01:00 We Finally Know The Name Of The Black Hawk Operator – Rebecca Lobach, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158831
20:00 Video: 500-Hour Blackhawk H-60 Pilot, Rebecca Lobach, Failed to See & Avoid American Eagle 5342, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PtOdR_VCc
48:00 Colin Liddell joins the show to discuss the DC crash, personalist vs situationist approaches, Elon Musk and the tech oligarchs
58:00 Elon Musk – hero or con man?
1:04:20 The significance of AI
1:15:30 Common values vs common interests: Which is a stronger basis for cooperation?
1:20:00 Hereditarian vs woke
1:24:00 Philosopher Michael Huemer: Are Men and Women Different? https://fakenous.substack.com/p/are-men-and-women-different
1:31:00 Kip joins to talk about identity
2:22:00 Tim Dillon: Bernie Sanders: You do not go after a man’s merch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgUUfPTnMoY
2:40:00 Martin Van Creveld: Military Women Are Not the Cure, They Are the Disease, https://www.martin-van-creveld.com/military-women-not-cure-disease/
2:43:00 Women in combat is a bad idea, https://www.martin-van-creveld.com/?s=idf+female+soldiers&submit=Search
2:50:00 Reflections on Yarvin, Why the Right is Stuck, and Startups as Dictatorships w/ Samo Burja, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeXLXbguZn0
3:03:00 Men, Women & War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line?, https://www.amazon.com/Men-Women-War-Belong-Front/dp/0304359599
3:21:30 The Truth about Women in Combat, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Cr2Tyn6io
3:32:00 World peace and the meaning of life: What equips a podcaster to be a multi-dimensional philosopher king?, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2025/world-peace-and-the-meaning-of-life/
3:38:00 Cricket in the 70’s – The Chappell Era – 2002, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8uyQEZZ6zU
3:45:30 Luka Doncic Traded to the Lakers? For Anthony Davis? Why Dallas Why??? | The Bill Simmons Podcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lYIfiyM_oE
3:56:00 Confessions of the world’s most elite sober coach,
https://www.ft.com/content/edeb157b-f543-4af4-8532-4bd30f249dac
4:01:10 Why TRUMP’S Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Opposes Women in Combat, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlwunCVoFLo
4:22:20 Phyllis Schlafly — Debate on Women in Combat | 1991, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr9vODvi0JU
4:37:45 A Conversation with Professor Emeritus Martin Van Creveld of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-BZfazbyRs
4:41:45 Bill Romanowski: He Won 4 Super Bowls… Then Became EVIL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rErWl1KsWXU
4:46:45 Talk: A Novel (2014) by Michael Smerconish, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139199
Here’s an Amazon review of Martin Van Creveld’s 2002 book Men, Women & War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line?:
In Co-ed Combat, Kingsley Browne approaches the issue of the introduction of women into the armed forces from the perspective of biology, surveying the physiological and psychological sex differences which render women unsuitable for combat. In contrast, in ‘Men, Women and War’, Martin Van Creveld, as befits his background as a military historian, adopts an historical perspective.
Surveying the historical record, he points to the scarcity of female warriors. They exist in large numbers only in mythology and fiction – which he comprehensively surveys from the Amazons of Greek mythology to ‘Xena the Warrior Princess’.
Much of this mythology, he observes, appears to be ultimately rooted, neither in reality nor even in feminist fantasies. Rather it derives from a decidedly male fantasy of the sort of which feminists usually disapprove.
“Owing partly to their titillating effects”, he writes, “tales of warrior women have always enjoyed a certain popularity, with the heroines commanding the sort of admiration that freaks often do” (p169) and “as a very large number of pictures, TV shows, films, computer games and mud-wrestling contests prove… many people find the idea of female warriors titillating: especially if, by simultaneously brandishing their weapons and showing their breasts, they can combine ferocity with sex appeal” (p9).
Regrettably, the reality is less titillating. Those few females who did pursue a military career were decidedly unfeminine. Joan of Arc famously cut her hair short and dressed like a man. Moreover, they often openly disparaged and sought to disassociate themselves from other women.
The best known are remembered, not for their modest military achievements, but precisely on account of their gender. Thus, Boudicca, although her forces vastly outnumbered the Romans, was quickly defeated (p67), while Joan of Arc, although the achievements claimed in her name were substantial, played an important role “neither as a fighter nor as a strategist”, but rather as a figurehead (p21).
