http://www.nationalreview.com/node/423888/print Women in Combat Endanger Their Fellow Soldiers’ Lives
By David French — September 11, 2015
Imagine, if you will, reading a story that begins, “The NFL announced the results of a year-long study in mixed-gender football teams today, concluding that women not only suffered more injuries than men, but also performed worse in every football-related physical task.”
You would likely have two immediate reactions. First, you’d wonder why the NFL actually had to commission a study to discover a reality obvious to every sentient, rational person in the universe — women aren’t as physically strong as men. Then, you’d demand to know what kind of barbarian actually approved a testing process in which real women were injured at wildly disproportionate rates to prove what we all already knew.
The Marine Corps is playing out just such a scenario today. In response to relentless political pressure from social-justice warriors who mistake military service for one long exercise in diversity training, the Marines conducted a nine-month study comparing the performance of all-male infantry units with mixed units in simulated combat environments. The results?
Women in a new Marine Corps unit created to assess how female service members perform in combat were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons, and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield.
In fact, this summary doesn’t do justice to the dramatic disparity the study documented. The women weren’t slightly less capable than the men; they were profoundly less capable. All-male units performed better in 93 of 134 categories evaluated, and there were “notable” differences in accuracy in “every individual weapons system.” Physically, the top 25th percentile of women overlapped with the bottom 25th percentile of men, and they possessed less anaerobic power, anaerobic capacity, and aerobic capacity than their male colleagues. Women undergoing entry-level infantry training were injured at “more than six times the rate of their male counterparts.”
continued
