No, The Military Should Not Be Sending Women Into Combat

Senate Democrats made a lot of insane remarks during Pete Hegseth’s defense secretary confirmation hearing on Tuesday. But one of the most outlandish was their unhinged obsession with sending women into combat.

Throughout their hostile interrogation of Hegseth, many of these (mainly female) leftist senators expressed maniacal levels of outrage about the Army veteran’s previously stated belief that female service members should not be permitted to serve in ground combat roles due to such a policy’s impact on military readiness. Democrat Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts were among those to partake in such disgraceful theatrics.

Support for sending women into the front lines of war was hardly a partisan issue, however.

During her questioning of Hegseth, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa — an Army veteran — reaffirmed her belief that women be afforded the opportunity to serve in combat roles so long as they meet the military’s “very, very high standards.” Ernst announced Tuesday evening that she will be supporting Hegseth’s confirmation.

As Hegseth has always maintained, women who put on the uniform to serve and — in some cases give their lives for — their country deserve our respect. To do so is an immense sacrifice that should not be taken lightly.

However, for all the Democrat kvetching during Tuesday’s hearing, Hegseth was correct in his original assessment that women should not be deployed to the trenches to fight America’s wars.

For starters, it does not produce better mission outcomes.

In 2015, under the Obama administration, the Marine Corps conducted a study comparing the efficiency of all-male and mixed-sex combat units, which according to the Marine Corps Times, found that the former outperformed the latter “in nearly every capacity.” The sex-integrated teams not only “performed at lower overall levels, completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts,” but female Marines also “sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall.”

In essence, the analysis confirmed what has been known since time immemorial: That men are stronger and more adept at performing physically demanding tasks than women. Placing women in combat roles jeopardizes the efficiency of military units, which produces a higher propensity for injury and death among service members.

These facts aren’t “mean,” as Gillibrand insinuated in her screeching tirade. It’s basic science. As Jesse Kelly — a Marine Corps veteran — aptly noted in these pages, “All people may be equal in the eyes of God and the eyes of the law, but they are not equal in the laws of biology.”

[READ: Whistleblower Gives Evidence The Pentagon Holds Female Soldiers To Lower Standards]

Deploying women to fight on the front lines of any given military conflict also defies common ethics and societal gender norms.

It is men who are supposed to take up the role of protector and defender. Not only for their families, but society writ large. Sending women into the heat of combat ignores this fundamental truth under the guise of the faux argument that a woman can “do anything a man can do.”

[READ: Why The Trump Administration Needs To Keep Women Out Of Combat]

Contrary to some senators’ wishes, ensuring service-wide “diversity” and “inclusion” should not be the primary focus of the U.S. military. The only objective our armed forces should care about is winning wars — and that means upholding the highest standards to recruit the best talent available and ensure mission success.

Yes, there are roles for women in the military. But one of those roles is not fighting in the trenches of war alongside men.