Good afternoon, this is The Smoke Eater for Friday, March 12, 2021, and all you need is metal.
Quick Hit
* Body armor with curves * Flight suits with stretch marks * And a distraction *
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At the end of January, the U.S. Army announced new grooming and appearance regulations. The Army's PR said the new regs would, "improve the well being of all soldiers," and quoted the head of the Army's uniform policy branch, Sgt. Maj. Brian Sanders, saying, "This is one of the many facets of putting our people first and recognizing who they are as human beings...Their identity and diverse backgrounds are what makes the Army an ultimate fighting force."
The changes were part of recommendations from a panel of 17 soldiers -- 10 Black women, four white women, one Latino woman, one Latino man, and one Black man, from multiple commands that included healthcare specialists -- that sought to improve inclusion and diversity. Changes include the allowance of natural hair dyes and highlights, nail polish, lipstick, earrings, and the abolition of certain potentially offensive phrases like, “Mohawk, Fu Manchu, dreadlocks, eccentric, and faddish."
Women will now be allowed to have a variety of hair styles that are more considerate to culture and ethnicity, including buzzcuts, locs, and long ponytails in combat situations where a bun might otherwise impede a helmet.
The Army's changes come roughly a decade after the Air Force changed regulations regarding the hair of female airman in a similar effort to promote inclusion and diversity.
As the New York Times noted in its reporting, this is a big deal. A 2020 study published by the Council on Foreign Relations found that women, particularly Black and Latino women, make up a rapidly growing percentage of uniformed service members, and the military has become reliant upon them to fill roles across all six branches of the armed services. Black women in particular make up a large percentage of Army recruits even as the total number of military service members has steadily decreased for decades, according to a recent Pew Research study.
"Look Sharp, Be Sharp"
Aside from new grooming standards for women and men, one of the biggest things in the new Army regs is body armor for women.
Skipping over about 500 years of design history (and the misogynistic debate about women in combat) body armor for women wasn't really considered until recently. Women serving in combat roles have complained about an inability to perform their duties -- which affects the overall readiness of any soldier -- thus jeopardizing the safety of all soldiers. Ill-fitting body armor can rise up to chin level when sitting in a vehicle, and armor that jostles when moving leads to physical injuries.
"Females are not small males," the Army quoted Beverly Kimball, a project engineer, in 2012 when it began prototyping the new armor type. "We have specific proportions that require designs for fit and function for uniforms as well as equipment."
When the military designed and tested the armor, it took into account bust size, torso length, and shoulder width. In December 2020, female-specific body armor was issued to women stationed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.
NOTE: Speaking as a journalist, body armor is uncomfortably heavy. Commercially available body armor weighs about 20 lbs. A crude example would be wearing two tight fitting backpacks, one on your chest and one on your back, with roughly 6 lbs. in each pack. Then put on another backpack full of 20-50lbs of crap, and run a 5k in under 30 minutes.
After all combat roles were opened to women in 2015, the military struggled to supply female-specific body armors. During a 2018 defense appropriations hearing, Sen. Lisa Murkowski told former Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford that "quantities are so low that I understand it’s only issued to women who are deploying and not during any initial entry or unit training."
Dunford responded saying that for two years each branch of the military had been struggling to supply equipment for women that wasn't specifically designed for men. “Each of the services now has an initiative to change the ... sizes to accommodate the different body types of women, but it has taken some time," Dunford said.
In March of 2018, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein told the Air Force Times the Air Force was reviewing all equipment after coming to the realization that, "women have been flying for years wearing gear that’s been designed for men." In that same piece, Col. Samantha Weeks, commander of the 57th Adversary Tactics Group at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, described how she and her fellow pilots were forced to modify the small-sized anti-gravity suits pilots must where when pulling high-G maneuvers.
"I had calf modifications, thigh modifications," Weeks told the Air Force Times. "It was tightened down to the smallest I could make it."