The Making of Modern Mythology
Recent cases of the successful integration of women into the armed services turn out to be similarly spurious.The most frequently-cited model is that of Israel. Van Creveld’s discussion of the Israeli armed forces is particularly authoritative because he is regarded as Israel’s leading military historian.
In 1949, Israel became, according to Van Creveld, the first country ever to conscript women in peacetime. However, the terms of their service are less onerous than those imposed on men.
Whereas male Israelis are now conscripted for three years, women serve only two or, in practice, “about twenty-two months” (p186).
Moreover, “married women and pregnant women (including such as got pregnant while on active service) were exempt”, as are “women who declared themselves to be religiously observant” (p186). By 1999, those claiming exemption on this ground reached “over 26%” (p208) and “it was always much easier for a woman to gain an exemption” (p188).
Women “were not expected to take part in combat or even… combat support” and “the first thing the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] used to do whenever war broke out was evacuate the female company clerks” such that “very few women Israeli soldiers have ever been killed in action” (p188).
Similarly, much is made of the contribution of Soviet women during World War Two. However, “the Red Army that defeated Hitler… was over 97% male”, only men were conscripted (p140) and “in proportion to the size of the armed forces neither more nor less of them served than was the case in the United States and Germany” (p147). Of these, “the vast majority… worked in administration, health care and food preparation” (p147) and “fighting women formed only a single regiment” (p142).
Exceptionally, female pilots served in combat. However, “compared with the size of either the armed forces or the population, actually fewer Soviet women flew for the Red Army than did British and American ones for their respective armed forces” and women “probably amounted to about 0.7%” of pilots (p148).
In the case of both the USSR and Israel, propaganda has distorted western perceptions. Thus, several Soviet Service women “were sent on speaking tours in the west…mainly to propaganda reasons” (p142).
Similarly, the image of female Israeli soldiers is, according to Van Creveld, carefully cultivated by the Israeli armed services. It is, however, every bit as mythical as the ancient Amazons.
Sociobiology, War and Women
Although he emphasises that emphasises the historical scarcity of female soldiers, Van Creveld nevertheless claims, “it would scarcely be too much to say that women are what war is all about” (p38).Perhaps full sense can be made of these conflicting claims by placing war in its sociobiological context.
War is not uniquely human. Male chimpanzees raid and kill members of neighbouring troops. However, tellingly, they rarely kill reproductive-age females.
This suggests that the ultimate Darwinian function of warfare is reproductive (i.e. eliminating male competitors and capturing females).
This is most apparent in primitive cultures. Among the Yanomamö, Napoleon Chagnon argues, raiding is also ultimately predicated upon the capture of women.
[Other anthropologists question Chagnon’s interpretation, notably Chagnon’s former student Kenneth Good, whose main claim to fame is to have married a Yanomamo girl, who was then twice abducted by raiding Yanomamo war parties, in a dramatic confirmation of Chagnon’s theory.]
Mythological accounts of war also highlight its reproductive function (e.g. ‘The Rape of the Sabines’ and Homer’s ‘Illiad’, where war is precipitated by the elopement of Helen and conflict over captured women leads to the rift between Achilles and Agamemnon). The kidnap or elopement of women also precipitates war in the Bible (Genesis 34).
Although wars among ‘civilised’ nations are more often economically or politically motivated, the underlying psychological motivation of individual soldiers may have changed little. Perhaps this is what Van Creveld means when he says, “women are what war is all about”.
The Blame for War
Even if women can be said to be (in Darwinian terms) the ultimate cause of war, in that it is women over whom men choose to fight, this does not mean women are to blame. After all, women cannot be blamed if men choose to fight over them.However, women cannot be wholly absolved of responsibility.
Women have, Van Creveld observes, “always acted as instigators, causes, objects, victims and protégées” and “had it not been for women who, in reality as well as imagination, demand protection from their menfolk, cheer them as they march away, pray for them while they fight, wait for their return, embrace the victors, console the losers, dress the wounded, mourn the dead, and act… as spoils, war would have been both pointless and impossible” (p38).
Pacifist-feminist Helena Swanwick is quoted as observing, “although men made war, they could not have done so had women not been so adoring of their efforts” (The Most Dangerous Animal: p86).
Van Creveld acknowledges, “by some modern accounts, female voters… tend to be slightly less inclined towards the use of armed force and in favour of peace than are men” (p16). However, “some female leaders are as aggressive, as competitive and as bent on exercising dominance as any males” (p236).
