There are many articles on women in the infantry, and it is not feasible to respond to every one. However, as Dr Katherine Brown has explicitly called out this blog in her article “Because they’re worth it: women in the infantry”, it makes sense to respond.

The original Fall When Hit piece, “Allowing Women into the Infantry is a Mistake”, made the following arguments:

• Diversity is not critical to infantry operations, but it is deleterious to unit cohesion
• Institutions, particularly government institutions, always prioritise diversity targets over performance, thus undermining standards
• Accepting women into the infantry will therefore have a net negative impact on operational effectiveness
• This is unacceptable because, although it is preferable that the military reflects society, this is far less important than operational effectiveness

Dr Brown summarises the blog thusly:

For example although Fall When Hit argues that while women are valuable to the military, they can exhibit valour, and can sometimes kill in close combat, they should not officially or institutionally be allowed to. Why? Because along with Richard Kemp he see’s it as a move lacking military logic, and one which will weaken the army’s fighting capability. The fear is women’s bodies and minds will erode combat effectiveness … (emphasis added)

This is a misrepresentation of the argument, and it’s important to point this out at the outset. Dr Brown implies that my article is blaming women for this predicament. This could not be further from the truth. It is not women’s fault that only a tiny percentage of females are physically capable of joining the infantry, and only a fraction of that tiny percentage actually want to. It’s not women’s fault that that infantry units need every ounce of cohesion they can muster to avoid collapse. It is not women’s fault that self-serving careerist officers and civil servants lack the integrity to maintain standards. And to be honest, you could make a pretty strong case that it is not women’s fault (overall) that we need armies at all.

But that is the world we live in. And mistaking the world as we’d like it to be for the world we actually live in is a grievous sin.

Dr Brown goes on to argue that “[f]irst, the UK military is legally bound to seek to eliminate discrimination harassment and victimisation, and advance equality of opportunity”. Clearly that sentence should not start with the word “first”, irrespective of context. First, the British military exists to protect the country. It is not always possible to maximise all of the “good things”, and in this case they must be prioritised.

Dr Brown writes:

Cohesion facilitated through exclusion affirms sexist, degrading and denigrating behaviours and attitudes against women (and other minorities) within the military.

On the face of it, that is a pretty shocking statement. It strongly implies that male-only organisations—like your local sports team—turn their men into misogynists. That besmirches the reputations of millions of men who have served in infantry units.

Fortunately, Dr Brown subsequently qualified this statement by saying that male-only organisations that employ “exclusion criteria based on negatively framed essentialised assumptions about women” *can* lead to sexist, degrading and denigrating behaviours and attitudes against women. We can charitably interpret the qualified statement as meaning that men in all-male groups run by misogynists behave like misogynists.

In neither interpretation is the argument particularly helpful. In the former case it’s positively misandrist (“Hello kettle, this is pot, over”).

But Dr Brown’s argument misses the critical point that the infantry does not define itself by the exclusion of women; it is pro-male without being anti-female. It defines itself as being “the poor bloody infantry”, the true warriors, the ones willing to do what no one else is. The “other” are most of the rest of the army, the other services and the civilian world. The absence of women, to be frank, just is not that important to the infanteer’s identity.

This leads us to a deeper problem with Dr Brown’s argument: cohesion is firmly rooted in exclusion. This applies just as much to a social club or a close group of friends as it does to the military. All the world’s elite institutions practice exclusion, but in the military it is particularly important. The British Army was once described as a loose alliance of warring tribes (corps v corps, regiment v regiment, green army v SOF); exclusion is the purpose of the regimental system. If everyone is special then no one is special; to follow Dr Brown’s argument to its conclusion would leave us with neither standards nor cohesion nor even identity.

Dr Brown goes on:

A diverse military bound by common doctrine, training, procedures and values, like other organisations, produces optimal outcomes, is successful, avoids group think, toxic leadership, and is more adaptable.

Is Dr Brown really suggesting that the presence of a female company commander, a couple of female platoon commanders and a smattering of female privates is going make a meaningful (positive) difference to combat outcomes in a 600-person infantry battlegroup? Women already serve throughout the Army, so there will already be female soldiers present — for instance, in the engineers, medics, artillery, PSYOPS, etc. There will already be women in the headquarters, and on the ground. I submit the incremental benefit will be zero, particularly—as I argued in the original post—as infantry soldiering is not rocket science in the first place. This makes the pay-off hugely asymmetric: big downside, negligible upside.

Dr Brown continues:

Ultimately though, why bother? Because allowing women into the Infantry is simply policy catching up with reality of contemporary war fighting and military service. It represents institutional recognition and support for those women (26% of women surveyed in Afghanistan said they’d engaged in close combat) who fight, serve and die on the frontline.

