Claire, the Lean, Mean, Killing Machine: This Woman’s Army

By Nicholas Stix

Toogood Reports/A Different Drummer
May 3, 2003

(The U.S. military’s recent outbursts of diversity at Fort Hood and the U.S. Naval Academy reminded me of, and inspired me to reprint this 2003 article.)
 

A Few Good Persons

If you’re goin’ to fight for freedom,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,
If you go to fight for freedom,
April time will be a love-in there.

Remember the song, “San Francisco”? As written by John Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie, it was a big hit in 1967, a time when the city by the bay was famous for “flower children.”

“If you’re going to San Francisco,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,
If you’re going to San Francisco,
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there,
For those who come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.”

Well, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, his bosses, and folks at places like NOW apparently think we can now fight wars with flower children.

Meet Claire. As Kristof described her last Friday,

The only time I saw Iraqi men entirely intimidated by the American-British forces was in Basra, when a cluster of men gaped, awestruck, around an example of the most astoundingly modern weapon in the Western arsenal.

Her name was Claire, and she had a machine gun in her arms and a flower in her helmet.

“I’m a bit of a novelty here,” she said, laughing. The Iraqis flinched.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, because I wasn’t there and Kristof was, that’s a lot of Barbra Streisand, if you’ll pardon my French. The only Iraqi male who might have been intimidated by Claire, would have to have had eyes so bad he could just make out the gun, but not the sex of its bearer, and was probably wheelchair bound. Those men weren’t intimidated; they were shocked.

Kristof’s arguments for why we should have women at the front lines are:

1. They will cause the most bloodthirsty enemy troops to show compassion, and perhaps not bomb vehicles occupied by both women and men;
2. They can pat down women;
3. And hey, female journalists function fine at the front lines, so why not infantrypersons?

I kid you not. Kristof also quotes Lory Manning, who runs the Washington, D.C.-based Women in the Military project, as saying that—

“There’s this whole mommy-at-war feeling, which tells me that the critics have given up on the women-can’t-do-it argument. They’re backing off the old arguments and have come up with a new one.”

 
Oh, Captain, My Captain

The problem with the Lory Mannings of the world, is that they split their time between peeing on people’s legs and telling them it’s raining, and giving interviews to pc journalists and academics who themselves spend much of their time peeing on folks’ legs, and telling their victims that it’s raining. Critics of the feminized military haven’t given up on “the women-can’t-do-it-argument”; since when do you give up on the truth? Mainstream journalists and tenured academics, however, have largely succeeded at silencing that argument in their respective workplaces. And Manning knew she was talking to just such a newspaper, whose virulently pc publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., is as hostile to the military ethos as they come.

Give any indication that you believe in biological differences between men and women, and you will never get hired as a staffer at the New York Times, or as a humanities or social science professor at, say, Columbia University. Express such blasphemy after being hired there, and the feminists will see to it that you’re fired, if not sued for creating a “hostile work environment.” And the alleged males of the species will help them.

Lory Manning’s a liar, but who’s going to call her on it? No one at the Times, certainly. And not CBS “reporter” Jane Clayson, who used an 1 April, 48 Hours “investigation,” “Waiting on Women Warriors,” which was supposedly a report on POW Jessica Lynch, as a pretext to give Manning a soapbox.

[B]ut ex-Navy Captain Lory Manning says much of the American public is still struggling to accept women as warriors, especially after hearing the news of MIAs Jessi Lynch and Pvt. Lori Piestewa and seeing the video of POW Shoshana Johnson.

“We have this idea that women stay at home and men go to war,” says Manning.

Her initial reaction to seeing Shoshana’s pictures as a POW, “Was oh my gosh, you know, let’s start praying for her right now. I could feel the fear.”

She hopes it won’t change the way America thinks about the role of women in the military.

“We have women POWS now, women missing. But we also have hundreds and thousands of women over there doing extraordinary heroic work,” says Manning.

Thus did Manning equivocate on the difference between a woman serving, say, as a clerk at headquarters, and serving in the infantry. And Clayson helped her, by retiring from journalism, to serve as a cheerleader for feminist gender politics, national defense be damned.

