{"id":92803,"date":"2016-04-07T12:29:57","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T20:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=92803"},"modified":"2016-04-07T12:29:57","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T20:29:57","slug":"women-in-combat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=92803","title":{"rendered":"Women In Combat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin van Creveld writes<\/a>: Women\u2019s inferiority to men in respect to physical strength, aerobic capacity, endurance and, above all, robustness, is obvious to all. The price is paid by their male colleagues; when a female trainee in a mixed unit breaks down, as often happens, guess who is going to carry her and\/or her weapons and pack? But the price women have paid for serving in \u201ccombat\u201d units has been much higher. Many of the documents in question are classified so as to avoid angering Israeli feminists, an aggressive and often obnoxious lot, by presenting them with the facts. Some, however, have been published by a former student of mine, Colonel (ret.) Raz Sagi.<\/p>\n

The picture that emerges is not pretty. Less than 3 percent of IDF \u201ccombat troops\u201d are female. However, over the last few years they, or the lawyers acting in their name, have served 10-15 percent of the suits concerning compensation for injuries suffered while on \u201coperational activity\u201d (whatever that may mean). In proportion to their numbers, women sue three to five times more often than men. Sagi\u2019s book bristles with interviews with young women who served as, or trained for, \u201ccombat\u201d MOS and were seriously injured, sometimes for life. Such cases are brought before the courts almost every day.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s take a closer look at what \u201ccombat\u201d actually entails. The largest group, 442 out of 1,593, serve in three mixed battalions named \u201cCaracal,\u201d \u201cLeopard,\u201d and \u201cLions of the Jordan\u201d respectively. In each of these they form 60 percent of the total. What all three have in common is that they are permanently deployed along the borders with Egypt and Jordan. Those in turn have this in common that, over the last forty years, they have seen hardly a shot fired in anger. The remaining women are divided between \u201ccombat intelligence collection\u201d (meaning that they look for all kinds of interesting things after the battle is over), border police (meaning that they stand guard against terrorists, as Hadar Cohen, who was mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago, did), civil defense, and artillery.<\/p>\n

It so happened that, a day after I completed this article, I watched a clip of artillery troops on a route march<\/a>. The men, heavily loaded with equipment of all kinds, sweated, grunted and did their best to keep up. One or two female soldiers were marching along, carrying a much smaller pack and looking as if they were on a lark. Whatever they may have been doing there, clearly they were not being tested as the men were. <\/p>\n

Neither the infantry, nor the armored corps, nor the engineers, nor the special units, which between them form the bulk of the IDF\u2019s \u201cteeth,\u201d have any women at all. Scant wonder that, during Operation Protective Edge back in the summer of 2014, out of 66 Israeli troops who died not one was female.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the terminology has been changing. Having just celebrated my seventieth birthday, I can remember the time when the term lohem, meaning fighter or warrior, used to be the highest compliment anyone in Israel could receive. Nine cases out of ten, it referred to a soldier, a male one of course, who actually fired at, and was fired on by, the enemy. Now its female form, lohemet, also refers to all the above units, not one of which are meant to face an armed and trained enemy soldier able to fire back. Scant wonder that, in popular slang, the plural form of lohemet, lohamot, is often explained as meaning lo-hamot, \u201cnot-hot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why does all this matter? For four reasons. First, as the term \u201cnot hot\u201d implies, in Israel as in all other modern countries armed forces the presence of women has contributed to the decline in the prestige of those forces and, with it, their ability to attract high-quality male manpower. Presumably that is why the \u201cLions\u201d (arayot, in Hebrew) battalion, in spite of being made up mostly of women, is not called leviot \u201cLionesses.\u201d Or else surely any proper man would have shot himself rather than serve in it.<\/p>\n

Second, in Israel as in all other modern countries that presence has led to \u201cgender norming\u201d and, with it, falling standards which, in case of war, could be dangerous. Third, as the above figures show, too many women who, whether out of idealism or sheer penis envy, volunteer to serve in \u201ccombat\u201d units are injured, with bad consequences both for themselves and, since they have to be paid pensions, the defense budget. Fourth, outside Israel quite some people, being misinformed about the true state of affairs, still take the IDF as an example to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin van Creveld writes: Women\u2019s inferiority to men in respect to physical strength, aerobic capacity, endurance and, above all, robustness, is obvious to all. The price is paid by their male colleagues; when a female trainee in a mixed unit … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[142,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-israel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t