Where was the national conversation about women in combat?

My point isn’t that women should be kept out of all combat roles. Indeed, as many supporters of the move are quick to point out, women are already getting shot at. “In our male-centric viewpoint, we want to keep women from harm’s way,” Ric Epps, a former Air Force intelligence officer who teaches political science, told the Los Angeles Times. “But . . . modern warfare has changed. There are no true front lines; the danger is everywhere, and women have already been there in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

True enough. But does anyone believe such changes are permanent? Will we never again have front lines? Or are the generals simply fighting the last war and projecting that experience out into the future?…

It is a common habit of many liberals and self-avowed centrists to preen about how they don’t deny science and evolution the way conservatives do. Well, on this issue, it is the opponents of women in combat invoking the scientific data that confirm a fairly obvious evolutionary fact: Men and women are different. For instance, at her physical peak, “the average woman has the aerobic capacity of a 50-year-old male,” notes defense intellectual and veteran Mackubin Thomas Owens in a powerfully empirical article in The Weekly Standard.