Jessica Lynch, Lori Piestewa, and Shoshana Johnson were not warriors. Period. That we have had women POWs and women missing, is due to mischief by Clinton Administration officials who eliminated rules prohibiting women from serving in all manner of risky capacities in war zones. Now they may serve in any unit but the infantry, artillery, armored divisions and special forces, a move that anyone familiar with combat knew would result in women becoming involved in battle. As my colleague Paul Scates has observed, in places like Afghanistan — and, with tragic results, Iraq — often there are no clear front lines or “rear areas.”
 
 
The Media Declare War on the Truth

In William McGowan’s excellent book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, McGowan tells of the Pentagon’s corruption of military standards during the 1990s, in order to meet quotas for female officers and fliers, and of the corruption of journalistic standards that not only permitted the military corruption to occur, but celebrated it.

If you relied on the New York Times for information, you would never have heard of Coloring the News. The Times refused to review it, and a search I did of their archives for this article, showed that the alleged newspaper of record has never so much as mentioned the most important book on media bias in recent years. That might have something to do with McGowan’s having taken the Times out to the woodshed, for its relentless propagandizing and dishonesty.

McGowan beat up on many other big-name, “legitimate” news organizations, as well, for systematically misrepresenting as “sexism” problems integrating women into the armed forces. In particular, he cited the incompetent, politically compromised reporting of the Washington Post’s Tamara Jones and Dana Priest, respectively, 60 Minutes’ Morley Safer, NBC Dateline’s Gary Matsumoto, Martha Raddatz (then of NPR, now with ABC News) and ABC News’ John McWethy.

None of the above “reporters” or outlets will tell you, that according to a 1992 Pentagon study, men have 81.8% more upper-body strength than women, that women are much slower than men, get winded more easily, and can’t carry a wounded comrade to safety. And so, instead of real basic training, women get a sex-normed Mommy-track, with a fraction of the rigorous exercises the men do, lighter packs, and only having to practice hand-to-hand combat against other women. That training regimen ought to come in handy, for when America fights an army of women.

Last year, my colleague Fred Reed, a Vietnam veteran (USMC) who has covered the military, among other beats, discussed sex differences as they relate to the military in graphic detail, in the sort of article – published by Toogood Reports – that you’ll never see in the New York Times, or if Lory Manning had anything to say about it, anywhere. In Reed’s article, which is must reading for anyone who wants to understand the reality of a sexually-integrated military, he quoted from the 1992 Pentagon report:

“Women’s aerobic capacity is significantly lower, meaning they cannot carry as much as far as fast as men, and they are more susceptible to fatigue.

“In terms of physical capability, the upper five percent of women are at the level of the male median. The average 20-to-30 year-old woman has the same aerobic capacity as a 50 year-old man....

“Using the standard Army Physical Fitness Test, [Lt. Col. William Gregor, U.S. Army] found that the upper quintile of women at West point achieved scores on the test equivalent to the bottom quintile of men.

“Only 21 women out of the initial 623 (3.4%) achieved a score equal to the male mean score of 260.

“On the push-up test, only seven percent of women can meet a score of 60, while 78 percent of men exceed it.

“Adopting a male standard of fitness at West Point would mean 70 percent of the women he studied would be separated as failures at the end of their junior year, only three percent would be eligible for the Recondo badge, and not one would receive the Army Physical Fitness badge.”

Reed quoted from a conversation with his friend, Catherine Asby, a Harvard graduate who enlisted in the Army in 1995.

“The Army was a vast day-care center, full of unmarried teen-age mothers using it as a welfare home. I took training seriously and really tried to keep up with the men. I found I couldn’t. It wasn’t even close. I had no idea the difference in physical ability was so huge. There were always crowds of women sitting out exercises or on crutches from training injuries.

“They [the Army] were so scared of sexual harassment that women weren’t allowed to go anywhere without another woman along. They called them ‘Battle Buddies.’ It was crazy. I was twenty-six years old but I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself.”

With rare exceptions, the mainstream media have steadfastly suppressed such stories. Instead, they quote silly coeds, er, G.I.s, who insist, as did Marine recruit Vanessa Jenkins, in getting the last word of a 1997 Dateline propaganda piece cited by William McGowan in Coloring the News, “A woman can do anything a man can do, and lots of times a whole lot better.”