This argument does not make sense. Society already recognises and supports women who fight: we give them the same medals and support as any other soldiers. The notion that policy is “catching up” with reality only works if you are a progressive, and view the current trend as a good thing. One could argue, for instance, that granting illegal immigrants citizenship is policy “catching up” with reality, but that does not necessarily make it good policy. The policy needs to be justified on its own merits. And, as described in my previous post, and summarised above, this policy cannot be so justified.

Dr Brown references articles by Professor Anthony King (“The Female Soldier” and “Can Women Fight?”), so it is worth addressing these as well as they fail some very basic tests of logic. Read critically they can only be seen as marshalling very weak evidence in support of pre-existing belief. They certainly do not provide justification for overturning centuries of military tradition.

Professor King’s core argument is that in the modern army professional bonds are replacing personal bonds, and that this creates the conditions under which women can slot into infantry units.

There are a number of problems with this argument, as made by Professor King.

First, it is historically questionable. Professor King cites examples of the US Army and IDF chopping and changing units such that soldiers regularly work with people they do not know, and argues that this is a recent phenomenon. He explicitly contrasts this with the experience of draftee armies. But draftee armies saw plenty of turnover within units. During World War I, for instance, units suffered grievous casualty rates and regularly saw huge inflows of new blood. Clearly such units were not models of modern professionalism but it is inaccurate to say the lack of personal bonds in the 21st century is a new phenomenon.

Professor King’s argument that personal bonds are unimportant may seem plausible to some when focused on the military, but it clearly flies in the face of the wider human experience. From sports, to business, to government, personal relationships are what get things done. It might please some progressives who are pursuing equality outcomes to believe otherwise, but that does not make it so.

Second, Professor King’s argument is based on stunningly superficial analysis. He cites examples from recent conflicts where women served alongside infantry soldiers, and on this basis concludes that the presence of women does not damage cohesion. What, precisely, did he expect to see? British Paras refusing to soldier because a female medic appeared? US Army soldiers refusing CAS from a female pilot? Or perhaps Bootnecks complaining to journalists about having women around? These are professional soldiers; that’s just not how they work.

As I stated in my original blog piece, the arrival of women in the infantry will not cause a complete collapse of combat effectiveness — but that clearly does not mean morale and cohesion have not been affected. As an analogy, “light” infantry soldiers often tab with more than 100 pounds on their backs. That they are able to put one foot in front of another does not mean we should add a few bricks to their bergens.

Third, Professor King inexplicably parrots the argument that the work of the infantry has somehow changed:

Yet, combat performance is not primarily determined by raw masculine courage, strength and bonding. Rather, on the mechanised battlefield, successful militaries require refined tactics developed through careful training and preparation, and they need to coordinate their units by means of established procedures and clear command relations.

This is a false dichotomy: successful militaries need both refined tactics and brute strength. But the core activity of the infanteer remains carrying extremely heavy weight (100 lbs) across rough terrain, then running up a re-entrant bent over at the waist (50 lbs), then crawling up a streambed, then posting a grenade into a bunker, and then sticking a bayonet into someone’s chest. Occasionally there’s a vehicle involved. Sometimes the radios work. Of course there are differences between operations, and even within operations, but that fundamental job has not changed in a hundred years.

Fourth, and related, Professor King clearly confuses causation and correlation. He argues that the sine qua non of the infanteer is training and SOPs, and that this standardisation and professionalisation mean that women with proper training can slot right into infantry units. This is dangerous reductionism. Training and standardisation are enablers of performance, which — when wrapped up in a warrior culture — create cohesion. Integral to this, as Sebastian Junger describes, is the cult of manhood. Training and standardisation are necessary but not sufficient factors: you can tick the training and knowledge box and still undermine the team, particularly if your arrival leads to standards being weakened.

But you can clearly see where this argument is taking us. Consider these two statements:

Arbitrary social criteria become less important for inclusion than competence.

Translation, for the dumb squaddie: your argument about women isn’t just wrong, it’s nonsensical.

[H]omosocial reproduction does not primarily work through dramatic and public forms of denigration but through microsocial mechanisms of quiet social marginalization from often trivial forms of communion.

Translation, for the thick grunt: every little part of your behaviour is wrong and needs fixing. Standby for accusations of microaggression. You better Google “trigger warning” ASAP.

Scratch the surface on the progressive argument and what you find is a charter for social engineering. Even progressives must surely appreciate that when they spout totalitarian nonsense like this professional soldiers — who have both their own lives and the defence of the realm on their shoulders, instead of just fears about getting tenure — want to crawl into their scrapes and call in a fire mission.

In an ideal world this policy change would be based on real data. In the absence of that, at least a solid argument would have been nice.