Women in Military Service & Combat (not just USA)

[davidbfpo]

A BBC News report:

Capt Ashley Collette was the only woman in her platoon of soldiers on the Afghan front line. In the Canadian armed forces, unusually, every job is open to women - and both sexes live together and fight together.

(At the end citing the Captain) In my experience there's no reason why a band of brothers cannot be a band of brothers and sisters.

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24622762

[rome]

knowing the army, they will not be the same. Men will die when they are too heavy in kit to be drug to cover by a female in their fire team, or she herself will get shot.

[davidbfpo]

A short interview with Canadian General John de Chastelain, who retired in 1995: Reflections on the introduction of women into combat roles in the Canadian military:http://strifeblog.org/2014/06/25/gen...dian-military/

[davidbfpo]

Six threads where the theme was Women in Military Service and Combat, not just the American experience and viewpoint have been merged here.

[JMA]

Study Finds Women Don't Belong in Combat

New book shows women in combat suffer much more serious non-combat injuries, alleges IDF cover-up...

...The book describes ludicrous measures by which women's lesser suitabilty for combat roles is masked. These include lowering the bar of requirements for women wishing to enter combat units, placing benches next to walls that trainees jump over (only for the women to use), running laps in circles (instead of straight-line runs from point A to point B) to make it less obvious that the women are lagging behind the men, and more.

and predictably:

The IDF told Maariv/NRG that Sagi's claims are “completely baseless” and that women's integration into combat units has been a success. “Female combat soldiers are dealt with in a supervised manner, which takes into account their medical, physiological and social needs,” the army said.

[davidbfpo]

As if by magic the UK MoD has announced a review of women in combat:

The aim of the review will be to assess the current exclusion of women from ground closecombat roles, to identify the benefits and risks of changing this policy and to make recommendations. The review is to be open and evidence based, building on theconsiderable work undertaken in support ofthe 2002 and 2010 reviews. The assessmentof benefits is to include the impact of a change in policy on the recruitment of women into the wider Armed Forces. It is to cover all three Services, with the Army acting as the lead Service working in close cooperation with the Navy, the Air Force and the Chief of Defence Personnel. It is to be based on the premise that all roles should be open to women unless this would undermine combat effectiveness. Armed Forces’ effectiveness is not, however, to be prejudiced by lowering operationally necessary standards.

Link:https://www.gov.uk/government/upload...oles-clean.pdf

[carl]

Forcing women into combat roles despite all is going to happen. There is no stopping it short of disastrous results when a big fight comes. Which is a certainty on both counts in my view.

From strictly an observer's standpoint, how it all plays out will be extremely interesting. A social experiment conducted on such a large scale has never really been done before. I don't count the WWII Red Army because they haven't fully opened their archives so we don't actually know what happened.

It is just so damn sad that all those people will have to die and suffer who wouldn't have had to die and suffer otherwise.

I hope there are some secret studies being done by staff officers somewhere that deal with having to reverse all this in the middle of a big fight.