Dear Friends,
While most of us Americans were thinking about something else, a decades long struggle has been going on within the leadership of our Armed Forces and the political decision makers to whom they are accountable. You should know about it if you don’t already. It concerns an effort to redesign and reshape our military and has far ranging implications for the security of this country. Since the early 1990s, each branch has been under unrelenting pressure to conform itself to the principles of political correctness. It has been driven by powerful left-wing social movements, including radical feminism, the gay rights movement, LGBTQ ideology, and most recently, transgender influences that have swept the nation. America has elected two presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who threw the force of their presidencies into these radical concepts, changing our defense apparatus from top to bottom and making it rethink recruitment, training, maintenance, and fighting in foreign wars. This revolutionary social experiment has weakened the U.S. military and made our troops march to a different set of drums. But, that is where we are headed.
For example, Congress first began considering the radical notion of authorizing women in combat 26 years ago. Hearings were held on that concept on June 18, 1991, which featured generals, senators and feminists who testified on behalf of what has never been permitted in the 217-year history of this country. Gender studies confirmed what has been known about male and female physiology, psychology, sexuality, family issues, gender norming and other dimensions of military life. What had to be considered is the undeniable fact that most women can’t run, swim, fight, climb, carry, or endure hardship like men. They were designed by the Creator with feminine physiological characteristics that influence every aspect of their lives. To be sure, women have made positive impacts in our military. However, if women are put on the front lines of battle, they will be subjected to the most brutal and demanding challenges known to humanity. For example, the additional physical strain placed on a woman already weighed down by over 100 pounds of weapons, ammunition, and equipment on an extended combat operation conducted over complex mountainous terrain would be insurmountable. These challenges go beyond the individual soldier or marine. The impact on the remainder of her unit could very well make them combat ineffective and lead to unnecessary loss of life. This is what is at stake for you and your daughters if assigned to combat duties.
Imagine women being disembarked in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when 17 or 18-year-old boys, many coming straight out of high school, fought, bled and died for their country. These fellows slogged through wet sandy beaches under a staggering load and into the face of withering machine gunfire and treacherous mines. Then, exhausted and terrified, they fought their way up heavily defended bluffs from which crack German troops rained down hell upon them. If they survived that bombardment, and 2,000 of them perished that first day, they were required to fight continually from foxholes all the way to Berlin. That trauma went on for 11 months. Some units didn’t have a single survivor when it was over.
Yet, the hoary-headed senior officers in the Pentagon pretended that women were as equipped as men to withstand physical and psychological deprivations, and then fight to the death against hardened troops with high octane testosterone surging through their veins. Common sense would tell us emphatically, “No, this is dangerous and irrational,” but common sense was not on the agenda that day in the U.S. Senate in June of 1991.
During that first morning in a Senate Chamber, the 27th Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Robert Barrow, sat listening to one military expert after another as they tried to make a case for putting women in harm’s way.
I have a video and transcript of General Barrow’s testimony from that morning. If you have any interest in what I am writing, you should read his words of warning. It may someday be highly relevant to you—to husbands or sons, or daughters. This is what the venerated General Barrow said:
You’re most kind, Sir. I, for a moment thought I’d perhaps been rendered irrelevant with some of this testimony. I will try to be brief and to the point. This is not about women’s rights, equal opportunity, career assignments for enhancement purposes for selection to higher rank. It most assuredly is about combat effectiveness in the next conflict, and so we’re also talking about national security. Those who advocate change have some strange arguments. One of which is [the meaning of combat]. That women have been shot at, they’ve heard gunfire, they’ve been in areas where they could have been hit with missiles. Well, exposure to danger is not combat.
Combat is a lot more than that. It’s a lot more than getting shot at or even getting killed. Combat is finding and closing with and killing or capturing the enemy if you’re down in the ground combat scheme of things. It’s killing, that’s what it is. And it’s done in an environment that is often as difficult as you can possibly imagine–extreme[s of] climate, brutality, death, and dying. It’s uncivilized! And women can’t do it, nor should they be even thought of as doing it.
The requirements for strength and endurance render them unable to do it. And I may be old fashioned, but I think the very nature of women disqualifies them from doing it. Women give life, sustain life, nurture life; they don't take it. I just cannot imagine why we are engaged in this debate about the possibility even of pushing women down into the ground combat part of our profession. Most harm that could come would probably come from what it would do to the men in that kind of situation. I know, in some circles, that it is very popular to ridicule something called male bonding, but it’s real. One has to have experienced it to understand it. It doesn’t lend itself to easy explanation. It is cohesiveness. I heard some of those words this morning. It’s cohesiveness. It’s mutual respect and admiration. It's one for all and all for one. It’s believing that as a unit no one else could do what this unit is being asked to do. Perhaps Shakespeare said it best of all, “We few, we precious few, we band of brothers.” For that’s what it is. And that would be shattered; it would be destroyed. If you want to make a combat unit ineffective, assign some women to it. It’s a destructive proposition.
