Efforts to ram women into what biology dictates as male-only "come across as a social engineering experiment" driven by people who neither know nor care about combat effectiveness or about the safety of our troops in the field.

Special Ops Should Be Off Limits to Women

In an historic 2015 announcement, Defense Secretary Ash Carter declared all combat positions would now be open to women. But for some it was not welcome news.

In strong opposition was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford. Carter had no military background before taking the Pentagon’s top civilian job under President Obama. (Nor did he stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night or play a military person on TV.) In fact, his doctorate is in theoretical physics. Dunford, meanwhile, is a Marine general with several tours of duty in the Iraq War, plus Afghanistan. At the time of the Carter announcement, Dunford presented evidence that women suffered drawbacks not only in the more obvious areas involving strength and stamina, but were even much less capable of hitting a target. All of which Carter simply pooh-poohed as “just not definitive, not determinative.

Meanwhile, “all” combat positions mean “all,” and that includes special operations units. And so to international fanfare (over 750,000 Google hits), the public was informed in July that a woman had become the first to try out for the uber-rigorous training of the best-known special operations unit in the world, the U.S. Navy SEALs. To rather less ado, but according to multiple reliable sources and a report in the veterans’ webzine Task and Purpose, that woman has already “dropped on request”—not during the actual BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) course but a vastly easier, three-week pre-BUD/S selection and conditioning course. The Special Warfare Center “will neither confirm nor deny” it.

Another female officer volunteered for training in the less-demanding but still very tough Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman program, basically today’s equivalent of the Swift Boats that plied Vietnamese rivers and coasts. We await the outcome of that. But overall, the attrition rate for SEAL candidates is 73 to 75 percent, and 63 percent for SWCC, according to the Navy.

The drop-out was not unexpected for retired SEAL Lt. Commander Andrew Paul. Paul was an assistant platoon commander for Task Unit Bruiser, Seal Team 3 during the bitterly-fought Battle of Ramadi in 2006. It was the most decorated SEAL Team since Vietnam including the first SEAL to win the Medal of Honor in Iraq (posthumously), Michael Monsoor. I encountered them during my second visit to Iraq as a photo-journalist, and my first firefight was with them. “The SEAL teams are already so effective that arguably they’re the finest fighting force on the planet,” Paul told me in an interview, clearly not in favor of opening up the SEALs to women. “Why do you want to mess with that?”

As commanding General H. Norman Schwarzkopf declared in the 1991 Gulf War, “War is not a Nintendo game.” Nor was it 15 years later; nor now. The accuracy of support weapons such as aircraft and artillery has improved, but battles are still decided by the grit and competency of the people on the ground. And both direct combat and being in combat conditions has actually become more difficult since Vietnam because of one simple factor—body armor.

Nevertheless, President Barack Obama opened all military positions to women and President Donald Trump, who like Obama never served in the military, supported that position during the election. Trump specifically included special operations.

And both men are wrong. With overall Army and Marine strength shrinking and with special ops now operating in a stunning 138 countries (as The American Conservativerecently reported), these units are now under enormous pressure—as that same article noted. The “mission” is victory with minimum casualties, not providing equal opportunity between genders or in any way, shape, or form, says Paul.

But haven’t women already graduated from special-ops schools?

While I was stationed at Fort Bragg as a paratrooper in 1980, Army Capt. Kathleen Wilder was awarded the most famous headgear in the U.S. military, the Green Beret. The Army said she failed the strenuous guerilla field exercise. But she appealed, saying she was the victim of gender discrimination, that several men who did worse than her on test graduated with the distinction nonetheless. She won on her second appeal in 1981. No woman since then has ever passed the school.

In 2015 two women did graduate from Ranger School and two more did so in April of this year. Ranger school may be less rigorous that Navy BUD/S, but it’s still very tough. No woman has completed the Marine Infantry Officer Course, which is considered easier. The last of about 30 who tried was given two chances to complete the conditioning hikes and failed both

So it is curious, then, that four women are now wearing the vaunted Ranger tab and camouflage beret. And one of the first two is 37, while the average age in the course is 23. It’s not particularly shocking, then, to hear the Army reportedly cheated for them.

An expose in People magazine in September 2015, prompted by a Congressman’s inquiry, found that before the women began the course, an unnamed general told his subordinates “A woman will graduate Ranger School.” He said, “At least one will get through.” People wrote that according to “multiple sources:”

The women were first sent to a special two-week training in January to get them ready for the school, although the course didn’t start until late April. “Once there they were allowed to repeat the program until they passed—while men were held to a strict pass/fail standard.”

They then spent months in a special platoon at Fort Benning getting, among other things, nutritional counseling and full-time training with a Ranger.

The women were put in a special platoon where among other things they were taken out to the land navigation course. This is a particularly difficult aspect of the course (Hint: You can’t use your cell phone GPS) and is timed. Meanwhile the men got no preview.

Once in Ranger school they were allowed to repeat key parts such as patrols. Men were not.

That congressman, by the way, was Steve Russell (R-OK), an Army Lieutenant Colonel and Ranger School graduate. His attempted investigation was thwarted by brass who informed him it appeared part of the records were destroyed. It was a literal conspiracy and cover-up.

In fact, at least as far back as 1978 when I attended Airborne School at Ft. Benning, Georgia, the women were in a segregated unit and we men saw them do fewer exercises and run in tennis shoes as opposed to our extremely heavy boots. Yet they graduated with the same Silver Wings, no asterisk appended to them. That said, it was no big deal since those women had no chance at seeing combat; they just wanted the wings to help advance their careers and the Army obliged.

