A Kinder, Gentler Military

   This of course is only one of numerous problems created by feminization and sexualization. Since the 1970s, it has seriously compromised US military strength and integrity. Standards have been lowered to accommodate women, and women have been exempted from requirements for men. “No sooner did many women begin to enter the armed forces during the 1970s than their presence started giving rise to endless, and continuing, trouble,” writes historian Martin van Creveld, who details “the damage that feminization is causing both in fiscal terms and from the point of view of fighting power.”207  Women have far higher rates of attrition, much greater need for medical care, much higher rates of nonavailability, lower rates of deployability, and of course less strength, endurance, and overall physical capacity. In training, less is expected of female recruits, standards are lowered both for them and for men in a futile pretense at uniformity, and resentment is inspired by men toward women and one another.208  Women require extensive accommodations in battlefield situations, alterations in military structure and organization, and expensive technological changes. Weapons and equipment are redesigned so women can use them, even when the results are inferior. Prior to deployments, women suddenly become pregnant in large numbers and are excused from duty. When combat commences, commanders are “flooded with requests from female soldiers for transfers to the rear.” With little fear of punishment, women simply refuse to participate in training exercises and battlefield operations, desert their posts, and break down in tears.209 

Predictably too, flirtations, romances, sex, and pregnancies quickly develop and further undermine effectiveness. Equally predictably, this in turn provides the material for further politicization — which also strikingly parallels the trajectory of welfare politics. When relationships go sour, accusations of gender crimes against servicemen are now routine: “sexual misconduct,” “sexual harassment,” sexual this and sexual that. Even more than in civilian life, the romance and indulgence create opportunities for feminists to launch accusations of pseudo-crimes against men and thereby also against military values. Rather than being presented as a breakdown of both standard military discipline and traditional sexual morality, the hanky-panky is “judged by newer, feminist standards, which came down hard on the men but went easy on the women.” The result offers huge opportunities to transform standard military discipline into ideological indoctrination. In meting out punishments, the Navy sent “a very important message” that it planned, not to restore traditional discipline, but to impose ideological conformity on its sailors and aviators and purge ideological heterodoxy. 

Extended witch hunts have driven decorated men from the services, including senior officers with distinguished careers: “men who were expert in performing their military missions, men whom the Navy had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to train, men with decades of experience, who had been tested in combat, and who had offered their lives in the service of their country.”210 

Not only in the US, but throughout the Western world, “[h]undreds of regulations aimed at defining, preventing, and punishing ‘sexual harassment’ were instituted,” van Creveld recounts. “In one military after another, ‘hot lines’ were opened to enable female soldiers to inform on their male comrades behind the latters’ backs.” The result now is that “[s]carcely a week goes by without some unfortunate male officer or soldier being accused of ‘sexual harassment’ and being hounded out of the services.” This happens “even if it was the woman who made the initial advances and seduced him, even if his record of service is otherwise excellent, often even if he is found innocent of the charges.”211 

Politicians, including conservative ones eager to display cheap chivalry, naturally weighed in on the side of ideological correctness and injustice. “Officials in Congress, the Pentagon, and the service academies are eager to establish ubiquitous ‘victim advocate’ offices, staffed by professionals [lawyers] who vow to protect military women from the slightest form of harassment, real or imagined,” writes Donnelly. “The same officials simultaneously promote the deliberate exposure of military women to extreme abuse and violence in close, lethal combat, where females do not have an equal opportunity to survive or to help fellow soldiers survive.”212 

Here again the Iron Law is operating. Having erected a “harassment” bureaucracy, the military command needed a problem to justify it. “Five women lined up and publicly accused Army investigators of trying to blackmail them into making false accusations of rape, and threatening to charge them with fraternization and sexual misconduct if they did not cooperate.” One sergeant was convicted, even though “one woman testified that she not only had sex ‘willingly’ but that investigators pressured her into accusing” him falsely. Mitchell characterizes the witch hunts as a “fear of being burned for not burning others,” reminiscent of the fervor driving civilian witch hunts. “Only accusers survive,” he concludes (much as we have seen with rape, campus rape, child abuse, domestic violence, and more). “Everyone else is a suspect.”213 

Here again, it is not only military men that are targeted, but also — with few noticing the sleight of hand — the very values on which military strength depends. “They cannot get a handle on this problem [of ‘sexual harassment’] because of a military culture that is macho,” says Karen Johnson of the National Organization for Women. What connection with reality does such a statement betray? The Army itself absorbs this thinking, becoming ashamed for “the encouragement of a ‘macho’ male image.” “There is nothing inherent in what the Army does that must be done in a masculine way,” argues a West Point study, apparently in all seriousness.214 

As we observed with the welfare state, only more so, the military’s necessarily authoritarian logic makes it the ideal prototype for the “Deep State.” Military discipline offers a unique machinery for social engineering. By necessity, military men are required to follow orders without objecting, and disobedience is severely punished. What better way to inculcate political ideology without dissent than to enforce it using military orders backed with the accompanying punishments? It is this logic, the same power to silence obvious objections and force servicemen to follow non-military orders, that now allows the “woke” state to force them to accept deadly and debilitating vaccine mandates. 

Looting Soldiers  As feminist welfare logic permeates the military, it creates a similar matriarchy with similar agendas of emasculation. It is eerie how faithfully the military has followed the political trajectory pioneered by the welfare machinery.

Even more than civilians, military men are sitting ducks for looting by divorce courts (see Chapter 6). It is no exaggeration to say that military service has been converted into a giant trap to tie the hands of servicemen so they cannot defend themselves as divorce lawyers plunder and criminalize them. “Sometimes I just feel like a sucker,” one veteran tells the Los Angeles Daily Breeze. “My government holds me and other vets in such contempt that it cannot lift a finger to stop a blatant fraud which victimizes tens of thousands of servicemen. Worse, the government actively enforces that fraud.”215  While risking life and limb for their country, servicemen are now routinely divorced unilaterally and without grounds, lose their children and everything else they possess, and even return home to face criminal sentences when they cannot pay the crushing child support imposed on them in their absence. 

Against this betrayal of fighting men, the military services and other institutions in the country for which they have risked their lives will provide no defense or assistance. On the contrary, officials are much more likely to assist the ex-wives and lawyers to ransack their comrades-in-arms. 

Vicariously divorced servicemen are criminally prosecuted for child-support arrearages that are almost impossible not to accrue while they are on duty. Reservists are hit especially hard because their child-support burdens are based on their civilian pay and do not decrease when their income decreases. “As a result, many reservists fall hopelessly behind while serving, and can be subject to arrest for nonpayment of child support upon their return,” write two columnists. “Even those returning servicemen who avoid jail or other sanctions may still spend years trying to pay off their child support debt — a debt created entirely by their willingness to serve their country.”216 

These men fight and die for their families and homes and freedom, all of which are being taken by feminist divorce courts. “Sometimes I wonder what I risked my life for,” one serviceman says. “I went [to Afghanistan] to fight for freedom but what freedom and what rights mean anything if a man doesn’t have the right to be a father to his own child?” Gordon Dollar was a reservist for sixteen years in the National Guard and Naval Reserves. “I’m getting out, and they can go recruit some judge’s son/daughter to go die for the ridiculous laws they enforce,” he tells researcher David Usher. “I regret that I ever served this nation.”217

Who Lost America? ...

Stephen Baskerville