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The other problem I have with female military leaders is the tendency to, consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously, treat their subordinates at some level like they are their children.  A military commander is not a mommy.  A military commander must be able to order his or her subordinates to go fight to probable death.  If you view your troops as your children, can you do this?  Who is more likely to send their children off to die, a man or a woman?  Answer honestly.
The conundrum here is that there are plenty of excellent female soldiers.  When I was a battalion commander, I had a female XO and a female S-3, and they were both superb in combat.  (I commanded a combat service support unit and not a combat arms unit, which is an important distinction I’ll come back to.)
So if female soldiers can perform at the individual level, wherein lies the problem?  IMO the real problem is that under Obama and Biden, DEI policies were brought into combat arms units and women were given combat arms commands at all levels, up to and including infantry divisions and 4-star combatant commands.
Now consider the timing.  In the Obama/Biden era the US military became wildly risk averse, became stultified via delays in planning and execution looking for the “perfect solution” that all can agree with, and created rules of engagement that literally rejected necessary violence against our enemies.  Individual standards suffered as we fielded obese and out of shape troops because no one wanted to hurt their feelings to tell them they were substandard (a male Fort Hood command sergeant major even got relieved in disgrace because he called a fat soldier “fat”).  Worst of all, individual training at the entry level became so feminized that drill sergeants fear for their careers if they induce training stress that does not even begin to compare with the stress of actual combat.  After all, we have to prioritize the sensitive feelings of Private Snuffy when he/she is in basic training.
These abysmal cultural changes happened at the EXACT SAME TIME as DEI was transforming the gender composition of combat units and feminizing the decision making processes at all levels of command.
Coincidence?
No.  Cause and effect.
The US military has become feminized, and this is a leading cause for our numerous battlefield failures over the past 15 years.
Now I know I’m going to get heat for this.  But hear me out.  I believe that while men and women are fundamentally different in their thought processes, they are of completely equal value in God’s eyes.  It’s just that the value needs to be applied properly.  Just as I believe almost all women will make terrible infantry division commanders, I believe Norman Schwarzkopf would have made a terrible kindergarten teacher.  Guess what?  Kindergarten teachers and Army generals are of equal importance to society.  How about we staff them with the people best suited to do the job?
So how do we fix this?
I think that we had a proper equilibrium back in the 1990s.  We had a military where combat arms was the exclusive domain of aggressive male killers, and women were staffing combat support and combat service support positions.  Heck, we even had a four-star female logistics general back then in Ann Dunwoody, so it’s not like women were denied opportunity.  That system worked pretty well.  We were not risk averse, we possessed decisive senior leadership in the combat arms and the warfighter ethos permeated our entire force.  Importantly, at the same time, women had superb opportunities for advancement and meaningful service while not degrading effective combat decision making.
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