Women in combat arms

[MicroBalrog]

what missions they go on? i mean real ones not exercises.

I'd recommend you'd read the thread.

But generally, the kind where they kill terrorists.

Probably in countries with a better applicant pool too

It's quite possible. But I was just talking about the supposed inherent biology.

[Jamisjockey]

All this whimpering and whining.  All services have until 2014 to submit waivers to keep women out of certain units.  I don't expect to see women In the SOF until they've had a chance to really prove themselves in combat.

[Balog]

The .mil has already had to significantly lower physical standards for women in order to get enough of them that qualify to make it anything but a token gesture. They want equality? Change the PT requirements so they are the same.

[longeyes]

I'd recommend you'd read the thread.

But generally, the kind where they kill terrorists.


It's quite possible. But I was just talking about the supposed inherent biology.

I can imagine women playing a combat role, but I find it hard to imagine them fluorishing in traditional military operations.  As warfare becomes increasingly technology-based and covert, they will have their role.

[Fly320s]

If it empties the shopping malls and therefore curbs our spendaholism I'm for it.   

But who will make our sammiches? 

[RoadKingLarry]

But who will make our sammiches? 

The Filipino cooks like always.

[gunsmith]

I have been thinking Obama might start another war and reinstate the draft, I was really looking forward to having a lot of young single women around....now thanks to those darn liberals and their equality stuff gals we be getting drafted too.
Its only a matter of time before the bugs find our planet and attack, well at least folks won't be able to dodge the draft by claiming they're gay like they did last century.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

I have been thinking Obama might start another war and reinstate the draft, I was really looking forward to having a lot of young single women around....now thanks to those darn liberals and their equality stuff gals we be getting drafted too.
Its only a matter of time before the bugs find our planet and attack, well at least folks won't be able to dodge the draft by claiming they're gay like they did last century.

time to get realistic start looking for middle age single women

[gunsmith]

time to get realistic start looking for middle age single women

60 is the new forty, as long as a gal can match my immaturity I'll take her our for coffee.

WRT the topic, Forever War by Haldeman is a great book on this kind of stuff.
If the bugs don't attack us first the clones will

[Waitone]

Equal standards will be the cry from the beginning.  When it fails to generate the numbers some FA bureaucrat deems necessary they will move to statistical norming.  When that fails to generate required numbers the system will move to separate training then deeming them equivalent.

Meanwhile, the time honored American military tradition of fragging will reappear.

Mother Nature is a Bitch.  You can pass law, issue edicts, and gender norm until the cows come home but reality will remain reality.

[Hutch]

Interesting piece on Fox News Sunday with an original female fighter pilot and an O9 that used to command Delta.  He made the usual remarks about small unit morale and cohesion, along with humiliating conditions in the field.  She never addressed those, asking whether we think Peewee Herman (I guess by virtue of the fact he has a peepee) would be a better infantryman than Serena Williams.  The broader implication being that, if a 99th percentile woman could pass the PT quals, no other factor matters.  I disagree, but since I've never served, I'm not sure how valid my opinion is.

[Fitz]

Interesting piece on Fox News Sunday with an original female fighter pilot and an O9 that used to command Delta.  He made the usual remarks about small unit morale and cohesion, along with humiliating conditions in the field.  She never addressed those, asking whether we think Peewee Herman (I guess by virtue of the fact he has a peepee) would be a better infantryman than Serena Williams.  The broader implication being that, if a 99th percentile woman could pass the PT quals, no other factor matters.  I disagree, but since I've never served, I'm not sure how valid my opinion is.

This is what irritates me about the argument. People say "well, SOME small percentage of women would be fine, so we should let them all try!"

And you know what, i'm on board with that, as long as the standards don't drop. I also have been a part of the US military for some time now, and I know, based on past experience, that this sort of social-engineering motivated stuff NEVER results in the same or higher standards, but lower ones.

When Fort sill's REGULAR basic training went gender integrated, standards went down. Drill sergeants were neutered, and we started getting UCMJ action for saying CUSS words. Drill sergeants were severely limited in the physical corrective training we could do. We were limited in how long we'd keep the privates out in the field. BCT went to *expletive deleted* there.

So, when people tell me in a condescending fashion that "other militaries have done this, and they're successful," I don't much give a *expletive deleted*. Because I know that those militaries are probably not led by social engineers with ulterior motives, and those countries aren't nearly as packed with self entitled blissninnies with no concept of what war requires. The percentage of females in the military who expect special accommodation and demand favorable treatment is sky high.

