Women in Combat

The Pentagon just announced that it is opening up the ground combat arms to women. I think this was a bad decision.

My concern however, is much less about the women than the men.

Male decision making ability goes down in the presence of women. Combat requires quite a bit of decision making – dig in or advance? Flank or assault? Dodge left or right? Press the attack or withdraw? The male members of a mixed unit will thus be less effective than if they were in an all-male unit. “Less effective in combat” of course, leads directly to higher casualties.

The problem remains even if the women are segregated into their own units – the commander of the next higher echelon still has to make decisions about them. Less of a problem then if the women are actually present, of course, but still a problem. And how will the neighboring units (some of them inevitably all-male) react?

Then there’s the elephant in the room – pregnancy. Women in the military do get pregnant despite the best efforts of birth control, regulations, separation off-duty, and everything else that has been tried. If a woman in a support role becomes pregnant she can generally be replaced with minimal loss to unit cohesion. Combat units, however, need to be very closely tied together. Short term replacements (even, as demonstrated painfully during WWII, when they themselves are veterans) die at a MUCH higher rate than those fully integrated into the unit. Do we mandate abortions for women who become pregnant? What if the woman in question doesn’t want an abortion? Do we limit combat positions to women willing to have abortions if they become pregnant? What if they change their mind?

Finally, there’s the companion to the elephant; the practical bottleneck to producing the next generation are women, not men. A man can conceive hundreds of children (allowing just one per day) in the same time a woman can carry just one to term. A woman’s biological ability to put her genetic material into the next generation is a long term process. A man can do so while on a 24 hour pass. The women who are willing and able to ‘stand between their loved home and war’s desolation’ are among the ones we’d most like to pass their genes onto the next generation… and just about the least able to do so while doing their job.

It has been argued that women are already on the front lines of the current war (as the current war has no ‘rear area’). This is more the exception than the rule, but let’s stipulate it for now. We are also assured that the current war is ending Real Soon Now. The next war’s character is unknowable. Counter-insurgency seems like a reasonable guess, but even counter-insurgency missions often have secure rear areas.

Of course, the nature of the current geo-political situation means the US is unlikely to be endangered by a decrease in the effectiveness of its military forces any time soon. In fact it would be years before even the total elimination of the US military would present a serious risk to the continental US (or, at least, one more serious than already exists). Once the decision to put women on the front line is implemented, however, it can not easily be undone (see the notes about unit cohesion). If we do find ourselves in a ‘war to the knife’ twenty years down the road (or a hundred, if you prefer) we will likely be outnumbered – counting on superior skill and decision making for our survival.

We might be doomed by men making decisions about women under fire.

Facebook

Is Facebook worth it?

Sure, it is a way to keep in touch with people. Find out what they're thinking, doing, or planning. For a fairly introverted person like me it has the advantage that I don't actually have to talk to them to find this stuff out.

Occasionally I use it to ask for advice. Often I even get useful advice that way.

But the signal-to-noise ratio is very low. Despite my efforts to use FB's filters, I mostly see junk. Poorly written and/or ignorant political posturing (including plenty from people nominally on 'my side' of issues) seems to be the dominant life form even now that the election is over.

I've considered a merciless pruning of my friend list (do I really care what someone I haven't seen since high school is doing? Not really)... but that would be a lot of work. It doesn't help that I've now got a bunch of SCA folks friended; often I don't remember their legal names. Further complicated by friends with similar names, and the fact that no one seems to use a straight face shot of themselves as their profile pic. I'm very afraid of deleting someone because I don't recognize their name or profile pic only to find I've deleted my Baron.

A much easier solution is just to stop visiting (perhaps deleting my account, perhaps not). Then, however, I lose what little signal I was getting. Along with the cute cat pictures - they probably don't count as 'signal', but they're fun.

12/12/12

Happy 12 day, everyone!

Enjoy it, because odds are none of us will live to see the next triple date (January 1st, 2101).

In other news, it is looking increasingly likely that SPEEA will strike. February 1st (2013) is being tossed around as a date.

I feel about the potential strike much the same way I feel about the fiscal cliff; it would be better if it didn't happen, but the people responsible (Boeing in the case of the strike, and the voters - especially those in Ohio, Florida, etc. - in the case of the fiscal cliff) have no one to blame but themselves if it does.