Given the pressure reportedly put on the Ranger School to pass those women, given that women have been given a break in jump school for over a generation now, just how long can the others schools be expected to hold out? “Nobody within the [SEAL] community thinks the standards will be maintained,” alleges Paul.

More than just a ‘Men’s Club’?

But could all of this be because of a “Men’s Club” in the military? In fairness, American sports remained segregated long after it was apparent that blacks were at least as qualified as whites to help win games. But competition forced the owners’ hands. No law was required.

Here, though, the great discriminator is biology.

A 1992 Presidential Commission report found that “The average female Army recruit is 4.8 inches shorter, 31.7 pounds lighter, has 37.4 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body strength.” Moreover, “The average 20-to-30-year-old woman [recruit] has the same aerobic capacity as a 50-year-old man.” That’s important under any circumstances but in the forever war of Afghanistan, high in the mountains, an otherwise healthy woman would be devastated from the moment she left a helicopter

According to the Surgeon General’s office in 2011, “Army women are more likely to be disabled than men and are approximately 67 percent more likely than Army men to receive a physical disability discharge for a musculoskeletal disorder.” They’re more than five times as likely to suffer stress fractures.

Tremendously aggravating this disparity is the now-universal use of body armor in combat areas—not just in combat. At Camp Corregidor in Ramadi in 2006 we had to wear armor not just “outside the wire” (beyond the camp perimeter) but even within, because of mortar attacks that killed soldiers. The newest armor is lighter but still weighs about 30-35 pounds depending on the size of the wearer, and the helmet adds another 3-4 pounds. Counting all equipment, the Marine Corps puts the average combat load at 83 pounds. The healthy weight for a U.S. woman of average size is only 104-135 pounds. A friend of mine lost over an inch in height during his year-long tour in Ramadi. Later in Afghanistan body armor, normal load, and extra load that I carried as a photojournalist herniated two of my lumbar disks and ended my days of combat reporting.

How are women to handle this burden? Train harder? No. These people are already pushed to their very limits and special ops if anything are pushed beyond.

In 2012, when the issue wasn’t even special ops but just women in combat, Marine Capt. Katie Petronio published a powerful essay entitled, “Get Over it; We Are Not All Created Equal.” She knew what she was talking about all too well: Her body was broken by two combat deployments. “Due to the excessive amount of time I spent in full combat load,” she suffered numerous nerve and muscle problems, and permanent infertility. “It was evident that stress and muscular deterioration was affecting everyone regardless of gender; however, the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines and further compounded by gender-specific medical conditions.”

Both as a victim of the concept of an egalitarian military and a combat veteran, Petronio notes the non-genderdiscrimination within the Corps:

Marines who can run first-class physical fitness tests and who have superior [occupational] proficiency are separated from the Service if they do not meet the Marine Corps’ height and weight standards. Further, tall Marines are restricted from flying specific platforms, and color blind Marines are faced with similar restrictions. We recognize differences in mental capabilities of Marines when we administer the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and use the results to eliminate/open specific fields.

In fact, a Marine Corps evaluation two years ago showed that all-male units greatly outperformed mixed-gender units in just about every capacity. The women performed their tasks more slowly, and sustained far more injuries during training than their male counterparts. Perhaps surprisingly, the women even fired weapons with less accuracy and required more time to engage targets.

BUT WHAT IF A WOMAN FAIRLY EARNS A SPECIAL OPS SLOT

Still, somewhere there must be a Brienne of Tarth, the giant blonde in The Game of Thrones who routinely kicks male butt. (Until finally this season she was beaten in a sparring match. By another female, and a teenage one at that!) Such females make great box office, as in as in 1997’s GI Jane where Demi Moore has to fight the “male-ocracy” in SEAL-like training.

But Paul says it’s important to distinguish the silver screen from blood-spattered mud and that even if there were a Brienne of Tarth she still shouldn’t be allowed in a SEAL platoon.

“It’s not true that we’re against women; we have them on SEAL teams,” he says. A team is the largest SEAL unit. “They serve in a capacity commensurate with their skill sets insofar as it enhances mission effectiveness,” he adds. “That includes intel support, communications support, at times going on target in handling female prisoners. Any role in which that person brings combat effectiveness is fine.”

But, he says, in a platoon? No, that’s where I draw the line.”

“Just because somebody makes it through BUD/S and earns the Trident doesn’t make them a good team guy,” he says. “It doesn’t make them good operators.” (By which he’s not referring to the official SEAL teams such as SEAL Team Three, but rather the small units that deploy to combat, such as Task Unit Bruiser.) “They just don’t gel. And then we have the task of removing them.” Says Paul, “It’s a knuckle-dragging f—ing tough culture. We eat our own. And that’s what we do to the men!

“The military does not have the time for that kind of political correctness, the niceties. The teams in the military culture is successful and to many highly offensive. But they get sh-t done. Anything else is a distraction from mission effectiveness.”

It’s not condescending to say that civilians don’t understand combat. Quite the opposite; it is condescending for them to pretend they do. Just as it would be outrageous for a soldier to pretend to be an expert in theoretical physics, scratch out a particle accelerator on paper, and demand it be built. That women are demonstrably weaker, more breakable, have drastically less lung capacity, and even shoot less accurately—it’s all simply ignored.

Yet nobody seems to be demanding female integration into professional sports, where there are no women players. Alas, while football, baseball, and so on are too important to force teams to hire non-competitive players, warfare, apparently, is not.

Says Paul, efforts to ram women into what biology dictates as male-only “come across as a social engineering experiment” driven by people who neither know nor care about combat effectiveness or about the safety of our troops in the field.

Michael Fumento (U.S. Army Airborne, 1978-1982) and attended two special ops schools. He was embedded three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan. He’s also an attorney, author, and free-lance writer.