Many women also end up sleeping with their fellow soldiers, their superiors, their subordinates, and in the case of Lt. Kelly Flinn, soldiers’ husbands. You can blame women for that, you can blame men, or like Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, you can blame the biggest offender of all—“human nature.” The mixing of the sexes within units has destroyed military discipline. (At any given moment, ten percent of military women are out on “disability,” due to pregnancy.) Sending women into battle would result not only in dead women, but in many men dying, trying to protect the weaker sex.

Cases like that of Kelly Flinn, an officer and B-52 bomber pilot who flaunted her superior rank in the face of the enlisted woman whose husband she stole, and who lied to her superiors, are examples of human malevolence that were encouraged by sexual integration which served no military purpose.

The insistence on promoting, for political reasons, incompetent females to highly technical, dangerous positions such as fighter and bomber pilot, has not only unnecessarily endangered soldiers (Lt. Carey Lohrenz), caused deaths (Lt. Kara Hultgreen), and destroyed precious military hardware, but has “empowered” female personnel, aware of the support they enjoy from politicians and the media, to shower military rules with contempt, as in the cases of pilots Carey Lohrenz and Kelly Flinn.

In feminizing their coverage, the media have also misrepresented the role that physical strength can play in piloting a plane. We are told that in today’s high-tech military, the need for brute strength has been neutralized. But on April 1, 2001, when a Chinese pilot deliberately collided with a EP-3E U.S. spy plane, Navy pilot Lt. Shane Osborn, a bull of a man who appeared to weigh over 220 pounds, had to use every ounce of his strength to pull back on the aircraft’s yoke, in order to help get the plane “nose up” (in fact, the plane had lost its nose), in order to land without losing any of his crew. Had a woman been at the controls, there can be no doubt that all 24 crewmen would have been lost.

Nicholas Kristof instructs us that “wars these days are less for territory than for hearts and minds, and coed military units appear less menacing.”

You know what you call an army that fails to appear menacing? 1. The vanquished; 2. the Dutch.
 
 
The New Matriarchy

The Pentagon surrendered to the matriarchy even before Bill Clinton became commander-in-chief. During the past twenty-odd years, a number of females have undermined the services, using those weapons of mass destruction, the lawsuit and the sexual harassment claim. Militarily incompetent females have worked their way up the officer corps, by playing politically correct media and politicians like fiddles. Pols like former Rep. Patricia Schroeder and Sen. Olympia Snowe, seek to turn military men into gender slaves. Women who couldn’t fly have been certified as fighter pilots, and women who couldn’t lead, have been promoted all the way to general officer.

Years ago, a feminist ex-girlfriend of mine had a name for men like the sort of generals you increasingly find in this woman’s army: “pussy-whipped.”

Shortly after 911, CNN interviewed gender warrior, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, ret., the highest-ranking woman in Army history.

CNN: How has the military environment changed for women in the last ten years?

KENNEDY: I think the military environment is a more open one for women. Two things have happened. One is the number and diversity of jobs increasing. And, I think that we have all grown more confident of the ability of women to perform not only the traditional women’s jobs, but those that are new and unusual for women to fill. The reason more jobs have been opened to women is that women have done so well in each field as it opens up to them.

Among civilians, Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy’s claim to fame is for having destroyed the career of Maj. Gen. Larry Smith. In 1999, when Smith was about to be promoted to lieutenant general, and to Deputy Inspector General of the Army, an office which, among other things, investigates sexual harassment claims, Kennedy claimed that Smith had groped and tried to kiss her three years earlier. The official charge was that Smith had “kissed [Kennedy] against her will in her office.”

The Army concluded that the charge was “substantiated.” What that really meant was, that in such “he said, she said” situations, the Pentagon always takes the word of the female officer.

I’ll have more to say on Claudia Kennedy at another time, but for now, all you need to know is that: 1. Her statement on women in the services is manifestly untrue; and 2. Her goal has long been to emasculate the military, and install a matriarchy, rather than to prepare soldiers, sailors, and airmen to defend America against her enemies.

Reading the likes of Nicholas Kristof and Claudia Kennedy, you wonder how the military functioned for thousands of years without women.

The military has one job: To win wars. Winning wars means killing the enemy, and seizing real estate. And you don’t do that while protecting coeds with flowers in their helmets.