more automated, this might change, but you then have, as the Canadians have found, terrible problems if your automatic system breaks down.
The new push, announced by Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science Minister Greg Combet, is to have all tasks assessed for their physical requirements and then anyone who can meet those requirements can join the relevant units. At the practical level this falls down in countless ways. If the push is on to make the inclusion of women a priority, history tells us the physical standards will be eroded. There is no ultimate objectivity about these standards. They have evolved simply as a result of what very fit, very strong blokes can do. You can change the standards if you want to. The result will be a less effective army.
Many practical considerations arise from the special nature of military culture and the extreme demands of battle. In close combat male soldiers will try to protect female soldiers. This is a law of human nature. The unit's effectiveness will suffer.
A military unit is bound by common identity, by deep traditions of comradely bonding. The romantic liaisons that inevitably develop in mixed gender units militate against the absolute teamwork, group identity and lack of favouritism that characterise military units in combat. A lack of knowledge of military culture leads to a lack of respect for it and then to policies that compromise effectiveness.
But all the practical arguments, which have prevented nearly all serious militaries from using women in these direct, personal combat roles, are secondary to the question of principle.
The best recent Australian writing on military matters comes from retired major general Jim Molan in his book on the Iraq war and his newspaper columns. One of Molan's central themes is that the laws of war, the moral conduct of war, not only permit but require ferocious, sustained, terrible violence.
Mainstream Western ethics have always recognised that occasionally a war is just and must be waged. For a war to be just it must be in a just cause, it must be a last resort with reasonable alternatives exhausted, it must not allow greater evil than it combats, and there must be a reasonable chance of success. But once you are involved in a war, you must do everything, within the laws of war, to win and win as quickly as possible. You can be absolutely sure that your enemy will not resile from extreme violence.
All societies have recognised that they therefore need warriors. The warriors are not barbarians. They are brave, skilled, disciplined individuals who risk their lives for something bigger than themselves. The overwhelming majority of people who have lived, and the overwhelming majority of people and societies today, recognise that the warriors are men. This is something that most people know, even if they deny it.
As with so many issues, normal people are smarter here than intellectuals. Is there a home in Australia in which, if attacked by a burglar, the husband would not respond first?
The wilder shores of feminism, which seek to eradicate all differences between men and women, have never been inhabited by normal people. Let me give you an example. I follow rugby league, physically the most demanding of sports. In my team, the Canterbury Bulldogs, a couple of weeks ago the halfback Brett Kimmorley suffered a depressed fracture of the cheekbone. He has multiple fractures and a titanium plate, held in by six bolts, has been inserted into his face. In 10 days or so Kimmorley will play for the Bulldogs, probably against Parramatta, and may tackle the human wrecking ball Fuifui Moimoi.
Part of my admiration for Kimmorley is admiration for his physical courage. Other sports require courage too, but rugby league requires it in this stark and brutal way. I do not want to see women playing in the National Rugby League. No doubt you could find some single Amazonian woman, out of 11 million Australian women, who could do it with no greater risk of injury than the blokes. But why would you? What purpose would it serve? It would be madness. Yet the SAS, infantry rifle companies and the tank squadron, because they deal in instant life and death at close quarters, are infinitely more demanding than rugby league.
Men and women are equal but they are not the same. Each can do some things the other can't. Suppose one day science finds a way to install an artificial womb in a man so that he can have a baby. If we could do that, would we want to?
Our society is awash with violence. Just walk through the centre of Melbourne about 1am any Saturday night if you don't believe me. Much of that violence is directed at women. To remove any notion that women are special, that men have an absolute obligation to protect women, is to coarsen and infantilise our society. It seems only five minutes ago that the feminist movement was telling us that women were superior because they were inherently less violent. I'm inclined to agree with that proposition. Now it seems feminists are quite happy about violence so long as women get an equal chance to do it.
The women in the ADF are a credit to the nation. But to make women eligible for front-line, personal combat roles is not liberation or equality, still less enlightenment. It is a punctuation mark in the larger grammar of madness.
