It's not like people with diabetes or bad eyesight can't love their country or shoe physical courage.

But the vast majority of people who don't meet physical standards have inherent impediments to the mission of combat : killing while others are trying to kill you.

They don't get different standards because that can get people killed - defeating the purpose entirely.

Not every single institution of repute and praise and visibility needs to be an opportunity for the ideals of decades young cultural-inclusivity politics to triumph over traditions assumed to be backwards.

Gender sensitivity, egalitarianism, and all the other academic niceties are irrelevant to the business of putting bullets through people's chest cavities and shrapnel through their arteries and bomb blasts through their limbs. This is the role of the military: killing those who resist with arms, the aims of our political apparatus or who aggress against the nation, until there are too few to resist or they cease hostilities. That's literally what the military is for.

Every single job in the military is combat or combat support. The purpose is always to make sure that rifles, tank cannons, boat guns, and helicopters's missiles are killing people when their triggers are pulled.

It's easy to lose sight of this, but that is the point of the armed forces. They're not there to play nice - that's what the diplomatic process is all about.

It's shocking to me to see how people have decided that every last sphere of existence which doesn't cater to the ideals of the progressive left, particularly on gender equality, has to be shamed into compliance, as though that will best serve those institutions' purposes.