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.  The Privatization of R... Walter Block Check Amazon for Pricing. Rather, we should be ambivalent about them. For, on the one hand, a weakened armed forces is to be regretted, since they are charged with protecting the citizenry, and now with these new initiatives the soldiers will become less able to carry out that needed task. (In saying this, I speak from the minimal government or mlnarchist point of view; from the anarcho-capitalist perspective, the government should be completely disbanded; thus, its makeup would be irrelevant).  On the other hand, much, most of what the armed forces actually do is in no way related to defense. Instead, it involves offense: the U.S. military are scattered all over the world, located in literally hundreds of other countries that pose no threat whatsoever of conquering our country. Thus, an emaciated military is something to be welcomed, since it will reduce U.S. imperialism.

There is another focus from which to view this new initiative of promoting female participation in the military other than the libertarian. This is the biological. Women are the limitation of population, and its growth. It is not for nothing that the farmer keeps 50 cows and one bull, rather than the reverse. If there were 50 bulls, 49 of them would be superfluous. If there were one cow, all the bulls in the world could not by one iota increase the size of the flock.  In other words, females, at the margin, are much more important for increasing the size of the human race. They are the precious limitation on population growth. Why is the latter to be preferred?  That is because in order to create another Mozart, or Mises, or Einstein, or Rothbard, or Salk, or Bach, or Gates, we need millions of new babies. The more of them the better. Defending the Undefend... Walter Block Best Price: $1.99 Buy New $10.80 (as of 07:55 UTC - Details) 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 cannon 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.