Anu Bhagwati

SINCE its creation six years ago, the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), which represents feminists in the military and supports the idea of women in combat, has become an influential and well-funded lobbying group. Its director, Anu Bhagwati, a graduate of Yale and former captain in the Marines, is a media celebrity, appearing on many major news shows and testifying before Congress, decrying the systematic inequities of military life.

Bhagwati is especially visible now that sexual assault in the military is the pervasive topic of the day. Concerning that issue, you may wonder why anyone, man or woman, is in the armed forces who is not capable of defending himself from assault. You may also wonder why an Asian woman has such power and influence over our military. (Can you imagine an American woman of comparable influence with regard to the Indian or Japanese military forces?) But if you do, you are not in step with the mission of our armed forces, which is on some levels not to protect America, but to fight it tooth and nail and raze its historic culture to the ground. The military has become our enemy.

The latest success of SWAN is the Military Justice Improvement Act, which was introduced in the Senate yesterday. The bill would restrict the jurisdiction of military commanders over sexual assault cases, many of which would be determined by “professionals.”

According to SWAN’s press release,

“The current commander-based system is a throwback to the days of the Revolutionary War and was established at a time when military courts did not even exist,” said Anu Bhagwati, former Marine Corps Captain and Executive Director of the Service Women’s Action Network. “The military does not send our troops into battle with 18th century weapons, nor does it treat the wounds of war with 18th century medicine, so why does today’s military continue to use an 18th century legal system?”

“Many of our trusted allies have adopted a modern legal system where decisions to prosecute serious crimes are made by legal professionals rather than commanding officers,” Bhagwati said.

Though only 15 percent of the armed forces are women, they have an overwhelming effect once the principles of equality are accepted. According to SWAN, which has generous corporate sponsors, “SWAN’s mission is to transform military culture by securing equal opportunity and freedom to serve without discrimination, harassment or assault; and to reform veterans’ services to ensure high quality health care and benefits for women veterans and their families.”

The “freedom to serve without discrimination” is an open-ended project to undermine national self-defense. It is already too late to turn back. Though Bhagwati decries the systematic inequities of military life, she is almost certainly a beneficiary of systematic inequity in the form of favoritism for women and nonwhites, and would never have achieved her current influence if the group she champions had not already won the most important prize: a position of unchallenged moral superiority. The military will never apologize to feminists enough — unless it rejects them utterly. And such a thing will not occur in America as it is.

Please follow and like us: