Obama Admin’s Ruling on Women in Combat Will Endanger Marines

[O]nly a small number of women were left by the experiment’s conclusion — two of the roughly two dozen who started — mostly in part because of the physical and mental stress that comes with combat roles. Both the men and women in the task force also reported a breakdown in unit cohesion with some voicing a perceived unequal treatment from their peers. […] The Marine Corps Times report cites a number of instances where women had a difficult time completing physical tasks, like moving 200 pound dummies off the battlefield or from the turret of a “damaged” vehicle. Peer assessments were also mixed. Lance Cpl. Chris Augello, a reservist who prior to the experiment was pro-integration, submitted a 13-page essay—which he shared with the Marine Corps Times—on why he had changed his mind. “The female variable in this social experiment has wrought a fundamental change in the way male [non-commissioned officers] think, act and lead,” he wrote, referring to the female presence and its effect on how Marine Corps small-unit leaders do their job.

Who cares what the Marines think about winning in combat when questions of social progress are on the table? As President Obama put it in a statement praising the Pentagon’s “historic step forward” yesterday afternoon, “When we desegregated our military, it became stronger.” Gender integration is just the latest advance, following the racial integration of the last century. The premise here, of course, is not in fact mainstream, but radical: that sexual differences are identical to racial differences. The mainstream of American opinion agrees that racial differences are physically superficial (literally skin deep, in a sense) and essentially social constructions. The president’s argument implies that gender differences are meaningless as well: that men and women are essentially interchangeable.