Armies that do real fighting do not employ women as infantry or submariners

The recent inquest into the suicide of a young female soldier in the British Army nearly four years ago has generated vast amounts of adverse-publicity for the army. Suicide is a lifelong catastrophe for the victim’s family, so nothing said here is intended to trivialise their loss or apportion blame for what happened to her. Suicidal impulses are both complex and unbearably tragic, but there is no doubt that the problems that the victim encountered in army life were related to sexual matters. The complex ruling of the Coroner’s court in essence confirmed this, but the overarching fixation of the media is that the army should  have done more to help her.

You can, however, put it another way. Fixing the unbroken and not leaving well alone has been the ruling addiction of zealous ideological reformers throughout the ages. This has been very much the case with inducting women into the fighting arm of armies. These days, an eager feminism, wishing to colonise privileged aspects traditional male-life, has inadvertently produced splendid examples of the consequence of introducing a spanner into the workings of an efficient and  functioning clock.  When the clock then ceases to function, it is allegedly because there has not been enough interference by spanners, so fresh laws are passed authorising the intervention of even more spanners. Guess what? The clock even more adamantly refuses to work. Realists will understand why: ideologists call for more spanners.

And so it is with the British Army today, and any army that tries to mix male and female soldiers together in wholly integrated units. The long aeons of human evolution have created a radical dimorphism for the two sexes. Males in groups tend to be aggressive, hierarchical, stoical, object-based and in the absence of women, sex-obsessed. Women in groups tend to be conspiratorial, emotional, exclusionary, self-pitying and monarchical. Their sexual drive is less libidinal than men’s and is often based on mutual grooming. Don’t take my word for it: just go into any newsagents and look at the dimorphic magazines on display. Then consider how armies are formed – around the concept of the hunting pack, in squads, roughly twelve strong: the same number as there were of apostles, and one more than soccer or American football teams. “Twelver” Shi’ism recognises twelve original holy men. The contubernium was the basic unit of the Roman army, and consisted of ten men, all of whom could be punished for an infraction by one – hence the term “decimate”.

These numbers have no psychological or organisational application for women, whose social groups tend to be more flexible, though often dominated by a “queen bee” type leader. The differences between the sexes were dramatically illustrated by the respective fates of the child-murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. The latter was confined for life in isolation because he would have been immediately murdered by fellow-prisoners. Hindley routinely had the pick of the fresh intake young female prisoners as sexual partners, while one of her many lovers, Prison Warden Patricia Cairns, even tried to help her escape. Yet these insights into female psycho-sexuality are the exceptions to the norm, which is that the vast majority – 99 per cent – of violent and sexual offences are by men. What enables men to kill is also what enables them to be effective soldiers. The only British soldier to win a VC for the D-Day Landings Stan Hollis had killed 90 Germans before June 6th, and added another twelve on that day. Or so he claimed – revealing an either unhealthy or hyperbolic appetite for keeping score.

If you think that the purpose of armed forces is to give career-opportunities to military-minded women, then behold the tragedy of the British Army, the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy today.  Of course, the causes of this comic opera extend well beyond the insane integration of the sexes: budgetary miserliness, bad political decision-making and a chronic failure to establish a long-term strategy that matches the UK’s military and political needs are other ingredients in this sorry stew. But whereas no fundamental and irrefutable agenda lies behind the possession of two aircraft carriers that don’t work and can’t be made to, or the continued existence of the largely functionless Corps of the Royal Marines, the same cannot be said of women serving in integrated units in the navy, army and air force.  That is now a non-negotiable and apparently irrefutable insanity, one which will be protected by the screeching harridans of politicised feminism, regardless of how dysfunctional these units turn out to be. The refusal of the clock to work will be met with yet more and ever-larger spanners, wielded with decibel-shrieking.

Yet armies that are obliged to do real fighting do not employ women as infantry: witness Gaza and Ukraine.  Of the roughly one thousand Israeli soldiers killed in action in Gaza, only a handful were women, and all in support arms, not as front-line soldiers. Ukraine went even further, allowing all women to leave the country and commanding all men into their sixties to remain and fight. Realistically, it seems, a 60-year-old male conscript is a better bet as a soldier than a twenty-year-old female. Realism is the hallmark of war-fighting armies. India, with enormous complex racial and cultural populations to draw from, does not recruit its soldiers impartially, preferring, as did the Raj, to enlist its men from the Punjab. The President’s bodyguard has since 1947 been drawn from only three castes, Jat Sikhs, Hindu Jats and Hindu Rajputs. That’s the system that works. Is it fair? Certainly not – but what has fairness to so with armies? They are intrinsically unfair organisations that are predicated on the concepts of drill, discipline and loyalty, with punishment for those who lack those qualities, and summary death for the enemy. Fairness barely enters into it. 

It certainly doesn’t when it comes to the allocation of medals. The only woman soldier to win a Military Cross in Northern Ireland was awarded it after shooting dead a loyalist terrorist who had just shot and killed a Catholic man. That was a pretty low bar for such a prestigious medal. An RAF woman pilot in Iraq was cited for a Distinguished Flying Cross because she had landed her helicopter under fire at Basra Hospital. The authorising officer checked on RAF records: all helicopters that week had landed and taken off under fire, but she was the only officer to be so honoured. Her original citation had been written up by an officer who knew that his career path would be improved the more decorations he awarded women. 

Wherever men and women have been billeted together there have been sexual shenanigans leading to both ordinary misunderstandings and abuse of rank, especially in submarines. It almost passes belief that the Admiralty thought it was a good idea to mix men and women in those underwater coffins with so much time of their hands and convenient torpedo tubes in which to spend it. The outcome of all this absurd decision-making, a contradiction of everything the human species has learnt about sexuality and keeping young people in close proximity, is always termed “misogyny”. This is handy little epithet to hang around the neck of a problem, making it the fault of men. It is the fault, firstly, of feminists for idealising military careers as platonic paths to career success, when there is nothing remotely platonic about making a living from killing people, or certainly preparing to, and the fault of politicians for abjectly surrendering to their absurd demands.

Moreover, a perverse rewards-system has accompanied the arrival of women into senior positions, rather comparable to the promotion of members of the Royal Family with no palpable talents that might merit such advances. The elevation of Sharon Nesmith to full General and Vice Chief of the Defence Staff – the first women so honoured – is probably not unrelated to her sex, but she is at least technically accomplished. This can barely be said of the New Zealand Navy skipper Yvonne Gray, who last year drove her hydrographic ship Manawanui onto rocks near Samoa, causing the vessel to catch fire and sink. The very purpose of hydrographic ships is to detect rocks remotely by sonar, not by foundering on them before being unceremoniously despatched to Davy Jones’ Locker. The New Zealand Minister for Defence Judith Collins nonetheless called Gray’s performance “something of a triumph, frankly”.

That about says it all, frankly.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.