For every one SFC Camille Adams, a soldier I'd go into a firefight with any day of the goddamn week, there are 100 blithering little hooahchicks who think it's cool to wear camoflage, but start bitching and whining the moment things get tough. I've been out in the field with women who whine about the cold, about the heat, about the dirt... but they'll take all the puffing up they can get when they go overseas and spend 12 months on a FOB. Ask them to leave the wire, and a lot of em start singing a different tune. Some do OK. Some drop down from the gun turret and start crying in the back of the truck. Female fighter pilots, i think, are a different story, because the QUALITY of female officers is orders of magnitude higher than the quality of female enlisted troops.

[Jamisjockey]

By general standards, the physical quality of the average Marine is higher then that of the average service member in the other branches.
And in my experience there were few female marines who I'd consider real combat material.
There are certainly women out there who can do the job.
But I agree, it's not about opening the doors to better candidates.  It's about feminist social engineering, with a twinge of leftist military-neutering to boot.

[slingshot]

I personally have no problem with the decision in general.  But I would hope that women may be excluded just like they might exclude men from certain functions and units.

[roo_ster]

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/01/la-times-women-in-combat-old-news-for.html

Anyway, the point is that that the Obama Administration is just acting out a James Cameron fetish of a generation ago. This policy shift would have seemed cool in the 1980s, but now that we finally all understand the nerdy fantasies underlying it, it just seems dorky and lame.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/01/track-and-battlefield-sailer-and-seiler.html

It was widely believed in the 1990s that women athletes were "closing the gap" with men athletes. (Look how fast Flo-Jo is!) In turn, this assumption of equalizing athletic performance was used to justify sending women into combat: obviously, prejudices about women warriors not being able to carry their fair share of their platoon's equipment were outdated.

So, the 12/31/1997 article "Track and Battlefield" in National Review by sports physiologist Stephen Seiler and myself was kind of a bombshell. We demonstrated that, contrary to nearly universal assumptions, the performance gap between male and female runners in the Olympics was widening.  This was because the Fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the East German doping program and the Ben Johnson scandal at the 1988 Olympics slowed Western cheaters. In other words, the narrowing of the gap after 1976 had been largely due to women runners taking artificial male hormones. (This was published, by the way, the year before the McGwire-Sosa home run fiasco.)

In conclusion, studying sports' gender gaps offers new perspectives on a host of contemporary issues seemingly far removed from athletics, such as women in the military. Ironically, feminists in sports have successfully campaigned for the funding of thousands of sexually segregated, female-only teams, while feminists in the media and Congress have compelled the Armed Forces (outside of the defiant Marines) to sexually integrate basic training and many operating units, even including some combat teams.

Who's right? Female college coaches have some powerful reasons for believing that coed competition would badly damage their mission of turning girls into strong, take-charge women....

Yet, feminists utterly forget to apply their own hard-earned wisdom to the armed forces: on the whole, deploying young women in cramped quarters alongside young fighting men does not make the women into better warriors, it make them into moms. For example, the Washington Times reports that for every year a coed warship is at sea, the Navy has to airlift out 16% of the female sailors as their pregnancies become advanced....

We can again turn for guidance to female coaches. The main reason they favor sexual apartheid on the playing fields is that in open competition males would slaughter females. It seems reasonable to conclude the same would happen on the battlefields....

...as economists have long pointed out, competition occurs at the margins: runners don't race against the average Joe, but against other runners. And soldiers fight other soldiers. Second, while the moderate width of track's gender gap is representative of many simple sports that test primarily a single physical skill (the main exceptions are tests of upper body strength like shotputting, where the top men are as much as twice as strong as the top women), in free-flowing multidimensional sports like basketball where many skills must be combined, overall gender gaps tend to be so imposing that after puberty females almost never compete with males. ...

Although the unique ease of our Gulf War victory encouraged the fantasy that technology has made fighting almost effortless, the chaos of combat will continue to demand a wide diversity of both physical aptitudes (like being able to hump a load of depleted-uranium ammunition) and mental attitudes (like the urge to kill) that interact to create a huge gender gap in fighting ability.

While in theory it might be nice if we could accommodate ambitious female officers' need for combat experience by negotiating during wars with our enemies to set up separate all-female battles between our Amazon units and their Amazon units, this is where the analogy with sports finally breaks down: opponents in war don't have to play by the rules ... causing our women to be defeated, captured, raped, and killed. Still, if (as, in effect, so many feminists insist) female officers' right to equal promotion opportunities requires that they be furnished with female cannon fodder, there is one proven formula for narrowing the gender gap to give our enlisted women more of a fighting chance. Feminist logic implies that just as our military once imported ex-Nazi German rocket scientists, it should now import ex-Communist German steroid pushers.

