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.

Women are certainly capable of learning and employing the infantry skills needed for short duration security and clearing patrols in the vicinity of basecamps. 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. The typical workloads in armour, artillery and engineers are less in the face but pulling tracks, humping shells and earth moving are – despite what politicians may suppose – sufficiently heavy and sustained to stretch the 95 percentile of women beyond their capacity and endurance.

However, political correctness is one hell of a weapon and its advocates are keen to change camouflage cream to pink. One current campaign is to renovate US Army and USMC training into a modern syllabus for touch football and cheerleading where many women could succeed. Of course the PC advocates are not game to suggest contact sports or armed conflict can be gentled down. But that is their basic and fatally incorrect assumption.