Women in Combat

This morning I sat down for a few minutes and watched celebrities on the View dither about the Army’s decision to let women become “combat” soldiers.  After listening for a couple of minutes to Elizabeth’s chatter, praising women who will “fight bravely on the front lines,” I turned off the television.

All the furore is just too silly.  When and where are these “front lines” expected to be?  What will be the battle formations of the future?

During World War II, we fought the Germans in traditional battles.  I knew a man who was wounded on the front line in the Battle of the Bulge.  That war ended in 1945.  Armies do not fight that kind of battles any more.  The Germans are now our friends.  They sell us their cars, Mercedes and BMW’s.

The time has passed for two armies to line up against each other and slug it out. We should have learned in Vietnam.  We didn’t.  We sent our Army to fight in Iraq, but there were no battles.  Our enemies planted roadside bombs and blew up our boys, one Humvee at a time.

We still have to deal with terrorists.  Even as women join men on the “front line,” the biggest Army in the World was helpless against eleven fanatical Arabs who highjacked planes and killed more Americans in one day than were killed in ten years of “fighting” in Afghanistan.

In the New Yorker, James Surowiecki describes the “sunk-cost effect.”  As he explains, “This means that we often end up sticking with something when we’d be better off cutting our losses – sitting through a bad movie, say, just because we’ve paid for the ticket.”

We wasted trillions on “defense,.” starting with the Cold War.  We were taught to be afraid of the Russians, while the Russians lived in terror that we would attack them.  Our government lied about the “missile gap.”   As an article in The Atlantic points out, “Nikita Khrushchev was acutely aware of America’s huge advantage not just in the number of weapons but in their quality and deployment as well.”      

We aimed missiles as Moscow from England and put more along the Russian border in Turkey.  That’s when Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba.   Kennedy let people think it was his show of strength which caused the Russians to withdraw.  Actually, he made a secret deal to pull our missiles out of Turkey, which was what Khrushchev wanted in the first place. 

The U.S. spends as much on “defense” as the rest of the World combined.  Why?  China does not want to go to war with us.  Lose their best customer?  No way!

Faced with threats from the U.S., Russia bankrupted its economy.  That, not our huge stockpile of weapons, is what ended the Cold War.  I fear we are following the same path as the Soviets.  . We face an economic crisis, and the war hawks say, “Don’t cut the defense budget!”  No, they would cut Social Security and Medicare instead.  That’s our esteemed Congress.  That’s criminal.