Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Although I am not aware that any nation in history that succeeded in battle with women as its front-line warriors, we will.

I am skeptical but willing to be proven wrong, if it can be done safely. There is a waiting list a mile long of good men wanting to become Navy SEALs. If a woman can beat them playing by the same rules, fine with me.

But if not – if she needs special rules because she’s not physically and mentally tough enough to become a snake-eating, bone-breaking killer – then this is worse than a bad idea, it’s another Benghazi back-stabbing in the making. Everybody on her special operations team is put at risk, no different than if they put flabby, middle-aged me on the team.

What usually happens when Sally The SEAL can’t do the job is simple: it becomes a “team lift” like they do at Target. What once was a one-man job becomes a two-person job. Having re-defined the job it downward, then the Pentagon can truthfully say “she can do the job” as it now exists. Best example: end of the movie GI Jane with Demi Moore. Firefight on the beach, SEAL team leader hit, new recruit Demi Moore breaks cover to dash out and drag him to safety BUT CAN’T DO IT ALONE . . . so another team member breaks cover to run out and assist her. Of course, in the movie neither the guy helping the little girl nor the guy waiting to be rescued get killed for their chivalry. But in real life? Her lack of physical ability puts two other team members at risk.

Worse, the helicopter has a limited number of seats to transport SEAL team members. Commanders can’t afford to fill those seats with people who can’t physically do the job. So we can call her a SEAL and give her the uniform and the medals, but unit commanders will work hard to ensure her role becomes communications, intelligence analyst, spotter, or some job that doesn’t involve the physical duties she can’t perform. More of the dangerous work will go to the big guys because there are fewer of them to share it. No chance for the big guys to advance to those prime slots as women will fill them right out of the gate.

What will the military do long-term? Probably start a new, more secret, more exclusive club where the men who join really can count on the standards being kept. The military will bury the membership, the very existence. Like the show The Unit. The Unit does not exist so it’s exempt from politically correct insanity. The SEALs were secret. Delta Force was secret. And while they were, they were the best. Now, they’re a social experiment. President Obama should rename the SEALs as “The Lightworker Brigade.”

Seriously, if women in front-line combat positions were a good idea, wouldn’t other countries have tried it before? Wouldn’t it be the standard model around the world already? Not talking about women taking up arms in desperate conflicts like the siege of Stalingrad or Israel (which has been pretty much a desperate situation from the day it was founded), I mean where are the female SAS troops, the female Foreign Legionnaires, show me the photos of Hildegard the SS-trooper?

I know, my lack of instant acceptance reveals me as a raciss, sexist, homophobe and besides, I have no proof it won’t work. Conceded, but I think it’s a bad idea to wait until I can offer the same proof as Tim the Enchanter . . . look at the bones, man! Look at the bones!

Joe Doakes

The publicity the SEALs have gotten recently may well be their undoing, unless the military develops the kind of policy backbone it hasn’t had in a few decades.  The Army unit formerly known as “Delta” – which hasn’t even gone by the name that replaced “Delta” in well over a decade – seems to have done more or less what Joe ascribed to the fictional “Unit”; adopted complete silence for both bureaucratic as well as operational security.

There’s also a long-standing rumor (that the Army and other sources constantly deny) that there’s an even-more-secret sub-unit in the unit formerly called “Delta” that does have mixed-gender operators at some level.  Intelligence people (and people who read about ’em) have long known that mixed-gender couples attract less attention from security than guys traveling alone, in pairs or small groups.  The theory is the mixed-gender unit does the “location scouting” in denied territory, using that basic tidbit of human psychology…

…but that, even if it’s true, is more a matter of espionage – at which women have a long and distinguished record – than fitnessfor knife-point combat.