This is an exaggeration. There has never been a female Hitler or Genghis Khan.
However, Warren Farrell observes that women rulers like Elizabeth I, Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Mier have waged wars at rates comparable to their male equivalents, but that the one thing that “has remained consistent throughout history is that, whether or not the leaders were female or male, almost 100 percent of the troops they sacrificed in battle were male… Equality at the top – not at the bottom” (The Myth of Male Power: p78).
As civilians, women have also supported war. For example, during WWI, British women handed white feathers to men in civilian uniform accusing them of cowardice. Feminists such as the suffragette-cum-terrorist Emmeline Pankhurst prominently participated in this practice (hence the title of my review).
Neither is women’s bellicosity unproductive. Van Creveld shows, “in myth – and, often enough, in fact as well – protecting women is one of the prime objectives for which wars are fought and for which men are expected to lay down their lives” (p37) and “the desire to gain the approval of women is one of the prime motivations that… make men desirous of going to war” (p18).
Thus, Joanna Bourke argues, “women satisfied their aggressive urges by pestering their menfolk to act on their behalf and decimate the enemy” (An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare: p149). In other words, they got men to do the dirty work while remaining themselves at a safe distance.
If men evolved to make because doing so increased their reproductive success, this partly reflects enhanced opportunities for rape and the capture of women as spoils. However, it probably also reflects enhanced opportunities for consensual sex.
Philosopher David Livingstone Smith theorises, “the masculine warrior mentality is a sexually selected trait bred into ancestral men by women who preferred warrior mates… like an inversion of the plot of Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens and Sparta take peacemaking into their own own hands by depriving their men of sex until they agree to end the Peloponnesian war” (The Most Dangerous Animal: p87).
Certainly, in terms of the ultimate Darwinian currency of reproductive success, the bottom line is that, as Van Creveld observes, “most women at most times and places have expressed their approval of warriors in the best way they could: by sleeping with them” (p25).
Thus, “the only way to make men cease fighting is to cause women to cease to admire warriors” (p93).
Casualties
Van Creveld argues, “females have generally received better treatment and fared better than males” in war (p29) and “there is reason to think that women have come out of war much better than men” (p32).Captured females are treated leniently. During the Easter Rising, Constance Markievicz “was ‘reprieved ‘due only to her sex'” while fourteen other Sinn Fein leaders were executed, and even the Nazis in Russia “hesitated to treat women as they did men” (p123).
In classical antiquity, “it was standard practice to kill the men of the cities taken by storm while selling the women and children” (p30). Thucydides in the ‘Melian Dialogue’ reports that, on conquering Melos, “the Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age, and made slaves of the women and children”.
Similar ‘Gendercides’ are reported in the Old Testament (Genesis 34; Exodus 1:22; Matthew 2).
Yet sex-selective massacres of males are not mere mythology. They are written into our genes.
James Watson reports, whereas 94% of the Y-chromosomes of contemporary Colombians are European, mitrochondrial DNA shows a “range of Amerindian MtDNA types”, concluding “the virtual absence of Amerindian Y chromosome types, reveals the tragic story of colonial genocide: indigenous men were eliminated while local women were sexually ‘assimilated’ by the conquistadors” (DNA: The Secret of Life: p257).
Neither are sex-selective massacres a mere thing of history. The targeting of male civilians – especially, but not exclusively, ‘battle-age’ males – is a recurrent feature of contemporary genocides (Jones 2000).
In contrast, targeting so-called ‘innocent women and children’ represents the quintessential war crime. Injunctions to spare women are traced back to the Old Testament. Van Creveld cites Deuteronomy 20: 10-15; but Numbers 31 contains a similar admonishment.
Van Creveld cites data that, in primitive societies, six times as many men are killed in violent conflagrations as compared to women (p30). He omits quantitative data for modern societies. However, Joshua Goldstein reports that men represent 58% of fatalities from war across the world – although, once children are included, men represent only a small minority of the world population (War and Gender: p400).
Even in WW2, where much is made of civilian bombing casualties, “only countries under German occupation had suffered more civilian than military losses” and “these victims were predominantly men” (Howarth 2005: p998).
