The other day Secretary of the Navy Ray Nabus was on C-Span's Washington Journal, and something he said was hard to reconcile with some of the other news that's come out about the military.
Specifically, at around the 16:15 point of the program -- watch it here -- he was asked what is the biggest challenge for the Naval Academy as it prepares a new generation of offices. He answered by saying how seriously he takes charges of sexual assaults at the Academy. He said reports show that this problem hasn't gotten any better over the past few years. He said he addressed the people at the school to emphasize how serious that was. And in an apparent attempt to compare sexual assaults with the Fort Hood shooting he noted that a sexual assault was an attack on one's fellow students similar to a gunman walking through the school shooting at the students. Maybe that stern talking-to will solve the problem.
So now we look back through the news a couple of months to see the announcement in WaPo that Pentagon removes ban on women in combat. So we need to reconcile these two things -- a problem of sexual assault and harassment on one hand, and a drive to put women in combat positions on the other.
Brings to mind this editorial titled Five myths about women in combat. Myth number 3 was as follows:
The presence of women causes sexual tension in training and battle.
This notion insults men as much as women. For nearly 10 years, the U.S. military has been fighting two wars with a majority of units that include both men and women. Why hasn’t supposed “sexual tension” undermined the stellar performance of gender-integrated units? ...
So the myth of "sexual tension in training and battle" has been busted, has it?
Well, that attempt at myth busting has itself been busted. March 13, 2013: Military Sexual Assault Victims Detail Humiliation; Aug 13, 2012: Sexual Assault Cases Flood Military Courts to cite two at Military.com.
Over at the government radio website we find two more from March of this year: Sexual Violence Victims Say Military Justice System Is 'Broken' and Off The Battlefield, Military Women Face Risks From Male Troops which proclaims "Women who join the military face a much higher risk of sexual assault than civilian women."
So clearly the problem of demanding political correctness from the people we train to kill our enemies is not so easy. The effort by the government to place women in combat situations with men is a little ahead of its time. Maybe it would work if they had gender segregated brigades as they probably do in other countries. In any event, put young men and women in their sexual prime in close quarters with one another, but don't expect political correctness to prevail.
[The sophisticated writer doesn't use the word "bust" or variations thereof when writing about gender differences. Robo-ed. We're good. No sophisticated writers here. Sleepless.]
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