Women in the Military

The U.S. government has just announced that women will be allowed to take on all roles in the military. No longer will they be banned from any of them. This will undoubtedly weaken this institution, as criteria for acceptance will be lowered, as Walter E. Williams has so brilliantly demonstrated. (A similar situation occurred when “firemen” became “firefighters” so that women who could not carry at person weighing 190 pounds up or down stairs to escape from fires were allowed to participate anyway). Then, too, biological imperatives for men to protect women will kick in even the more, instead of fighting the enemy.  Also from this perspective the natural tendency of males to compete with each other for the attention and affection of females will further deflect them from the presumed goal of the army, to defeat the enemy.

How shall we as libertarians view these new developments? Are they an unmitigated good? Are they a clear evil? Neither, I contend.  If we are ever to occupy the Moon and Mars and eventually colonize worlds in other solar systems, we shall need lots of human beings. But in order to accomplish this goal, women, not men, are required (always at the margin). Men are relatively speaking, good canon fodder. Women are too important, again from this biological point of view, to be wasted in any such manner. In world war two, the Russians and the Germans inflicted heavy blows on each other.  There were hardly any healthy men left standing afterwards of child-bearing age. Yet, after this conflagration, they were never missed, at least not in terms of population growth. Any woman who wanted to become pregnant, such is the human condition, had little or no difficulty achieving this goal. Imagine, instead, that this war had been fought only or mainly by females, with the males taking on the role of civilians (in those quaint times, non-combatants were less targeted than in the modern era). Then, there would have been hardly any healthy women left upright afterwards. What would have happened to the population in these two countries? To ask this is to answer it: there would have been virtually no new generation.

So, we may oppose placing women in those “boots” that are and are going to be “on the ground” all over the world, not only on libertarian grounds, but on biological ones too.

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