As soon as Remembrance Day lapel poppies make their annual appearance, wars, old and new, occupy my thoughts. I am especially keen to see the film Jarhead, which tells the story of a U.S. Marine who fought in the first Gulf War. By all accounts, Jarhead follows on other classics of the war-movie genre by answering the timeless question of why young males are willing to face torturous training, brutal hazing, long-term celibacy, excruciating tedium, dust, mud and the risk of death (or worse) in war.
Jarhead will no doubt be seen as hate propaganda in peace-loving Canada, where pacifism is in vogue, and traditional military values are viewed with suspicion. Not coincidentally, our Canadian Forces (CF) are deeply demoralized; military historian Jack Granatstein predicts a mass exodus of 20% over the next few years.
Reviving a military with cruelly degraded mechanical resources—with virtually no significant new funds available for use until 2009-10—will be a difficult job for recently appointed Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier. His most pressing task is to stem rampant attrition—in 1993, enlistment stood at 80,000; in 2005, at 58,000. Re-masculating the Forces would be a good place to start.
Nothing better illustrates Hillier’s uphill battle than political termagant Carolyn Parrish’s reaction to his perfectly reasonable assertion, in July, that terrorists are “scumbags … who detest our freedoms” and that it is the Forces’ job “to be able to kill people.” She declared Hillier “dangerous” and “testosterone-fuelled.”
Parish’s reflexive hostility to Hillier’s personal manliness is, unfortunately, emblematic of the anti-male attitude behind the transformation of our combat forces into the integrated, “sensitive” New Military. Women have served in the CF since 1951, and today represent up to 14% of the CF. They were deployed in support roles until a Human Rights tribunal in 1989 struck down barriers to all service options, including combat.
This meant integrated training with men. Since then, it’s goodbye testosterone, hello estrogen, PMS, pregnancy—and lower, gentler criteria. The single-standard Old Military shaped recruits to meet fixed benchmarks. The double-standard New Military fixes benchmarks to meet enlistees’ shapes.
To maintain the fiction of gender neutrality insisted upon by the social engineers who pressed for integration, and produce the appearance of equality of outcomes, co-ed physical training has been dumbed down to accommodate women’s lesser strength and ability, an insulting disservice to male recruits. But women also have female reproductive issues that can’t be similarly obscured, and that receive special treatment. Pregnancy, for example, allows women to withdraw from combat duty with honour, while men have no such combat escape hatch. Some “equity.”
Feminists perceive the military as simply one more government or social institution in need of accelerated PC behaviour modification to ensure functional and numerical parity for women. Manliness as a virtue has already been eradicated from scholarship, early education, child psychology, family law, and social work. Now it is the military’s turn.
But combat troops aren’t like teachers or postal workers or bus drivers. The military is—was—a unique, genetics-dependent culture, as specific to males as midwifery is to females. Men don’t fight for the feminist ideal of androgyny, but to protect the women they love—wives, daughters, mothers, sisters—and the values they represent—normalcy, freedom and peace. Former U.S. infantry officer Brian Mitchell, author of Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, points out that rather than shortfalls being a reason to recruit women, recruiting women causes shortfalls: “The more attractive you make the military look to women, the less attractive you make it look to men.”
In spite of the military’s ardent courtship, women leave the CF for domestic obligations or greener career pastures at double to triple the rate for men. Add extra expense for female-specific injury and medical needs, double those of men’s, not to mention costly flights of PC-induced idiocy (our Forces once commissioned a pregnancy combat uniform), and you have an institution in denial. Sadly, according to Granatstein, “It will take a large number of dead female soldiers before we snap back to reality”.
Rick Hillier’s comments have been labelled “controversial.” Nonsense. He’s a breath of fresh air, a role model for young men seeking purpose and self-realization through the ultimate male bonding experience.
Apart from rear-service, medical and administrative functions, where they shine, women don’t belong in the CF. Hillier would do well to take a leaf from the Jarheads’ copybook. Unlike the other Services, the U.S. Marines enlisted women, but successfully resisted integrated training. Consequently, they are the only U.S. Service to have easily met their recruitment goals, ensuring their continuing capability to field the world’s most motivated, cohesive and effective combat units. More power to them.
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