American Casualties
This disparity in casualty rates is inflated when combatants operates in theatres far from their homes, as in most recent US military history.Van Creveld reports, in WW2, whereas 75,000 Americans were killed, only 38 American women died – “mostly of flu” (p128). During WW2, 350,000 American women volunteered (p136), of whom only 4.7% were “in or near combat zones”, only 3.5% were fired upon and only 2% were in “serious combat” (p138).
However, “Life magazine’s commemorative issue on the Second World War carried the pictures of seven female heroes and ten male ones” (p214).
Similarly, “almost 57,000 American men, but only eight American women, died in Vietnam” (p191). (Of these, only one was killed in action, compared to 47,000 of the men: ‘Co-Ed Combat’: p13). However, “this vast discrepancy did not prevent the soldiers of each sex from getting their separate monuments on the mall in Washington DC, with each monument comprising exactly three figures” (p191).
In the Gulf War, just thirteen American women died, compared to 388 men, and deployed women were only half as likely to be killed as men (p203-204). The first female combat death was hardly heroic – she “trained her weapon at a suspect while standing at the end of a pier”, then “backing off, she fell and drowned under the weight of her equipment” (p202).
Van Creveld’s book predates the Iraq War. However, Warren Farrell in Why Men Earn More updates the data, explaining, “while women comprise approximately 15% of active-duty military personnel, and 10% of those deployed in Iraq, only a bit more than 2.3% of the soldiers killed in hostile action have been women” and women have “only about one-fourth the chance of being killed” (p30).
Physical Fitness
Van Creveld demonstrates that, physiologically, “keeping up with men is too much for almost all women” (p195).The average US female army recruit is, not only shorter and lighter, but “had 16.9 fewer kiligrams of muscle and 2.6 more kilograms of fat… only 55% of the upper-body strength and 22% of the lower-body strength” and are “at a significant disadvantage when performing aerobic activities such as marching with heavy loads and working in the heat” (p152).
Moreover, “intensive training, far from diminishing the physical differences between the sexes, tends to increase them further” due to “the superior ability of men to add muscle to their bodies” (p153).
Similarly, “shorter arms make is harder for women to drawn weapons from their scabbards, stab with them and throw them”, while “a different brain structure renders them less adept at guiding or intercepting projectiles” (p153). Moreover, “large pendulous breasts… impede movement and require special protection” (p153).
Consequently, many female recruits are “[un]able to throw a hand grenade… to the minimum distance that they would not be blown to pieces” (p194).
Women are also vulnerable to injury. “Thinner skulls, lighter bone ridges and weaker jawbones provide them with less protection” and “at West Point in the early 80s, women suffered ten times as many stress fractures as… men”, while in the Air Force Academy women “suffered nine times as many shin splints, five times as many stress fractures, and more than five times as many cases of tendonitis” (p153).
During the Gulf War, “women were considerably more likely to experience problems that prevented them from being deployed: one source puts the difference at almost four to one” (p202) and, once there, “they were more likely to be sent home because of illness or because they had become pregnant” (p203). Indeed, “at one point, about one in ten women in the services was likely to be pregnant” (p203).
Servicewomen are not merely ineffective soldiers, they are often a positive burden on male colleagues, since “to compensate for women’s physical weakness military men are often obliged to undertake additional hardship” (p215) – e.g. helping women carry their supplies.
Training Standards
How can the military respond to this physiological inferiority? Clearly, “making women measure up to the same standard as men is grossly unfair” and “will lead to a massive waste of resources as a high proportion of women sustain injuries and/or drop out” (p195).Thus, “in Canada, only 1% of women who entered the standard infantryman’s training graduated” (p194).
However, “training all personnel to physical standards that most women can meet means that the men will get hardly any proper training at all” (p195). Meanwhile, the obvious solution – recruiting only men – is ideologically unthinkable.
Instead, the armed forces choose another ‘solution’ – imposing different standards for each sex. Thus, at Sandhurst, “in an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the fact that women have an easier time of it, male and female cadets begin and end their training at the same locations but follow a different course in between” (p195-6).
This is not only discrimination, it also means female troops are, compared to males, unfit for purpose and “is why in some international military publications, female soldiers are put in brackets” (p196).
Special Privileges
Special privileges do not end at basic training. Rather, “women tend to escape the more unpleasant aspects of military life, proceeding straight from a much softened form of basic training to comfortable jobs”, “somehow it was always the men who found themselves doing the heavier and dirtier work” and “whenever women enter such high-prestige, extremely demanding fields as pilot training, the physical requirements made of them are invariably less, and the conditions in which they live invariably better” (p215).Women are also relatively exempt from discipline.
