Why Women in the Front Lines is Fantasy

The people that want to put women on the front lines of the Infantry have created a world in their imagination where they have convinced themselves that what they WANT to be true IS true.

Fantasy is all well and good when it is recognized as BEING fantasy. I enjoy watching Xena, Warrior Princess kick butt as much as anyone else. I enjoy the The Deed of Paksenarrion Trilogy as much as anyone and have read it multiple times. I enjoy Urban Fantasy and Post-Apocalyptic fiction where the women are shoulder to shoulder with the men savaging Orcs or creatures of the night or enemy soldiers or zombies.

But I always recognize that what I am reading is FANTASY and not reality.

I’ve studied history most of my life, especially military history. There is a reason that, as far back as we have recorded history, women have not (with rare exceptions) been shoulder to shoulder with men on the battlefield.The few exceptions have been times of utter desperation or societies where combat was more formal ritual that actual warfare.

The simple historical fact is that if putting women on the battlefield alongside men produced an army as effective as one comprised solely of men SOME civilization would have tried it and that civilization would have defeated, conquered and absorbed every other civilization in the world by dint of having twice as many available combatants as any other civilization.Even if a single civilization had tried it and failed, if the practice had truly been effective everyone else would have adopted it as well and it would have become the norm.

We would be that the descendents of that culture because all cultures and civilizations that didn’t embrace the more effective form of warfare would be in the dustbin of history and exist only in history books. Where is that civilization?

The differences between men and women in size, strength, psychological characteristics and many other factors are obvious enough to everyone (except true died in the wools fantasists) that there is not really any need to go into them. If those things need to be explained to you then perhaps you should just go back to your fantasy novel and let the adults talk.

One of the pernicious aspects of this decision is that there exists the belief that putting young men and women, at their peak physical condition, in distant, dangerous places where the only thing they have to depend on is each other is NOT going to result in significant emotional relationships developing between individuals of opposite sexes.

The Israelis, undeniably one of the most effective military organizations in the world, will not put women in the front lines with men because they have seen the consequences of doing so; the primary one being that such units always take much higher casualties because the men place themselves in extraordinary danger to try to keep the women safe. That is the result of tens of thousands of years of Human cultural and psychological evolution and nothing you say or do or teach is going to dramatically change that fundamental aspect of human nature. And for the sake of the Human Race we’d better pray that we never DO manage to change that aspect of Human Nature.

Only someone as innocent as a young child could ever believe that simply by imagining that these young people are going to maintain asexual, platonic relationships in an atmosphere of extreme danger and extreme stress would make that a reality. That idea also flies in the face of several thousands of years of Human Nature

And that is the fundamental flaw in so many of the absurd ideas that are being implemented in our country today… the fallacy that IMAGINING something to be true, WISHING it to be true, WANTING it to be true will in any way, shape or form alter Reality.

People like this develop these theories of how life COULD be if people would simply act the way these theorists believe they SHOULD act. They believe that by simply telling people the way the SHOULD act that people will suddenly undergo an epiphany of enlightenment and start behaving as the theorists believe the should (if they don’t then it will be necessary to pass new laws and create new regulations to ensure that they DO behave as they SHOULD).

Once they have convinced themselves that they have “instructed” people in the correct way to behave then it is logical to go forward and implement their theories of how life COULD be.

That is the logic that has created the world in which we increasingly find ourselves. People fantasizing the world as they WISH it were and then assuming that Reality will cooperate with their wishes.

And WE, the People of the country, our sons (and now our daughters) pay the price in blood for their fantasies.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Lighthouse Survival Librarian