. Women in military combat is insane. No society in its right mind would have such a policy. The military needs only young people, and that means the only women who are those in their childbearing years. Kill them off and society will not be able to perpetuate itself.
The premise of this argument is that putting women into military combat would threaten the existence of society because women, who would be on the front lines and would be in their childbearing years, would be killed in combat. Therefore, the argument concludes, allowing women to participate in military combat is bad public policy.
A fallacy of relevance embedded in this argument is that it makes an indirect appeal to the reader's desire for security, love, and other social goods in order to link the very fate of society to a military policy. While it is reasonable to suppose that everybody wants access to social goods, that does not prove that putting women into military combat is a bad policy. This argument, therefore, evades directly addressing the issue by way of logic and reason, instead making an emotional and psychological appeal to persuasion.
Out of the fallacy of relevance comes a host of inappropriate presumptions. A minor one is that the military needs young people only, even though the command structure contains persons of some maturity and even though officers are the ones charged with strategic and tactical decisions. Thus it is simply incorrect to characterize all military combatants as "young." Another presumption is that the women who enter combat are all likely to be killed. However, if that is so, it makes just as much sense to presume that all the men who enter combat will be killed as well, which begs the question how society is any more likely to perpetuate itself if they are not around to participate in the process.
Another presumption fallacy that operates in this argument has to do with the fact that it presents reasons that are supp...