And the thing that puzzles me about it is that there is no military requirement for it. There’s no military need to put women in combat. We have all the men we need for that kind of thing. Male bonding is not peculiar to people down, at say, the infantry level. There’s a lot of comradeship about combat flying. It flourishes there. Fighting squadrons, attack squadrons, those men, if they have nothing else in common, it is the belief that they, and they alone, are able to do what they’ve been asked to do. And that—that’s male bonding. And we want to play around with this sort of thing and perhaps do away with it. And who would be called on to pick up the rifle to do these things in the ground combat area? The ones who don’t want to do it are the ones who are not qualified. The young soldiers and Marines, women. They are terrific, I know them well. They serve with great skill; they have a spirit about them, the crème de la crème. And most of them, I've never met one who wanted to be an infantryman.
Who wants them to be an infantryman? The hard-lined feminists do! That’s who wants to be an infantryman. They have their agenda, and it doesn’t have anything to do with national security. They want to put our daughters at risk. And the other attendant problems to being in such situations where you have sexual harassment, fraternization, favoritism, resentment, male backlash, all these things would be an insurmountable problem for someone to deal with. Who deals with that? Not some faceless political appointee over there in the Pentagon, but the corporals and the sergeants, and the lieutenants and the captains would have to maintain good order and discipline and also fight the war. Doesn’t work, doesn’t work.
Mr. Secretary, what is this we’re hearing about you’re going to put women in the Navy Seal teams or whatever it might be? I do worry about this thing called the draft. I don’t know if C-SPAN is picking it up [or not], I hope they are. They’ve heard that enough today, that ought to excite the parents a little bit. Maybe you’ll get more mail, Senator. I hope you do. I believe that if this thing persists that the logical conclusion that, somewhere down the road, women would not only register for the draft, but if we had one she would be compelled to serve, yes, even end up in the infantry. I reflected last night at some length about places I’ve been, things I’ve done in [my] 41 years in the Marine Corps and three wars.
Senator John Warner commented: “I think, General, you should put aside modesty and put on the record today the exact combat situations and the period that you served in them.” General Barrow then replied:
Well, I was in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. I commanded in all three. And I found nowhere in my mental exploration any place for women to be down in the ground combat element. Indeed, I went so far as to reflect upon one campaign in particular, the Chosin Reservoir, 40 years ago. December, 1950, in North Korea. [It was] one of the greatest epics of all time. First Marine Division confronting eight Chinese divisions spread out along 35 to 40-mile linear disposition “NORTHEAST” and “NORTHSOUTH” in extreme cold, minus 25. Winds out of Siberia bring[ing] the wind chill factor down to God knows what. Mountains, constant attacking, they were attacking us, we were attacking them, for days, night and day. Death all about, frostbite, inadequate clothing. I said, “Suppose we had 15% women, 20% women.” My supposition led me to say I wouldn’t be here. “I guess Kim Il Sung would be taking care of my bones along with everyone else’s in North Korea.”
I know about my service. If you persist and push this down into the combat area, it would destroy the Marine Corps. Simple as that. Something no enemy has been able to do in over 200 years. So, my recommendation is to make the law clear and unambiguous. If it needs to be made that way, keep it to [yourself].
General Barrow’s words that day reveal his passion about the issue being debated. These were the words of a national hero who had seen death and dying for then 41 years. He was pleading with his colleagues and the nation not to make a tragic mistake. But the campaign for political correctness went on unabated. Two years later, President Bill Clinton sought to open all combat assignments to women and to authorize participation by gays.
I weighed in on the debate at that point in an attempt to alert the American people. We invited two knowledgeable guests whom I respect highly. They joined me in the studio. Mrs. Elaine Donnelly was appointed by President George H. W. Bush, (41) to the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. She was present at the Senate hearings on “Women in Combat” in 1991. She currently serves as president of the Center for Military Readiness and was one of my guests in 1993. Also present was Colonel Ronald D. Ray. We discussed our grave concerns about these changes in policy throughout the Armed Forces in light of all the implications I have mentioned today. We then invited our listeners to express their beliefs about President Clinton’s efforts to implement his social agenda.
The result of our broadcast was shocking. We reeled under a deluge of 50,000 phone calls from the American people in the next two days, and the vast majority of them expressed anger and intense opposition to the proposals. It was the greatest outpouring to any of the 7,500 broadcasts aired, up to that point, during my 33 years in Christian radio. The White House and Senate were overwhelmed by phone calls and letters. As a result, President Clinton and members of Congress were forced to withdraw their support for women in combat . . . temporarily.
Since that time, political correctness has run amok in the Pentagon and elsewhere in government. I’m going to write now without reservation, expressing my Constitutional right to Freedom of Speech.
