Just some quick headlines:
- Official recounts frustration at Libya response (WashPost) — According to Jennifer Rubin, it was more dramatic than that headline makes it sound.
- Bangladesh death toll tops 800 (The Guardian) — It just gets worse and worse.
- Charges in Cleveland Abduction (WSJ) — What a horrific story.
- Jenny wins; Sanford admits to being in contempt (AP) — Of his divorce decree. His contempt for the people of the 1st District, and their willingness to submit to it, is another matter.
- 17 U.S. officers stripped of missile power (The Guardian) — Nuclear missiles, that is. A very disturbing leaked report.
- Lawmakers Shift Focus to Sex Assaults in Military (NYT) — This was a bigger story yesterday than today, but I didn’t do a VFP yesterday.
Related Posts
5 – Not really surprising. Strategic Defense, in the thermonuclear sense, has been on the back burner since the mid 90’s. I think both services would prefer to shed their responsibilities in this area. Morale and training are bound to suffer when there is an air of benign neglect. Problem is, nothing is ever benign about nuclear weapons. The lack of professionalism among the shooters worries me more about what it may say about the commitment of the maintainers. That sort of “accident” would be beyond thinking about.
6. This sex scandal should be a much bigger story than what it is. I guess we’re just in a time of numerous big stories and something has to be back burnered. Still, the numbers are gigantic. I would suggest this makes a mockery of the notion that military discipline is an effective means of creating, well, discipline among our soldiers. Heck, the guy in charge of addressing the situation turns out to be a pervert. Maybe it works to indoctrinate young men in how to kill others but as for creating descent human beings the system obvioulsy needs some tweaking.
Nobody joins the military to become the sexual assualt prevention officer. It’s likely that this guy was just filling that billet in between jobs in his actual career field, whatever it might have been. It is a sad state of affairs when the peole who are responsible for preventing bad behavior turn out to engage in the very same bad behavior. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Deny women from serving in the military and 99.9% of sexual assaults will stop.
Yeah and make women practice purdah and where the hijab, then rape will drop 99.9% too. You sound just like the Taliban. Its always the woman’s fault the man couldn’t control himself. Maybe you can go join the mujaheddin, I bet there looking for some recruits like you.
I didn’t realize this pool had a deep end until you fell off it.
Says the person who believes women should be punished for the transgressions of men.
Bud says, “this makes a mockery of the notion that military discipline is an effective means of creating, well, discipline among our soldiers.”
Yes, it does. Which is why it needs to be dealt with effectively (well, one reason — the other being simple justice to the victims), because maintaining discipline is essential to having an effective fighting force.
The military, which has learned over the centuries how to instill and maintain discipline in other areas, hasn’t figured this one out, in part because the situation is new.
In the past, the military kept problems from arising between men and women by keeping women away from the men. For instance, in WWII, while there were thousands of women in the nursing corps, they were kept away from the men except in the context of their duties taking care of patients. By “men,” I’m using the military sense meaning “enlisted men.” The women were all officers, so the rules against fraternization helped at least keep all of the men under the rank of 2nd lieutenant from socializing with the women.
Women simply weren’t allowed in close, tight quarters with men, such as on warships.
I’m not talking here about the value or advisability of integrating women into the same units with men. I’m just saying that doing so presents a new (in the sense of historically new) challenge that the military hasn’t figured out how to deal with yet. And it needs to do so.
Most of us work in close proximity to women all the time without committing sexual harassment or worse…. and do it without having to have that “discipline” drilled into our heads.
The military attracts men of a certain mindset… not all of them, mind you, but many.
I don’t know if “mindset” is the word. More like physically different, and perhaps with a greater constitutional tendency toward aggression. I say that not as a pejorative, but it stands to reason that a man who chooses to be a warrior is likely to be more aggressive than one who chooses to be a librarian, say.
Men in the military are, compared to men at large:
1. Younger.
2. Fitter. (Which is to say stronger, and probably with higher testosterone levels.)
3. More aggressive (again, not a pejorative, but actually a good thing in a soldier, as long as he responds positively to discipline).
So yeah, that makes the problem harder to control than it would be with a group of bloggers my age, for instance.
Not that I’m not chock full o’ testosterone, people… 🙂
Although I’m getting a LOT of those ads aimed at guys who think they need to boost their testosterone.
There’s a logical fallacy in these ads. They all feature mildly provocative photos of hot young women. (Sort of like the ones in these ads.)
So here’s the thing… if you’re sufficiently attracted by the picture to click on it to see more, it seems your testosterone level must be high enough. If you ignore the ad, you might be the guy who has “low T”…
Nothing says “Testosterone” like a good bow tie. Also, maybe a seersucker suit. When I see a a former EPE walking around dressed in a genteel southern style, I immediately start fearing ‘roid rage and get out of the way before he goes all “Hulk” on me.
