Women Should Not Serve in Combat
And a nation which defends herself with women in combat no longer deserves to be defended (Dt. 20:7).
In Douglas Wilson’s own words: 8 quotes from 1999 to 2026, from Blog & Mablog, CNN and On the Line, each cited to the source.
And a nation which defends herself with women in combat no longer deserves to be defended (Dt. 20:7).
There are certain places that ought to be male-only spaces, and combat is one of them, and being closed up in a submarine is another one... Men are good at smashing and breaking things; they’re good at fighting. And when you have this egalitarian dogma that women and men have to be the same, what happens is it’s like saying everybody has to be able to dunk the basketball. If you’ve got an egalitarian dogma that says everyone has to be able to dunk, the only thing you’re going to wind up doing is lowering the net.
A man is not supposed to put on a frilly dress and a woman is not supposed to put on an AR-15 and a helmet and go out... because women are not supposed to be in combat roles, because that’s not their role, that’s not their assigned role... Where there is a man, where there is a husband, he’s the head. That’s assigned. In civil affairs, it says in Isaiah that a nation is under a curse when women and children rule over them.
I think that if you have women on board a submarine, and we went to sea a couple of times, submerged for two and a half months, you’ve got 130 people locked up in this steel tube under the water for two and a half months. You put three women on board. That’s like, ‘Why shouldn’t I throw catnip into the pack of cats?’ [Spencer Macnaughton: “Well, there’s going to be gay people in the submarine too.”] Yeah. That’s another problem.
A nation defended by her women is a nation no longer worth defending. When women are placed in the front line of defense, every Christian man should walk away from the cause of that nation as being beneath contempt. Taking this a step further, a nation as far gone as to think that women in combat is a viable way to go is a nation which is no longer defensible in principle—even if there remains a misguided desire to defend it. […] the nation which we call the United States has already been lost.
As I mentioned before the interview, I was in the submarine service, for example, and whatever idiot thought of putting women on submarines… [Pamela Brown: “What would you say to a female submariner who’s been doing the job and kicking butt doing it?”] I’d say, yeah, we don’t want you down here kicking butt. [Pamela Brown: “Why?”] Because, I went to sea a couple of times. We were submerged for two and a half months. All right, two and a half months. Let’s say 130 guys in a submarine with three women on it. Okay, so let’s put 130 horny sailors and three women and submerge them out in the middle of the Atlantic for two and a half months. What could go wrong?
To keep women out of combat is nothing more than simple, biblical prudence because women as a group are not suited for combat. Put another way, women do a poor job fighting. […] The Bible tells us that women are not as good as men are in the important work of violence. […] When a nation has finally come to the point where it is defended by the women, that same nation no longer deserves to be defended.
The prohibition to women in Deuteronomy 22:5 is one which blindsides us. We knew abortion and homosexuality were abominations, but here we are told, no woman shall put on “the gear of a warrior” (keli gabar).