Former Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson similarly explained that women flying combat aircraft have been forced to accommodate to weapon systems that, by design, only a small minority of Americans could actually operate. “We shouldn’t be at that point almost 30 years after women have been flying combat aircraft,” Wilson said.
"This Man's Army"
Earlier this week, conservative talking head Tucker Carlson whined about the female-specific body armor, and the Air Force’s testing of new flight suits designed for pregnant pilots. I'm not going reprint the bastard, I consider that free advertising for an overpaid drama queen.
In response to Calrson's ignorant comments, current and former military officials up and down the chain of command publicly sounded off in support of the critical roles women play in the military.
Pentagon spox John Kirby started off yesterday's press briefing by addressing Carlson's comments, saying the US military's diversity is one of its greatest strengths.
"We still have a lot of work to do to make our military more inclusive, more respectful of everyone, especially women. But what we absolutely won't do is take personnel advice from a talk show host, “Kirby said. “We know we’re the greatest military in the world today, and even for all the things we need to improve, we know exactly why that’s so."
The Air Force has been slowly relaxing regulations for pregnant Airmen as the role of Airmen is broadening. Under the old rules, drone pilots, remote missile operators, cyber specialists -- all could be driving a desk once they confirmed their pregnancy, and that's after filing a mountain a paperwork, and hoping they get approved for duty time. Rules were changed in 2019, but pilots in their first trimester are are still prohibited from flying ejection-seat aircraft (like fighter jets) and deploying overseas, but pilots can now fly dual-seat aircraft under most conditions.
A maternity flight suit has been in the works for awhile. The Air Force rolled out maternity Airman Battle Uniforms (ABUs) in 2017 and nobody really cared. In June of 2020, the Air Force began requesting proposals for the maternity flight suit; it began testing them back in November. And there never a single Trump tweet.
A quick look on the military Exchange (like Walmart, but for service members) shows a lot of semi-formal clothing like skirts, blouses, jumpers, and slacks. There's also Multi-Cam maternity coat and pants currently listed as a "best seller.”
One More thing...
Arguments that women in combat roles decrease the effective fighting strength of a military don't stand up to even modest scrutiny.
In World War II, Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko notched 309 confirmed Axis kills, making her one of the best snipers in human history. Women attached to special forces units deployed in Afghanistan were more than capable of keeping up with their male counterparts. Throughout the Syrian civil war, the YPJ's Women's Protection Unit has been revered as some of the fiercest fighters, successfully pushing back ISIS, stopping the advance of forces aligned with Asad, Turkey, and Russia, and playing a pivotal role in the creation of Rojava, the autonomous Kurdish state in Northeastern Syria.
Micha Ables penned a piece in 2019 for West Point's Modern War Institute arguing that the military's existing standards were problematic, and that in his experience as a soldier, a gender-neutral approach is beneficial. "Military policies should only be developed for one purpose: fighting and winning our nation’s wars," Ables wrote.
That the military has to trudge through this crap while it’s attempting to stomp out sexual assault, suicide, and political extremism within the ranks is unconscionable. Yesterday Army Secretary John Whitley held a summit with brigade and battalion commanders at Ft. Bliss, warning them that Congress is ready to strip them of their power to investigate and reprimand soldiers in their units — a move he said could have “unintended consequences.” What Whitley thinks those consequences are is worthy of debate. The Pentagon warning about white supremacists within its ranks requires serious discussion. The six-year high of military suicides should be what galvanizes everyone with a chevron, star, bar, or bird to tweet.
It's possible Carlson's bitching about women in the military stems from his own of inadequacy, impotence, and/or insecurities. It's possible that Carlson's skittishness to new military standards is all part of his own history of espousing white supremacist tropes while the military (and America) becomes more diverse. It's unlikely we'll know the answers to those questions, but we do know that he never served. The prep school graduate makes confused faces on TV about the women and men who sacrifice themselves for his First Amendment right to collect a fat paycheck while sitting in a posh Manhattan studio talking shit.
OK, here's a cute critter video:
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