]]]]]]]]]]]]]]       TOO MANY WOMEN IN MILITARY     [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
              by Charley Reese, syndicated columnist      (1/26/1989)

     I will say what military officers cannot say without having their
careers destroyed by spineless civilian politicians, catering to the
current fad of feminism.
     There are too many women in the armed forces, and too many of
them pregnant.
     According to an article in a recent issue of Amphibious Warfare
Review, about 10 percent of the U.S. Armed Forces are women.
     The article, written by Rebecca Patterson Kmet, herself a former
naval officer, further states:
     "Supplementing the volunteer forces with a male draft, if
necessary, is preferable to staffing the armed forces with 220,000
women, 7 to 10 percent of whom are pregnant at any given time.  Over
the course of a year, up to 17 percent are pregnant.  Among Navy women
assigned to ships, the pregnancy rate soars an additional 11 percent."
     Women are not suitable for combat.
     Those nations that have the most experience, the Soviet Union and
Israel, do not use women in combat positions and have nowhere near as
high a percentage of women in their own forces.
     Historically, the role of women in the service has been to free
men for combat.
     When women become pregnant, somebody else has to do their work
for them, further weakening the services.
     At one time, women who became pregnant were discharged, but
feminists and their cowardly-civilian cohorts in Washington put a stop
to that.
     In the Navy alone, 10 percent of the females are classified as
having dependents with no spouse.
     While technically Congress has so far resisted the feminists by
forbidding women in combat roles, they are so jammed into close-
support positions that their involvement in combat will be inevitable.
     Combat is stressful enough without mixing the sexes.
     Furthermore, the single biggest deterrent to retention in the
service is spouse discontent, and mixing sexes defintely increases
this problem as it attempts to retain male officers and enlisted
personnel.
     Military life is hard enough on the family without adding this
stress.
     What we have done, of course, is allow feminist ideology to
override common sense.
     In the name of equality, we admit women to the service academies
but of course have to set up different standards for them because most
cannot meet the standards set for males.
     The armed forces have only one purpose.  That is to fight.  If
they are not fighting, they are training to fight.
     They are not a social service organization.  They are not
vocational schools.
     Day and night, the services work toward that point in the future
when they will do what they exist to do, which is to destroy property
and kill people.
     Women are not suited by nature to that environment.  Less than 1
percent of women veterans complete a 20-year career.
     Even Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, noted that "warring is a
male occupation."  There is a certain level of aggressiveness, even
brutality, necessary to maintain an effective fighting force that is
at odds with a woman's nature.
     Foul language or crude talk about sex is not a substitute for
this aggressiveness; that's only a female version of macho hot air.
     There's something strange when noting obvious differences in 
upper body strength, psychology and hormonal makeup is viewed as 
sexist.
     Congress should limit women in the armed forces to no more than 2 
percent and it should require those women who become pregnant to be 
honorably discharged.
     The armed forces have enough to do with too few resources as it 
is to be saddled with the task of baby-sitting.

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