The High Cost of Fairness in the Military

On his radio show today, Frank Gaffney spoke to Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness about an upcoming Armed Services Committee hearing and some of the issues which are expected to be addressed.

In addition to gutting military budgets, this administration is obsessed with making sure women in the military are treated exactly like men, despite their physical differences. It goes to the heart of the progressive belief in fairness above all else even if that fairness costs lives.

Donnelly pointed out that this will be a public hearing and that top officials from the Marines, Navy and Army will be present. Once again, the Obama administration is ignoring the advice of military leaders in favor of civilian recommendations that conform to their vision and our elected representatives will sit by and let it happen.

Here’s how Donnelly described it:

“I’m so alarmed to see the leaders of the Congress, they have the Constitutional responsibility to make these decisions and yet they are just abdicating it. They are assuming everything is decided. There were some closed door hearings during this process of research, only now are the documents coming out, and I have to tell you, looking at these documents, you see they come from sociologists, political scientists, behaviorists; civilians most of them. They are all academic in their premises, and they don’t even consider that maybe this is a bad idea.”

Again, what’s likely to happen here is the bypassing of reality in the name of gender equality.

Donnelly went on:

“…it will all be about their plans for mitigation, everyone will say, ‘Oh that sounds nice.’ And they’ll all go home. And the people out there in the field, including the people at the boot camp are going to try to figure out how do you treat women exactly like men when you know that their physical strength is not the same, that it is deficient by at least 30 percent in upper body strength and much more in other physical tests. How are you going to turn women into men physically? You can’t do that, and if you do, you’re going to end up breaking a lot of bones and hurting a lot of Marines.”

Later in their conversation, Gaffney brought up a recent story from Stars and Stripes magazine about a spate of recent accidents involving military helicopters which may be due to maintenance and training issues which are a direct result of military budget cuts.

It seems as though this administration cares more deeply about social policy in the military than they do about aging aircraft. Donnelly concluded:

“Distractions, as well as reductions in budget and the maintenance budgets that, quite often, are the first to be cut because you don’t have lobbyists that are out there advocating for maintenance. It’s a dynamic that can get worse in times of severe budget cuts, sequestration. It’s an issue that is going to have to be addressed, defense dollars are being misspent in many areas; the social changes  going on are certainly going to cost a lot more in the future.”

Hopefully, our next commander in chief will care more about helicopter maintenance than social justice policy.