Dear BSL,
Having never served your frame of reference is purely theoretical. I have served in mixed gender units. Both Active and Reserve (Military Police) and I can count on one finger the number of females that were worth a damn out in the field (were the rubber truly meets the road).
I am personally aware of not one but TWO companies that were raided for running prostitution, one with 23 females (C Company (Medical) 208th Forward Support Battalion, 8th Infantry Division, and the 814th Military Police Company (During DS/DS)). I served as it's XO after I came off active duty when it had ZERO females assigned as all assigned had been part of the ring (when they were getting $300-$500 a trick while making E-3/E-4 pay, it seems most would let their female NCOs pimp them out). Even before that about once every 3-6 months or so we'd hear about a unit in Germany that had several females assigned that would get caught up in a prostitution ring or one sort or another.
Within 2 weeks of the 92nd MP CO being alerted to go to DS/DS 12 females in that company were suddenly pregnant. It also usually happened to new females after their first trip to the field for an extended exercise, then once we would start prepping for the next one, suddenly all these new females who had been in the Army for less then a year would show up pregnant and we have to give them the option to stay or get out. So here's a soldier that been in for 6-9 months and she's out processing because it ain't at all like the recruiter said with playing Keystone Cop. They want me to carry both a machine gun (yeah newbie, here's the M60 Machine Gun. It's called "The Pig", because it weighs 28 pounds, unloaded, but you also have to carry 100 rounds of ammo (8 lbs) for it. Oh, you don't want to carry that, then you can carry 200 rounds of ammo (16.7 lbs), plus the 16 pound tripod. Plus all your *expletive deleted*it and the PRC-77 radio..
Like I said, there was ONE in 4 years of active duty and 7 years on the reserves that could hump their load and keep up (or not have to re-distribute the weight to their other two team members).
Do I even have to go into the completely unsanitary conditions that living out in the field is like? If I had one, I probably had at least twenty females come-up to me (with their NCO chain of command just so they could watch me lose my *expletive deleted*it) and ask to be excused/go "Home" because their period was about to start or had started.
And yeah, we were the closest things to infantry there is for females (do note that one of the two females to make it through Ranger School is an MP Officer). We used to joke that we were motorized infantry, that the crossed pistols on our collars were bent rifles. Our mission was (and still it) to close with a destroy enemy special operations and irregular forces operating behind the Forward Line of Own Troops, on in the current 4th Generation Asymmetrical Warfare speak "Everywhere".
And the simple fact is that women can not hack it. Yes, there might be one or two here and there, but it the standards were equalized for men and women, the rad-fems and do-gooders would be screaming bloody murder at the numbers of women being shown the door and failing to graduate basic training.
And your "Train it out of the men", is such utter bull hockey. You really want men to never treat you like a woman or lady again? Then don't EVER say word *expletive deleted*ing one about any scantily attired women in pictures or movies in the barracks or any where else. Not another *expletive deleted*ing word about sexual harassment or *expletive deleted*ing feelings. You want to be treated like a man. Then harden the *expletive deleted*ck up. Go pick up a weapon and stand a post.
We already have a metric shitload of data from both the Soviet Union (Socialism makes everyone equal, Comrade !!!) and Israel, about what horrible *expletive deleted*ing disasters putting women in front-line units were. The ONLY reason they did it is because they were literally fighting for their very survival as a nation, and they pretty much un-did it as soon as they could.*
*- Although the Israelis didn't really have women in frontline combat after the country was founded in 1948 Women did serve in the underground before statehood. It would appear that Israel is going away from it's past experience of women not serving in combat units and putting them in some units in combat roles.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/185563Critics of the gender-mixing experiment in the IDF have noted that women who serve in combat units suffer from an extremely high rate of injury and that often, entire platoons are disabled because of this. According to Col. (res.) Raz Sagi, who has authored a book on the subject, injuries suffered by women tend to be more serious and often involve stress fractures at the hip and uterine prolapse, which can cause permanent inability to give birth.
In addition, the critics point out that in order to enable enough women to pass the physical tests for entry into the combat units, requirements for women are significantly lower than for men. In a physical test that includes jumping over a wall, for instance, the women are given a bench to step on as they climb over the wall. Another technique adopted by the military to mask gender differences is to have trainees run long distances in circles rather than in straight lines, making it less embarrassing for the women to lag behind the men, because no one can tell what lap they have completed at any given point in time.
