Sex & the Soldiers

On 17 November, the lady senator from New York was one level shy of hysteria on a Sunday talk-show with Martha Raddatz, who had a hard time getting a word in. I’ve watched two other lady senators on C-Span delivering withering lectures on the subject before that august body. The subject (again): sexual assaults in the military. The women want alleged perpetrators to be tried in civilian courts. A change in assault laws is before the Senate.

On C-Span back in the summer, a hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee was aired, about a fourth of its 26 members being women, nearly all of them democrats. The subject of the hearing: rape in the military and the alleged lack of effort to do anything about it. The officers/witnesses—top brass—had to sit and take tongue lashings from the women senators, who knew as much about the military as a bullfrog knows about jet engines.

The statistics had to do with rape in the military—3,374 reported in 2012, with 238 convictions in military courts, but also 26,000 other assaults (including groping, etc.) that were not reported, an increase of 37% from 2011. Ostensibly, the episodes were not reported for fear of losing rank or location or whatever.

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 women-troops just talking to each other and perhaps noting the information in their diaries, with the diaries somehow made available to somebody…maybe a female news-anchor?

Rape is the quintessential “he said, she said” thing, his word against hers. There are rarely witnesses to rape or even groping. So, even if rape-kit results point to intimacy they do not furnish facts concerning who did what absent physical injuries such as would be present in the case of an actual altercation between the players.

The female senators argue that the conviction-rate represents a military not policing itself adequately or conducting its tribunals according to law. A conviction rate of only 7% has to account for something, but all a woman has to do to be taken seriously is simply make the charge. The male in either civilian or military status is automatically presumed guilty until proven innocent, no matter the actual facts.

One senator gave a gory description of an assault (and others) at the Air Force Academy. It was discovered long ago that gender-integration in boot camps was loony-tunes and had to be stopped. Why not just set up military academies—like boot camp but on the college 4-year level—that are gender specific? That’s simple enough and the government wastes relentlessly the minute amount of cost involved.

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. Placing a handful of women in combat roles now only exacerbates the problem. They’re as fit for armed combat as they are to play in the National Football League…dead weight, taking the attention of fighting men from their jobs – breaking things and killing people.

Unisex is great for political-correctness methodology but it’s loony-tunes practically. If women are as good 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, who also know about the female come-on factor and the revenge-tool of rape-charge employed by a woman scorned, things the officers will never mention. 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.

As for the lady news-anchors who might be in on the alleged info (26,000)…while the military women dress modestly, at least in public, the TV gals do the come-on thing—plenty of cleavage and thigh, with body language to make the news sexy, no matter if it involves something like the Marathon bombers or a school-shooting. No wonder it’s called the “boob-tube.”

And so it goes.
Jim Clark