Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 44

participating in more sports and bodybuilding than
ever. To complete the same physically demanding
task, a woman expends much more effort than a man
(no fair!). A man’s bones are denser, his heart is bigger—making his aerobic capacity greater—and he is
able to develop much more lean muscle mass. He can
carry more weight and run farther and faster with
it. His units-of-work effort is worth many of hers,
and he will be able to maintain a demanding, arduous level of performance for far longer than she will
in both the short and long term. Double standards
did not create this reality; they are the response to it
(and to political pressure to open more jobs to women). Kingsley Browne writes in his 2007 book Co-ed
Combat: The New Evidence That Women Shouldn’t
Fight the Nation’s Wars,
When males and females both start out in
good physical condition, women gain less
than men from further conditioning, so that
the gap between the sexes actually increases.
A study of male and female cadets at West
Point, who all started out in relatively good
condition, found that although women’s
upper body strength was initially 66 percent
of men’s, by the end of their first two years,
it had dropped below 60 percent.14
Moreover, Browne states,
Sex differences in physical performance
are here to stay. As Constance Holden
observed in Science magazine, the male
advantage in athletics will endure, due to
men’s “steady supply of a performance-enhancing drug that will never be banned:
endogenous testosterone.”15
In other words, a platoon of the top female
CrossFitters is still no match for a platoon of the
top male CrossFitters. It does not matter that one
individual female CrossFitter may be stronger
and faster than one particular male. The idea that
one woman somewhere might someday be able to
achieve the infantry standard is inadequate to justify
putting women in the units. Women have to be able
to consistently and predictably make and maintain
the men’s standards in order to demonstrate equal
ability and be useful in combat.
Even on a lower general standard, women break
at far higher rates than men do, with longer-term
42

injuries. More women leave the military, when or
before their contracts are up. Women are regularly
unavailable for duty for female issues. Chicago Tribune
correspondent Kirsten Scharnberg reports in a 2005
article that women suffer post-traumatic stress disorder more acutely.16 The combat “opportunity” is
sounding less and less equal all the time.
In his 2013 book Deadly Consequences: How
Cowards Are Pushing Women Into Combat, retired
Army Col. Robert Maginnis describes several military studies showing the physical suffering of women
in combat:
1. A U.S. Navy study found the risk of
anterior cruciate ligament injury associated
with military training is almost ten times
higher for women than for men. 2. A sexblind study by the British military found
that women were injured 7.5 times more
often than men while training to the same
standards. … 5. Women suffer twice as many
lower-extremity injuries as men, an Army
study found, and they fatigue much more
quickly because of the difference in “size of
muscle,” which makes them more vulnerable
to non-battle injury.17
Marine Capt. Katie Petronio, writing in the Marine
Corps Gazette about Officer Candidate School, states,
Of candidates who were dropped from training because they were injured or not physically qualified, females were breaking at a much
higher rate than males, 14 percent versus 4
percent. The same trends were seen at TBS
[The Basic School] in 2011; the attrition rate
for females was 13 percent versus 5 percent
for males, and 5 percent of females were
found not physically qualified compared with
1 percent of males.18
We females can train as hard as we like, and
we may increase strength, stamina, and fitness.
Nevertheless, our increased fitness still will not put
us on par with that of the men who are training to
their utmost, like men in combat units and the Special
Forces. They are the top ten percent of the top ten
percent. We also bear too many other risks to be
cost effective. No matter how widespread feminism
becomes, our bones will always be lighter, more vulnerable to breaks and fractures. Our aerobic capacity
March-April 2015  MILITARY REVIEW