Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently delivered a barn-burner of a speech to a large gathering of military personnel, from generals to privates. In it, he outlined ten points upon which the military establishment is pivoting away from its Biden-era woke policies to a strictly war-fighting, war-winning doctrine.
Predictably, due to one of many memorable lines by the secretary, the left’s response will be hair-on-fire outrage. As Hegseth pointed out, the result of the restored policy of gender-neutral physical fitness standards is, inevitably, that few, and possibly no, women will meet the requirements for certain combat duties. He said, then so be it.
So much for the myth of “women can do anything that men can do.”
It occurs to me that Hegseth’s wise words apply not only to the military armed forces, but in large measure also to the civilian armed forces, which means law enforcement agencies.
The nation was witness to the well-meaning but unqualified women of the Secret Service who valiantly tried to protect President Trump from a would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania. All of them were obviously too short to adequately shield him with their bodies, as their duty requires, and at least one of them could not properly handle her weapon. The failure of the Secret Service was so spectacular that its director, Kimberly Cheatle, resigned. Her diversity goals had been met, at the expense of the mission, and possibly at the cost of the life of an innocent man who had been killed protecting his family.
Diversity can be fatal.
The nation has also witnessed, for years, televised videos of nonfederal police women who clearly could not do their job due to their physical inability to overpower a resisting male suspect. Numerous videos, including those on so-called reality shows, depict women who could not chase down a fleeing male suspect, nor successfully wrestle one if she did catch him. When assisting male officers to effect an arrest, the typical contribution of the female was to grasp the ankles of a handcuffed perpetrator as he was lifted and carried by male officers.
In one incident, a male broke the grasp of two police women and escaped. (He was arrested days later.) In another, a pear-shaped police woman was unable to cross a waist-high fence, while the subject of her command to stop dismissively ignored her and casually walked away untouched.
The ripple effect of incapable police officers is that they endanger the capable ones. Officers may depend on their partner in life-and-death struggles with criminals. If that partner is physically incapable, one or both of them may die. The overwhelming evidence of these videos is that many police women passively, despite their best intentions, pose a potential danger to police men.
Clearly, the physical abilities (strength, speed, and agility) of most police women are lower than those of most police men. Just as clearly, it has been forbidden for years to openly state the obvious fact, the fact witnessed by millions in these videos. Meanwhile, off camera, a New York City police woman of diminutive stature was easily disarmed by a prisoner in a courthouse; he then used her gun to murder a male officer.
Diversity led to death.
Proponents of diversity hiring will correctly point out that some women may be physically and mentally more qualified than some men to do police work. True, but that misses the point. Hiring a woman only (or primarily) because she fills a diversity quota is a dangerous, potentially fatal policy. It is likewise when standards are lowered to ensure that women can meet them. If a woman meets all the male-standard requirements, then those objections become moot. Likewise, the hiring of unqualified men is a dangerous and deadly practice. Hiring based on merit and high standards only should be the focus of any personnel policy. Yet that idea has become controversial.
Not all police work need involve chasing down bad guys and handcuffing them. Some studies may have shown that in general, women are more able (than men) to pacify suspects through negotiation. If so, then employing them in that capacity, without reducing the available number of officers capable of physically overpowering resisting suspects, is justified.
The world is a dangerous place, both in the military and civilian spheres. It is sometimes necessary to apply brute physical force to disable foreign enemies and domestic criminals. Those two spheres differ in important respects and must be kept separate. Both spheres require that common sense, not woke ideology, govern the selection of the most capable people, men or women, to perform the difficult and dangerous duties required to keep us safe.
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Image: Pete Hegseth. Credit: Gage Skidmore via <a data-cke-saved-href=" by-sa="" captext="<a data-cke-saved-href=" cc="" gage="" gageskidmore="" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode.en" https:="" p="" photos="" src="https://images.americanthinker.com/kq/kqn1iyrcopomeswlrijb_640.jpg" www.flickr.com="" width="100%" height="auto">
Image: Pete Hegseth. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.