Senator Barack Obama then came on the scene and began advocating a full repeal of laws barring gays and lesbians from serving in the military. Once he was elected president, he wasted no time asking Congress to take action, following a review by the Department of Defense.
• In 2010, Congress complied and passed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act. It ended the policy that had been in place since 1993, which had allowed them to serve only if they kept their sexual orientation secret and the military did not learn of their sexual orientation.
• In 2013, military departments opened 14,325 positions to women under the new exceptions to the exclusion rule. On January 24, 2013, then-Secretary Leon Panetta rescinded the rule that restricted women from serving in combat units.
• Since 2015, the Army has brought more than 640 women into previously closed specialties in the Field Artillery, Ordnance, and Combat Engineer career fields.
• As of 2016, the Marine Corps has integrated 18 women into load bearing combat units and 156 into non-load bearing units.
Political correctness is a jailbreak now.
Let’s consider military personnel with what the American Psychiatric Association defines as a diagnosed mental disorder known as gender dysphoria (transgender). Such individuals are now recruited and retained and are entitled to a full range of medical and psychiatric services. They include counseling, cross-sex hormones, gender reassignment surgery, and social and legal transition to the desired gender. Costs for this care can be in excess of $100,000 per person.
Elaine Donnelly writes at the Center for Military Readiness, “The Defense Department has decided to treat confusion about one’s sexual identity as a ‘civil rights’ issue,” essentially extending “‘special rights that reflect the LGBT fantasies and ideology, not tangible reality.’”
Gone are the days when a man would be excluded from military service for being an inch too short or tall. Now, he, or she, enjoys constitutionally protected rights in an ever-widening array of politically correctness. Lord, help us. There is one final dimension to this military revisionism that must be shared. You won’t believe it, but there is intrigue all over the place in Congress. I alerted you last year that Congressman Duncan Hunter, usually a conservative member of Congress, sponsored an amendment that should have been called the “Dare you to Draft America’s Daughters.” Sadly, it passed with the support of RINO Republicans such as Martha McSally. We came that close to a national disaster. Fortunately, Mac Thornberry and Pete Sessions, Chairmen of the House Rules Committee, removed the offending language from the floor vote. That was when Senator John McCain made his move, operating behind closed doors and out of your sight. He succeeded in getting language in a Senate bill to “Draft America’s Daughters.” He then set up an expensive, three-year, loaded–his-way commission to “study” the issue and ultimately do what McCain really wants: universal compulsory national service.
As I wrote you last year, McCain is the villain here. But Hunter is in on it too. They should both receive a massive amount of mail and phone calls from parents and concerned citizens, warning them not to continue with this insane idea of registering girls for national service and the draft.
Disturbingly, new appointee as the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, is in on the scheme, too. He nominated Rudy DeLeon to be head of Personnel and Readiness, a former Clinton Administration DoD Deputy Secretary. DeLeon was one of the architects of Clinton’s determined efforts to repeal the DoD policy regarding homosexuals in the military. He is a V.P. at the ultra-liberal Center for American Progress. So, the new swamp members are working behind the scenes to force your daughters into what could be compulsory military service. After the courts have had their say, combat assignments could be next.
Please weigh-in on what is happening here. Contact the following “players” and tell them you will not stand for this intrusion into American’s young womenhood. Pull no punches. Irreversible decisions could be made at any minute.
Congressman Duncan Hunter - Washington D.C. Office: 202-225-5672
Senator John McCain - Washington D.C. Office: (202) 224-2235
Secretary of Defense, James Mattis - 703-571-3343 (leave a voicemail)
How about it, Mothers and Fathers? Do you want your daughters engaged in combat situations during national emergencies? The Pentagon has already decided that women will help fight our wars. Speaking personally, I resent McCain, Hunter and other members of Congress trying to ram this policy down the throats of American families.
I must bring this missive to a close. Thank you for letting me express my concerns about political correctness in the military. Sooner or later, America will face another war that will threaten our national survival. It is inevitable. Plato said, “Only dead men have seen an end to war.” Will we be ready for the next crisis? Will another “Greatest Generation” emerge that is prepared to shed its blood, sweat, and tears? Or will we dissipate our resolve and our energies on foolishness and squandered resources?
America, let your voices be heard. The White House and Congress need to know where you stand. All I can do is alert you to the facts as they are known. Intrigue is difficult to oppose when the media is silent.
Blessings to you all,
P.S. Our contributions are running very lean in February and March. Please help us if you can. That will allow us to continue the fight to defend the institution of the family and this great country.
For your information, here are two articles that describe McCain’s and other’s efforts to draft our daughters:
1. Senate Should Drop McCain Mandate to Register, Draft Young Women
2. House, Senate Should Defeat “Draft America’s Daughters” Legislation
This letter may be reproduced without change and in its entirety for non-commercial and non-political purposes without prior permission from Family Talk. Copyright, 2017 Family Talk. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed in the U.S.A.