I would add that many men in the SOF used PEDs, back in my day.  I would be surprised if they still don't, given that law enforcement agencies and .mil are reluctant to test for PEDs.  IOW, many men who had the drive to get into the Rangers, Delta, etc. felt the need for roids, HGH, etc. in order to stay there and to be competitive or to increase theior odds of survival.  So, women would compete not just against the usual slice of hyper-competitive and motivated men, they would compete against a group of men who are  (or were) also boosted by the best PEDs on the market.

That experiece, plus my experience before the service with some hyper-fit & competitive female athletes (kickboxers, power lifters, and others), leads me to look at MicroBalrog's examples with more than a little skepticism. 

[MicroBalrog]

...as economists have long pointed out, competition occurs at the margins: runners don't race against the average Joe, but against other runners. And soldiers fight other soldiers.

Except that unlike with runners - who are tested against a single skill, in which a 1% improvement of physical performance means a gold medal, soldiers are tested in a variety of ways, in which mere physical strength, even boosted by 10, 20% will not boost your chances of victory all that much.

Need I remind you about that little thing Samuel Colt did?

[roo_ster]

Except that unlike with runners - who are tested against a single skill, in which a 1% improvement of physical performance means a gold medal, soldiers are tested in a variety of ways, in which mere physical strength, even boosted by 10, 20% will not boost your chances of victory all that much.

Need I remind you about that little thing Samuel Colt did?

If you read the entirety of the linked article and its links(0) you would find that when males and females compete in ways that include several/many physical attributes, the deltas are larger than for one attribute.  IOW, top male sprinters may only be 1 1/8x (1.125x) faster than top female sprinters, but male top basketball players(1) wipe the floor with top female basketball players.  Basketball calls on several attributes where females are lacking and the total task disadvantage is greater than the sum of the disadvantages.

We don't have "Top Men's Basketball Team vs Top Women's Basketball Team" or "Men's All-Star Team vs Women's All-Star Team" games because it would not be fun to watch a one-sided blowout and we, as a society, generally do not like watching women get the crap kicked out of them on the teevee(2).  Also, such a spectacle would be Bad for the (Feminist) Movement.

Then, there are issues of unit cohesion, elevated cost to train to the same standard(3), etc., etc.  Frankly, it is just a mess and no number of movies by James Cameron or Joss Whedon will make sense of it.



"God created man, Sam Colt made them equal."
Nice sentiment and very helpful, indeed, but not 100% backed by empirical evidence.



(0) Yes, kinda onerous and two links deep, so this is not "Why didn't you RTFA?" snark, but, "Hey, RTA because it is full of tasty factualness."

(1) Basketball using acceleration, top speed, mass, height, among other attributes

(2) But many seem to be just fine with them getting killed in far off lands for the benefit of illiterate pedophile goat herders.

(3) Yes, it costs more to train women to the same standard as men.

[MicroBalrog]

If you read the entirety of the linked article and its links(0) you would find that when males and females compete in ways that include several/many physical attributes, the deltas are larger than for one attribute.  IOW, top male sprinters may only be 1 1/8x (1.125x) faster than top female sprinters, but male top basketball players(1) wipe the floor with top female basketball players.  Basketball calls on several attributes where females are lacking and the total task disadvantage is greater than the sum of the disadvantages.

Artillery and tank duels are not basketball.

[Bigjake]

Artillery and tank duels are not basketball.

Artillery and Tank duels are not Grunt work.

[MicroBalrog]

Artillery and Tank duels are not Grunt work.

So we've conceded that women can be 'allowed' into artillery and armor, and we're just arguing about line infantry and special operations forces?

[seeker_two]

Why don't we just put all soldiers on 'roids & level out the playing field?.....

[MicroBalrog]

Why don't we just put all soldiers on 'roids & level out the playing field?.....

Because that'd be unethical or something.

[seeker_two]

Because that'd be unethical or something.

Hasn't stopped them before....

[Scout26]

Artillery and Tank duels are not Grunt work.

Ever bust track on a tank?  How about clean the main gun?  Recovery operations?  (Hauling heavy cables and tow bars etc.)  Yeah anyone can sit inside, lase a target and squeeze the triggers.  But ramming home 40lb and 50lb main gun rounds requires a wee bit of upperbody strength.   Same with being on a cannon crew.

There's more to fighting then just pulling the trigger.

[Bigjake]

Ever bust track on a tank?  How about clean the main gun?  Recovery operations?  (Hauling heavy cables and tow bars etc.)  Yeah anyone can sit inside, lase a target and squeeze the triggers.  But ramming home 40lb and 50lb main gun rounds requires a wee bit of upperbody strength.   Same with being on a cannon crew.

There's more to fighting then just pulling the trigger.

I have no experience there,  and am not suggesting it's easy.   I just assumed it wasn't comparable to Grunt work for the sake of this particular topic.