The "Women Can't Fight" article written by James Webb was published in
1979. Quite some time ago.
He long ago renounced his former views. The 1979 article was used against him by Democrats when he was nominated (and later approved) to be Secretary of the Navy during President Reagan's 2nd term. And again, this time by Republicans, after he argued against the invasion of Iraq, denounced the Bush administration, switched parties from GOP to Democrat and successfully was elected senator from Virginia, ousting 2-term sitting Senator (and believed to be in line for a 2008 White House run) George Allen.
While he won those fights against large political parties, he appears to have lost in 2017 to a "small but vociferous group of women graudates" (
http://www.dailywire.com/news/14954/jim-webb-forced-turn-down-naval-academy-award-james-barrett#) who have successfully fought Webb's nomination by the US Naval Academy's Alumni Association for an award.
If the US Naval Academy Alumni Association can't give an award to somebody like Jim Webb, then who is better qualified?
Webb's history includes being an alumnus of the USNA, US Marine veteran of Vietnam War, awarded the Navy Cross for combat heroism, plus the Silver Star, Bronze Star & two Purple Hearts, OCS instructor at Quantico, post-grad doctorate from George Washington University, best-selling author, Emmy-award winner, former Assistant Secy of Defense, former Secy of the Navy, former US senator, former US presidential candidate, key proponent behind the post 9/11 GI Bill (which was opposed by John McCain, among others), etc.
Still carries NVA shrapnel in his body to this day.
He should be enshrined in the halls of Annapolis for his signature novel "Fields of Fire", if nothing else.
Here are some excerpts from Webb's controversal 1979 article (
https://www.washingtonian.com/1979/11/01/jim-webb-women-cant-fight/):
"Lest I be understood too quickly, I should say that I believe most of what has happened over the past decade (the 1970s) in the name of sexual equality has been good. It is good to see women doctors and lawyers and executives. I can visualize a woman President. If I were British, I would have supported Margaret Thatcher. But no benefit to anyone can come from women serving in combat."
"The United States is the only country of any size on earth where the prospect of women serving in combat is being seriously considered. Even Israel, which continually operates under near-total mobilization requirements, does not subject its women to combat or combat-related duty. Although some 55 percent of Israeli women— as opposed to 95 percent of the men— serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, the women have administrative and technical jobs that require little or no training."
"What are the advantages to us, as a society, of having women in combat units? I don’t know of any. Some say that coming manpower shortages might mandate it, but this country has never come close to full mobilization, and we are nowhere near that now. During World War II, 16 million men wore the uniform. Today, the active-duty strength of the US military is only 2 million people, out of a much larger group of eligible citizens. Furthermore, bringing women into the military does not mandate bringing them into combat."
Granted, the 1979 version of Jim Webb who wanted not just to keep women out of combat but also the Service Academies is viewed by 2017 readers as a sexist, misogynistic throwback to the "Mad Men" era, but his following statement should be read and re-read:
"We would go months without bathing, except when we could stand naked among each other next to a village well or in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We carried our own gear and when we took casualties we carried the weapons of those who had been hit. When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep fighting holes. When we needed to make a call of nature we squatted off a trail or straddled a slit trench that had been dug between fighting holes, always by necessity in public view. We slept in makeshift hooches made out of ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces. Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws, and some of us had all of them. We became vicious and aggressive and debased, and reveled in it, because combat is all of those things and we were surviving. I once woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of one of my machine gunners stabbing an already-dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustrations into the corpse’s chest. I watched another of my men, a wholesome Midwest boy, yank the trousers off a dead woman while under fire, just to see if he really remembered what it looked like."