Thus, “whereas eighteenth century armies thought nothing of executing a man or flogging him to death, normally the worst that could happen to a woman was to be drummed out of the regiment” (p93). Likewise, in WWI, “no sooner had the first American women donned uniform than [the] Secretary of the Navy… made it known he took ‘a dim view’ of any attempt to court-martial them”; while, in WWII, “the worst fate any female member of the armed forces might face after committing an offence was to be dishonourably discharged”, and “in the British forces women enjoyed better living conditions, more leave and laxer discipline” (p213).
Likewise, today, “all the forces that included women continued to give them preferential treatment” (p214). Even in the USSR, “servicewomen were exempt from the stricter forms of disciplinary action including arrest, details and transfer to punitive units” and “their accommodation was also superior” (p214).
Yet women are often promoted faster. Thus, “in Switzerland they do considerably less service in order to gain promotion” (p214) and “in countries that conscript men but allow women to volunteer the latter are usually underrepresented in entry-level slots and overrepresented among NCOs” (p215).
Pregnancies
Van Creveld reports, “at one point [during the Gulf War], about one in ten women in the services was likely to be pregnant” (p203). Indeed, pregnancy was incentivised – “female service personnel could… obtain a homeward ticket by neglecting to use contraceptives and getting pregnant” – whereas “men who voluntarily incapacitated themselves would be court-marshalled” (p216).The fate of the first Aircraft carrier to accept women as crewmembers illustrates the scale of the problem. Millions of dollars were spent to modify the washrooms, accommodation etc. Yet, although the changes introduced included bringing gynaecologists and contraceptives on board, “none of this could prevent thirty-nine women – just under 10 per cent of the total – from getting pregnant during the cruise and consequentially having to leave the ship” (p206).
Van Creveld caustically concludes, “if it is true that their absence did not affect operations, as the navy claimed, one might well wonder what they were doing on board in the first place” (p206).
‘Sexual Harassment’
Although exploiting authority to coerce sexual favours has always been a disciplinary and criminal offence, in the 70s a new concept – ‘sexual harassment’ – was invented and soon “stretched beyond recognition until it included anything a women might not like… even if there was no physical contact; even if it did not include pressure of any sort; and even if it did not damage her career” (p217).In response, “hotlines were opened to enable female soldiers to inform on their male colleagues” (p219) and this “provided military women with a formidable weapon for use against their own side” in the battle for promotions (p217).
Consequentially, armed forces, “first in the US and then in other countries as well… were torn apart” (p217). In Australia “a major scandal (followed by a major investigation and the inevitable male casualties)… may be expected every two years on average” (p219).
Soon, “sexual harassment was turned into a one-time offence that led to the immediate discharge of those convicted” (p219). A married couple was jailed because “during the period of courtship, the woman had been under the man’s command” (p219).
Acquittal was no defence as “even if the charge failed to stick, the man’s career would probably be over… as happened… when President Clinton had a navy captain and admiral designate who had just been acquitted taken off the promotions list” (p218).
Thus, “in organizations long noted for their coarse language… all of a sudden for drillmasters to refer to a person’s gender or bodily parts constituted sexual harassment” (p217) and “anyone caught touching… a female soldier with the aim of straightening a tie or adjusting a belt while on parade put himself at risk” (p217).
By the turn of the century, he reveals, “US army recruits actually spent more time on [sensitivity training] than on learning to use their weapons” (p220).
Strict discipline and hierarchy are essential in an effective armed services. Likewise, ‘hazing’ and initiation rituals function to develop the bonding and trust necessary in a cohesive unit. Such methods are, Van Creveld observes, “often used as a deliberate tool to humiliate new recruits and make them more amenable to disciple” (p217).
The result was that, exempted from this treatment, female soldiers were, far from being ‘integrated’, effectively “put out of bounds” (p219).
The Right to Vote and the Obligation to Fight
When wars were still frequent and bloody, Van Creveld observes, “nobody, least of all feminists, had hit on the idea that women could not be free and equal unless they served in the one human institution that is most hierarchical and which, prison apart, allows its members least freedom” (p133).Rather, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst argued, “it was not necessary for women to go to ‘the trenches’… since it was women who brought children into the world and thus perpetuated the human race” (quoted in ‘Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography’ by June Purvis: p269).
