General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that having women in combat will cut down on sexual assaults in the military.

Let's get this straight: Sending women into combat—a form of lethal assault—will cut down on sexual assualts. A woman who is captured by an enemy, who just might be barbarian enough to rape a her, is better off than if she were filing a complaint about misconduct by a fellow soldier, somebody under the jurisdiction of the U.S. military, who can be brought to trial?

This is possibly the strangest non-sequitur from a high-ranking military officer since General George Casey said that the worst thing about the mass murders at Fort Hood was that they could affect the Army’s diversity program.

As quoted by Think Progress, here is what Dempsey said:  

We’ve had this ongoing issue with sexual harassment, sexual assault. I believe it’s because we’ve had separate classes of military personnel at some level. Now, its far more complicated than that. But when you have one part of the population that is designated as ‘warriors’ and one part that is designated as something else, that disparity begins to establish a psychology that — in some cases — led to that environment. I have to believe the more we treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.

In addition to having classes together, they’ll be doing all these things together. Call me a skeptic, but I can’t see how, if men and women end up having to, say, strip naked to have the chemicals, caked blood, and dirt hosed off their bodies, this will cut down on sexual assaults in the military. I’m not sure you can set up separate facilities for men and women on the front line.

And this from General Dempsey, who is describing being driven to a forward operating base in a Humvee:

“I asked the driver who he was [and] where he was from,” Dempsey recalled, “then I slapped the turret gunner around the leg and said, ‘Who are you?’ She leaned down and said, ‘I'm Amanda.’”

What do you bet it was people named Barack and Leon who influenced General Dempsey more than Amanda the turret gunner?

Wes Pruden writes in a piece headlined “The Craven Retreat of the Generals:”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have finally succumbed to the pressure of the ladies who can't imagine ever getting close to a gun, registered or otherwise, but who think it would be nifty if some of the cannon fodder for America's wars could be "service members" of the female persuasion. This would make the ladies on the sidelines feel brave and good about themselves.

Lucky Amanda and others like her will now have new opportunities to be blown to smithereens—all to satisfy ideology.