I already tried to avert one, and I'm making my support of SPEEA very visible at work as the best way I have to avoid the other.

We'll see... or maybe the Mayans actually were prophets and not the first cobol programmers and we won't see.

A few days ago the news reported that some government agency assured the public that the world will not end this december or anytime soon. NPR noted that while it was a bold claim it would be hard to hold them accountable if they were wrong.

Personally I don't believe the world will end on 12/21 or any nearby date, don't believe we'll go over the fiscal cliff, and don't believe we'll strike.

On the plus side, I can't be wrong about all three of those!

Gun Control in a Soundbite

“Anti-gun lawmaker caught trying to board airplane with gun.”

Illinois state senator Donne Trotter of Chicago, spent the night in jail after trying to go through a TSA checkpoint at O’Hare with a pistol in his bag. Yes, he admits owning the pistol and claims he forgot it was there. He has been an advocate for gun control and has opposed granting concealed carry permits since he joined the senate in 1989.

This, to me, shows a person who wants to prevent other people from having guns but also wants to have them himself – the classic ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ mindset. While it gets very little press attention, this is a very common attitude in the anti-gun community.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from fiction – the highly anti-gun TV show “The West Wing” featured an almost entirely anti-gun cast of characters, but the supposedly anti-gun president at one point commented that he didn’t want the Secret Service agents defending his daughter to be discrete about the fact that they were carrying firearms. ‘I’m carrying a fully loaded gun and the safety’s off’. Its fine for MY daughter to have people protecting her with firearms but not someone else’s daughter. Sure, its fiction, and The West Wing was infamous for getting their technical details wrong. Still, the show was highly accurate in presenting the attitudes and the level of information that the characters would have had they been real.

I’ll admit, there are things I feel safe and justified in doing that I do not feel are safe or justified for everyone. I do not, however, feel that there should be laws prohibiting them from doing such things. If there are such laws then they apply to me too and if I break them I deserve to be punished. In such cases I would prefer that any laws required training or a demonstration of competence (or both, of course) but protect the right of individuals who pass such tests to do the thing in question.

OK, that was a bunch of generalities. Let’s take an example. I think I’m a sufficiently skilled and conscientious driver that I should be permitted to operate a motor vehicle. I feel that quite a lot of people on the road should not be. I’d be very happy if in order to get a driver’s license you had to pass a period skills check that actually prevented a notable percentage of the adult population from driving. Said law would, of course, have to allow means by which someone could get training and experience in advance of the test (especially for first-time applicants). It would cost money to do this testing – so get part of it by increasing the license fee, and a bunch of it by increasing the gas tax or new car tax or something.

On the flip side, such a law would, in my opinion, be unconstitutional if applied to firearms – that pesky 2nd Amendment. Nevertheless I’d back a constitutional amendment that reasserted the individual’s right to keep and bear arms if it included a training/proficiency requirement. But I’d ONLY back a constitutional amendment to that effect – no lesser law could override the 2nd.

The law is the law, and Sen. Trotter would have done well to remember it.

This is what you voted for

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Obamacare is a fundamentally bad plan and unconstitutional to boot.

But this post is just about Point A.

Walmart will be cutting health care coverage for a large number of its workers, and reducing the hours of many so that it can cut their benefits too.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/01/walmart-health-care-policy-medicaid-obamacare_n_2220152.html

This is fully legal under Obamacare, and the taxpayers will be picking up the tab.

In other words thanks to the wonder of Obamacare Walmart will save money and its workers will get fewer hours and less benefits. But you should remember that our glorious leader is for the poor and middle class people of this country, not the rich. That’s why his signature legislation will benefit the millionaires who run Walmart while imposing another financial burden on the middle class taxpayers and making life harder for the poor.

I’m not defending what Walmart is doing, but I’m sure they’ll be just the first of many companies to do this. I get bitten by this two ways – the federal government is going to need to raise more money to pay for the increased number of people getting some healthcare on the government’s dime, and the insurance companies are going to up prices since the government dime doesn’t go very far in healthcare. If you think Medicare is a great plan I urge you to consult with someone familiar with the billing side of it – providers like, say, paramedics often have to have that familiarity since if we don’t do our documentation “right” (i.e. to arcane government standards) Medicare won’t pay our employer.