Yet the issues of enfranchisement and conscription are intimately linked. Van Creveld reports:
“In the Western world since the French Revolution the right to vote was often a direct consequence of, or at any rate went together with, conscription. But women were able to obtain the former without being subjected to the latter; for them to be put on an equal footing with men would have meant an end to their greatest privilege” (p210).
Yet, in the UK (like in the US), the enfranchisement women occurred immediately after WW1. Thus, while women metaphorically ‘fought’ for the right to vote, men literally fought in the trenches of the Somme and Verdun.
Perversely, the enfranchisement of women was explained as a ‘reward’ for women’s ‘contribution the war effort’. Yet, besides handing out white feathers, this ‘contribution’ consisted largely of industrial and agricultural work of the sort which men had had to do even before the war. Meanwhile, those men whose ‘contribution’ was equivalent – namely conscientious objectors – were actually deprived of the vote for several years as a punishment.
Van Creveld concludes, “had women been asked to share the burden of conscription as the price for price for citizenship most might well have preferred to do without” (p229).
As evidence he cites the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the US constitutional amendment which was defeated after conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly observed that it would abolish women’s legal privileges in relation to, not only the draft, but also matrimonial law and child custody.
Thus, Van Creveld concludes, “faced with the choice between maintaining their traditional privileges and obtaining equality, they preferred the former” (p211). In short, “being treated equally with men was the last thing most women wanted” (p211).
This controversial conclusion is expanded in a more recent work by Van Creveld, in which he contends that, far from being ‘oppressed’, women are in fact “The Privileged Sex”.
The Decline of War
Van Creveld sees the integration of the armed forces as a symptom of their decline. In recent times, “the armed forces of no developed country have fought a major war against a major opponent who was even remotely capable of putting its own national existence in danger… all they have done is engage in skirmishes… in places hundreds if not thousands of miles away against enemies who were often so small and weak they could hardly be located on a map” (p11-12).“As major inter-state war began to retreat and the armed forces of developed countries entered a long decline,” he writes, “paradoxically women for the first time gained a permanent place in those forces” (p180).
Actually, Van Creveld contends, the decline of war is a direct cause of the move towards integration.
Only a nation with no imminent threat of invasion would risk the feminisation of its armed forces – “the more superfluous they… become… the more both society and its leaders feel able to treat them, not as fighting machines, but as social laboratories for some feminist brave new world” (p11).
Only where the risk of death or serious injury to service personnel is sufficiently minimal is a society likely tolerate the spectre of women soldiers. If and when the bloodbath begins, the project will be swiftly abandoned.
Moreover, “it was hardly by accident” that calls for the inclusion of women “coincided with the switch from conscription to all volunteer forces” (p210). It was one thing for women to demand the ‘right’ to enlist – quite another to be forcibly conscripted.
Proof of the association between the decline of war and the inclusion of women is found, Van Creveld reports, in those parts of the world where there has been no such decline – namely “the five sixths of the world… known as ‘developing'”, where “wars are frequent, bloody and devastating” but where “in not one of these wars do women participate any more than they have always done; that is to say hardly at all” (p12).
Instead, “because the belligerents regard these wars as a matter of life and death… the last thing that enters their heads is to bow to the kind of social political and juridicial constraints that have compelled the armed forces of the developed world to take in women” (p226).
“Unlike their sisters in the developed countries, who have enjoyed peace for over half a century on end and consequentially no longer have the slightest idea of what war is really like,” Van Creveld explains, “women in war-torn developing ones all over the world” want no part of what is “of all human activities… by far the most nasty… the most dangerous… [and] physically the most demanding” (p227).
Conclusion
The special privileges afforded female enlistees mean that, far from representing a triumph for gender equality, the enlistment of women has actually been a case study in female privilege.Thus, Van Creveld concludes:
“Women’s attempt to improve their social position by joining the military has not only failed but backfired. Instead of showing they are equal to men, it has shown they cannot do without male protection” (p234).The Future
What then of the future?In ‘Co-ed Combat’, Browne views the feminisation of the military as a classic illustration of the old adage that ‘generals always fight the last war’. Thus, whereas recent conflicts have involved the US fighting third-rate powers or stateless insurgents, such that the integration of the armed services has proven a costly but not insurmountable burden, this will not necessarily be true in the future.
In contrast, Van Creveld views changes in the nature of war as likely to be permanent (see The Transformation of War).
We can only hope that Van Creveld is proven right.
