Disgrace at the Naval Academy

Jim Webb, the decorated Vietnam war veteran and former U.S. senator and secretary of the Navy, has declined to accept an award at his alma mater the Naval Academy because some alumni were threatening to disrupt the ceremony. Aaron MacLean writes at the Washington Free Beacon:

The most widely cited reason for his political toxicity is an article he wrote in 1979 (side note: almost forty years ago!) in Washingtonian Magazine entitled “Women Can’t Fight.” Never mind that he has apologized for both the vivid language of his youth and the ways in which the article made life difficult for women already in the service. (“Clearly, if I had been a more mature individual, there are things that I would not have said in that magazine article. To the extent that this article subjected women at the Academy or the armed forces to undue hardship, I remain profoundly sorry.”) Never mind the fact that Webb was channeling the beliefs of the vast majority of his fellow infantrymen, if in somewhat impolitic language—or that even today, the vast majority of Marines of all grades oppose the inclusion of women in combat units. Never mind that in 1987, as secretary of the Navy, Webb opened a tremendous number of new positions in the service to women. Most of all, never mind that as of December 2015, combat units were all opened to women by order of then-Secretary of Defense Carter, overriding the objections of the Marine Corps (though not of the Army).

Read the rest here.

Webb wrote about “The War on Military Culture” in 1997 for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

When the Obama administration announced in 2013 that it intended to open all combat units to women, Webb’s son, himself a decorated veteran, spoke out against the decision, as TWS reported at the time:

The big divide on this issue is not between the young and the old or women and men, but between the political class and the infantrymen who have seen combat. Although they’ve been largely ignored by Congress and the media, a number of Marines and soldiers have spoken out since the policy change was announced.

One is Sergeant James Robert Webb, who served as an infantryman in Ramadi in 2006 and 2007. The 31-year-old son of former Democratic senator, secretary of the Navy, and Vietnam war hero Jim Webb took to his blog to describe how the change would harm combat effectiveness and unit cohesion. The Marine explained that a noninfantry convoy unit engaging in combat if attacked—returning fire and getting to safety—is different from the infantry fulfilling its mission to “close with and destroy hostile forces.” Furthermore, the infantry demands the utmost from Marines in terms of physical strength, endurance, attitude, and group loyalty and bonding. “More to the point, if the calculus is altered, our people, my peers, die,” wrote Webb.

“The major concern is with women in infantry units,” Webb tells me in an email. “This is a subject which comes up every time I get together with combat veterans—from any branch of service. The message is an unequivocal ‘No, this should not happen.’ I have yet to receive an email, comment, text message, etc. from anyone who has served in a combat unit who supports this decision by DoD.”

In December 2015, the Obama administration rejected the Marine Corps’s request for an exemption from this policy. That ruling came despite the objections of many who have served or are currently serving in the infantry, as John McCormack reported in February 2016 in TWS:

[C]ritics [of women in the infantry] have two main objections. The first is that political pressure will inevitably lead to the lowering of physical standards, despite current promises to the contrary from the Obama administration and Republican presidential candidates. The second objection is equally significant. Yes, physical standards—such as whether female members of the infantry would be at a disadvantage in hand-to-hand combat or would struggle to carry a wounded 230-pound infantryman to safety—matter. But it also matters a great deal that gender integration harms social bonding and unit cohesion. Lance Cpl. Chris Augello was one of the Marines who participated in the Marine Corps study that found that exclusively male units outperformed gender-integrated units on 93 of 134 battlefield tasks. Augello “arrived at the integrated task force believing that women should get a shot at service in the infantry as long as they could meet existing standards,” the Marine Corps Times reported. But by the time the study was done, he had changed his mind: “The female variable in this social experiment has wrought a fundamental change in the way male NCOs think, act and lead,” Augello wrote in a 13-page paper he presented to Marine leaders and shared with the Marine Corps Times. Those changes, he wrote, are “sadly for the worse, not the better.” Put young men and women together day and night for months in close quarters: No amount of social conditioning will prevent some from becoming romantically involved with each other. No amount of social conditioning will teach men to ignore their natural instinct to protect women. And the problems that necessarily arise from gender differences in this context—favoritism, jealousy, resentment—will lead to much worse consequences in infantry units that face more stress and danger than support units do.

When Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis was asked during his confirmation about Obama administration’s policy on women in combat, he left open the possibility that he might reverse it.

Disgrace at the Naval Academy

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