Women in Military Service & Combat (not just USA)

[AmericanPride]

It is interesting that those proposing women as suitable for service throughout the military and especially in combat elements such as infantry are not also proposing women compete against men in gridiron and ice hockey.

The assumption here is that women, if given equal training and resourcing, could not compete with men in gridiron and hockey. From a very young age, boys and girls are segregated in athletics, and this has compounding effects over the years as boys on the whole receive more training than girls. This is also true for the military.

There is also another assumption in your comment: that whatever abstract level of proficiency required for 'combat' is somehow inherently gendered. There exists somewhere and by some measurement a minimum standard necessary for 'combat', however defined, regardless of one's sex. There are many men who fail to meet this standard and by your arbitrary formulation here, men should be as equally disqualified as women from combat arms. Military standards are not looking for "the best" like in profit-driven professional sports, but for 'good enough' among those who volunteer for service.

But operations outside the wire in front-line infantry units include periods of fatique, hardship and rugged labour that are just as demanding and brutishly intense as contact sport

What does this have to do with anyone's gender? Were Soviet women less capable of killing German invaders than their male comrades? Did women not share with men the hardship of the Indian frontier? How about the hard labor in factories or mines?

The opposition to women in combat arms is based on an antiquated, patriarchal, and romantic view of the 'right place' for the sexes - a view that is quickly being dismantled by the necessities of the modern era's demands on society. Wars are no longer won by personal courage and individual strength (ah blasphemy!) but by the cold calculation of the massing of combat power on the enemy. What about the genders makes one better than the other at pulling the trigger of an assault right, flying a drone, or driving a tank? And as technology continues to find new means of automation and miniaturization, like exoskeletons, the 'justifications' for excluding women from combat arms become increasingly irrelevant to modern warfare. The military - given its importance for the national security - is no place to stake the last stand of dying male machismo in American society.