The yearly Munich Security Conference came to an end last week, and I wanted to be sure to pass along the following tweet that issued out of that, and especially the accompanying photo, which is said to have “gone viral.”

It’s this article in the Guardian that claims that this picture went viral, and which provides a good English-language account for you about how this issue cropped up at that security conference.

At least we have here something in the way of continuity from the “male chauvinist pig” theme in my previous post about today’s election for Tokyo governor. For what we have is no less than four European Defense Ministers who are female, and the issue must be: What, if anything, does that mean?

The obvious jumping-off point here is the question of whether to allow females to serve as soldiers in combat units. Although hardly widespread (yet), there is an unmistakeable trend worldwide in that direction. A few countries do already allow women to serve in their militaries without restriction, including Sweden, whose Defense Minister you see there second from left. In the US, while the formal ban on women serving in combat was removed only as recently as January 2013, further institutional progress towards enabling them actually to do so is only creeping along. For example, while the first women (three of them) recently graduated from Marine Corps infantry combat training, they won’t be allowed to actually serve in infantry units (and that probably means “combat units,” of any type) for the foreseeable future.

Your friendly EuroSavant blogger here is himself a combat veteran, and I think that women serving in combat units is a bad idea, for reasons of unit cohesion and effectiveness. I am hardly alone in this – indeed, I’d want to tell you that any man who has ever actually been in combat will tell you the exact same thing, but of course I can’t know that. For what it is worth, the highly respected Israeli military writer Martin van Creveld is a prominent opponent of the idea, and put his case forward back in 2002 with his book Men, Women & War: Do Women Belong in the Front Line? (His answer: No.) Indeed, Creveld on this topic often shows a vehemence that jars even me, and he followed up that book last year with another one entitled The Privileged Sex. (Hint: It ain’t men he is talking about.) Prof. Van Creveld has also been quite willing to stand up for his ideas, even embarking last year on a lecture tour through Europe to debate the point against various female opponents. (more…)

One distinct Amsterdam “happening” that we’ve been glad to cover previously in these pages is the “Gay Pride” festival, occurring each year the first weekend of August and with a crowded, often rather bawdy boat-parade along the outermost of the city’s famous set of concentric canals, the Prinsengracht, as its centerpiece. It’s always a blast for those who can hitch a ride along with one of the boats, or even get the funds together for one’s organization to sponsor its own such boat – as long as your organization does not mind the affiliation with the homosexual cause. These days, though, when it comes to Amsterdam it’s hard to think of many organizations that would mind, other than the Muslim ones.

Then again, up to now the Dutch military has also not been too happy with any sign of its presence at the Gay Pride parade – like soldiers floating along on the boats while in uniform, something that happened last year and led to some sort of uproar (presumably including sanctions against those military personnel). But now that has changed; the Volkskrant reports today (but in a story credited to the Dutch news agency ANP) that permanent Defense Ministry undersecretary (Staatssecretaris) Jack de Vries has announced, through a spokesman, that participating in Gay Pride in your uniform is OK – but that that should still in no way be interpreted as official Defense Ministry participation in, or endorsement of, the festival.

Perhaps the really interesting thing here is that this is not just some spontaneous decision from the Ministry, but rather is in reaction to encouragement from the Dutch lower house of Parliament (the Tweede Kamer) to make such a policy change. That, it seems, was ultimately among the more significant follow-on effects of last year’s controversy.