Brad, you’re missing the point. You claim the military is this bastion of discipline yet this completely refutes that claim. Worse, the military itself seems content to sweep it under the rug. High ranking officers, including one female general, were covering up for these perps. In my opinion these guys aren’t soldiers they’re just creepy criminals. And they deserve jail time.
No I’m not missing the point. I was just trying to agree with you. I kind of thought you were implying that “military discipline is a sham,” but I ignored that, because it’s so patently and obviously false. It’s a simple fact of life that it takes a tremendous, successful emphasis on discipline for a military force to function at all, much less functions as well as the U.S. military does. But you’re not going to agree.
Without arguing with you, I tried to politely point out WHY this is such a departure from the norm of military discipline. It didn’t take. I tried.
We’re not going to get much farther toward agreement on this…
I think that this is a prime example of a few bad apples being tolerated and abetted by far too many other people. I would guess that the same guys commit these crimes over and over again.
It is important to stand up and say that behavior is unacceptable – and to punish it.
The military just finds it tough to confront, like the pervasive pre 1950 racism in the military. Only here, society at large is not also accepting of the abuse.
If Brad’s hypothesis were correct, we would have just single sex high schools. We don’t. What we have here is a tolerance problem within the military chain of command.
You’re misunderstanding my hypothesis, if I even have one.
Here’s what I said — it’s a big problem. It needs to be addressed more effectively than it has been.
What you said about “single-sex high schools” reminds me of a rather silly proposal I read about in the WSJ today — that men and women serve in separate units.
What was silly about it was the analogy given to support it — that males and females generally do not participate in co-ed sports.
What’s ridiculous about THAT is that the idea behind single-sex sports is that, say, if men and women competed against each other in basketball, shot put, what have you, it would be unfair to the women.
Carrying that over to the military means supposing that the enemies that our military would face would ALSO separate their fighters into male and female teams, and only send female units up against ours. To be fair, you know. Just like in sports.
As I said, it was pretty silly.
Mind you, that wasn’t a position being taken by the WSJ editorial board or anything. It was an op-ed from a Marine 1st lieutenant. It was intriguing, and worth publishing for that. I just found the sports analogy ridiculous.
I just meant the Younger, Fitter, More Aggressive idea. Didn’t mean to imply you were anything but against the situation.
Single sex female units would actually be interesting. Some might surpass the all male units, depending on the role. Bet all the nuclear missile shooters ordered to stand down this week were male.
But they ARE younger, fitter and more aggressive. All of which are categories that, statistically, make someone more likely to commit a sexual assault. As opposed to older, less healthy, less aggressive guys, who statistically would be a far lesser threat to women.
That’s not a moral judgment. The latter group doesn’t deserve greater credit for behaving itself…
In other words, acknowledge that you’re dealing with a demographic subgroup that is going to be harder to control. And then figure out how to control them, and do it.
My point was to address Doug’s assertion that it was a “mindset” problem that led to the assaults. Which I saw as vaguely akin to Bud’s implication that the military is inherently wicked, and THAT’S the problem (to which, of course, the only solution would be not to have a military).
It doesn’t excuse anyone, or any institution, to acknowledge the fact that this subset of men is likely to be more sexually aggressive than a random sample of men — NOT because they’re in the military and that somehow turned them into brutes, but because of their age, physicality and relative tendency toward aggression, all of which they brought with them when they enlisted.
The problem must be effectively addressed. But to do that, it’s important to recognize the actual problem.
Um, have you seen the recent news out of Cleveland?
I, too, think the military, as an institution, has a historical problem of condoning sex abuse – among both the enlisted ranks and the officer corps.
I don’t see the leadership on this that the military showed with regard to interracial integration. I’m not sure why; it is disturbingly anti-American that this would not be more strongly confronted. Groupthink develops slowly and is hard to alter once set…
Brad you’ve missed the latest embarrassing story to come out of our great state. Slate has an article that shows why we should not implement a school voucher system (in its currently purposed form) in South Carolina.
Nothing on Benghazi, huh?
Whaddya mean? It was my lead story…
Oops. I should have looked before I leaped. I saw “Official recounts frustration” and my brain immediately decided that a frustrated official was recounting votes in the aftermath of a close election somewhere.
I predict this non-issue will peak soon with a few embarrassing but ultimately non-criminal revelations and we’ll soon forget about it. After all there were at least 10 Benghazi-type events in places like Yemen, Syria and Saudi-Arabia claiming 60 lives during the Bush Administration and the Democrats largely left it alone. Foreign diplomacy is a dangerous thing and we should strive to do better. But this witch hunt mind set by the Republicans gets us nowhere.
Yeah, the government misled the American public about a terrorist attack for political gain in the middle of a Presidential campaign. Non-issue. Nothing to see here.