Read them on Martin van Creveld's home page.
MVC is one hell of an historian, with plenty of books under his belt. Some of which are wonderfully good and insightful. Why is he not more well-known? Mostly because he does not flatter those in power who repeatedly screw the pooch, year in and year out.
I have read his recent stuff on the cheap via Kindle and much of his older stuff not yet available on Kindle via Abebooks.
Of the two most remarkable books I have read by him, one was on logistics, the other on the impossible quest of equality (of any sort at any time).
Anyways, here are bits from those two articles. One by MVC, one by Bill Lind
The Indispensible Sex
Martin Van Creveld
Last week a female Israeli soldier, Hadar (meaning, roughly, “Splendor,” or “Glory,”) Cohen, was killed in the course of duty. Two months into the Israel Defense Force, just two days after she had completed her basic training and taken the military oath of allegiance, she found herself standing guard at Old Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. With her were another female soldier and some male comrades. Three terrorists (some would call them Palestinian freedom fighters) armed with knives, submachine guns which they concealed under their coats emerged. One terrorist stabbed and was able to wound the other female soldier before Hadar gunned him down, probably saving her comrade’s life. Thereupon a second terrorist turned on her and stabbed her to death before he and the third terrorist present were “wasted”—this is standard language—by her fellow soldiers. She was nineteen years old.
...she volunteered to do a man’s job; i.e was trained to become what both the IDF and the media call a lohemet, meaning either “fighter” or “warrior.”
But do not allow yourself to be misled. The term does not mean she went through anything like a full infantryman’s course. No Israeli woman does, and of those who tried to do so on a more or less experimental basis many have been injured, some of them very badly. All it means is that she was taught how to use her weapon, apparently a shortened version of the M-16 rifle (the real thing would have been too long for her to operate efficiently), and put into a bulletproof vest. So equipped, she was made to stand guard at what is currently one of the most dangerous spots in Israel; dangerous in the sense that, over the last few weeks, it has been the scene of several more or less similar attacks.
There is a lot more. MVC's argument is from practicality/indispensability.
The SECDEF Lied
Bill Lind
In announcing that all positions in the U.S. armed forces would be opened to women, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter lied. According to the December 4 New York Times, he said,
They’ll [women] be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men.
That statement is false. Women will not be able to do those things. Their bodies are not designed to do many of the tasks those positions entail. So long as realistic standards are maintained for those specialties, women will not be able even to qualify for them much less perform adequately in them. Men and women are different, physically and mentally, and their traditional social roles reflect their inherent differences.
Had the Truth Fairy landed on the SECDEF’s tongue as he was about to make his announcement, he would have said,
We are opening all positions in the armed forces to women. Women will not be able to do many of the duties entailed especially in the combat arms. We–the Obama administration–don’t care about that. Our ideology of cultural Marxism demands we pretend men and women are interchangeable. We will do whatever is necessary to maintain that illusion. In this case, if women cannot meet the standards, we will change the standards. If not enough women make it into the combat arms, we will establish quotas.
If, in combat, women cannot perform the mission, that’s not our problem. If it means lost engagements and unnecessary American casualties, what is that to us? Our ideology comes first. Get with the party’s program–or else.
Here again we see the slide of state armed forces into history’s wastebasket. Playthings of a political establishment that knows nothing of war, they exist for every purpose except fighting.
More at the linky.
Bill Lind is also no slouch. Read up on his 4th Gen / four generations of modern war for a different take on our current crisis.
