One of the most pathetic things I’ve seen lately appeared on TV the other day. It was not a newscast, soap opera or lousy baseball game. It was a small part of a hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which about a fourth of its 26 members are women, nearly all of them democrats.
Before the committee was an array of military officers with enough metal in rank-designations to start a foundry, enough ribbons/medals to cover countless battles and wounds all the way back to Vietnam and enough stripes of seniority to symbolize experience too profound to imagine. They sat like so many sheep, dumb before the shearers.
These officers—top brass—had to sit and take tongue lashings from the women senators, who knew about as much about the military as a bullfrog knows about jet engines. In another recent Senate hearing, for instance, a male brigadier general was upbraided harshly by Senator Barbara Boxer for answering her as “ma’am” instead of as “senator,” the position she said she had worked so hard for and thus wanted to be rewarded by being referred to as senator. She was so information-challenged that she didn’t understand that “ma’am” and “sir” are used in the military when GIs address each other.
The subject of the hearing: rape in the military and the lack of effort to do anything about it. The big news recently has to do with rape in the military (3,374 rapes reported in 2012, with 238 convictions) but perhaps 26,000 (includes groping, etc.) that were not reported. This, reportedly, was an increase of 37% from 2011. Amazing!
One supposes that the number 26,000 was not just pulled out of a hat, but one also wonders how its validity was determined if there were no records supporting it. Did it derive from the ladies just talking to each other and perhaps noting the information in their diaries, with the diaries somehow made available to somebody (maybe a news-anchor…does anyone know?) but as only off-the-record stuff?
The number of reported rapes is intolerable if it represents the actual facts, which, on the basis of the number of convictions, seems problematic, though the senators would argue that they merely represent the fact that the military does not police itself adequately or conduct its tribunals according to law. A conviction rate of only 7% has to account for something, however, especially when all a woman has to do to be taken seriously is simply make the charge.
Rape is the quintessential “he said, she said” thing, his word against hers. There are rarely witnesses to rape. So, even if rape-kit results point to intimacy they do not furnish facts concerning who said or did what absent physical testimony such as would be present in the case of an altercation between the players.
But none of this actually matters. The disgusting thing about that hearing (charade, actually) was that everyone in that room knew precisely what would virtually cut the incidences of rape or rape-accusations to nothing, to wit, taking the military back from the social engineers who have been wrecking it for a generation.
Separating the genders is the answer. The miserable results of boot-camp integration were proof enough that, while unisex is great for political-correctness methodology, it’s loony-tunes practically. American women are not even traditional Amazons, let alone fighting machines, so there’s also a military reason (mutual protection) for keeping them and actual soldiers apart.
The president and the political-appointees at the Pentagon have announced women ready for combat, ergo, okay in the foxholes…exponential stupidity but politically astute. They already serve on ships and have to be handled as special cases when they become pregnant. Now, they’re prepping for submarine duty, which involves quarters so crowded as to be claustrophobic to most people.
If women are as capable at making war as men are, let them form their own platoons, companies, brigades, etc. Let naval ships be either all-male or all-female. When the sexes are not thrown together, especially in high-hormone-mode connected to youth, they won’t commit hanky panky or groping or rape. This could be done practically overnight.
It won’t be done. The lady-senators would be horrified at such a thing. It’s more fun to chew-out hapless generals. The vapid Congressmen are incapable of facing the truth in the face of having to count on votes from the largest voting bloc—women. In short, common sense has no place in government.
But this—and only this—would solve the rape problem.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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