Early in the film The Enforcer, Dirty Harry remarks that prematurely promoting a patrolwoman to inspector for the sake of progress is “a hell of a price to pay for being stylish.” President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to open up combat jobs to women including Special Operations Forces like the Army Rangers. At the time of this writing, two young women are in the final stages of the Ranger course. I’m confident at least one of them will pass and receive the Ranger tab. I’m much less confident she will have passed completely on her own merits. When a majority of young men routinely fail the ranger course, what are the odds one of only a handful of female volunteers would pass the course -- even if it’s a third try? 

The president expects the Army to produce some female Rangers so he can crow about how he’s on the “right side of history.”  Massaging the process for political reasons is vintage Obama, but it undermines one of the reasons SOF units are so effective: no weak links. Members of SEAL teams know they and the man next to them earned the right to be there, period. No one among them was passed through to satisfy any agenda other than to find the best sailors for the teams.

Neither the president nor anyone else has made a serious argument that women will make equally good infantrymen as men.  Civilian advocates for the policy do argue, however, that women deserve the career boost that comes with serving in combat units. They ignore concerns such as the reports of the Army scrambling to find ways to distribute combats loads creatively among squad members so females can be spared humping one hundred pound rucksacks. Isn’t there a reason young men and women play on separate sports teams? Perhaps those who insist on female Rangers should have started with insisting on girls playing on boy’s football or baseball teams. What? Too rough, too fast -- not fair? What do you think the recent Delta Force raid into an IS stronghold in Syria was like? It was messy work that quickly devolved into hand-to-hand combat.

I don’t doubt there are young women who will pass the qualification tests, but will their presence in combat units make the units more combat effective? If women are the same as men then why not field all female squads and companies just as there are all male units. The nation’s combat readiness should not be tampered with because the president and his appointed civilian bureaucrats do not appreciate that there will be “a hell of a price to pay for being stylish.”