Women, Military Readiness, and Int'l Security

[AmericanPride]

This appeared in the New York Times yesterday as the Marine Corps looks to study the impact of women in front-line units. Not a new debate really. More interesting is the conversation about gender relationships, security, and military effectiveness.

First, gender equality:

Originally Posted by What Sex Means for World Peace

In fact, the very best predictor of a state's peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state's peacefulness is how well its women are treated. What's more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies.

....

The evidence of violence against women is clear. So what does it mean for world peace? Consider the effects of sex-selective abortion and polygyny: Both help create an underclass of young adult men with no stake in society because they will never become heads of households, the marker for manhood in their cultures. It's unsurprising that we see a rise in violent crime, theft, and smuggling, whereby these young men seek to become contenders in the marriage market. But the prevalence of these volatile young males may also contribute to greater success in terrorist recruiting, or even state interest in wars of attrition that will attenuate the ranks of these men. For instance, the sole surviving terrorist from the 2008 Mumbai attacks testified that he was persuaded by his own father to participate in order to raise money for the dower that he and his siblings needed in order to marry.

We also know through experimental studies that post-conflict agreements that are negotiated without women break down faster than those that do include women, and that all-male groups take riskier, more aggressive, and less empathetic decisions than mixed groups -- two phenomena that may lead to higher levels of interstate conflict.

So, basically, gender security is a legitimate concern when predicting or resolving conflict. However, is female participation in the armed forces or in combat a substantial factor in a country's ability to favorably prosecute conflict? Is there a distinct female temperament, and what impact will it have as women enter into combat and strategic leadership roles in the armed forces?

This article provides a once-over-the-world review of women in armies around the world, while this 2009 UK MoD report goes into more detail of the applicable literature up to that time. This article points out that female youth obesity has grown slower than male youth obesity; so while both genders have shrinking eligible recruits for military service, females are less likely to be ineligible on the basis of weight (it also linked obesity with region and education, which is another conversation about military recruiting demographics and recruit eligibility).

Of course, there are objections about female temperaments, male temperament towards women, and female physical make-up and capacity but I have not seen a study yet linking female participation in combat with a unit's inability to conduct a combat mission or a country's ability to win a war. This article references US, Canadian, and Danish military reports that indicate the presence of women do not undermine unit effectiveness (and presumably, the overall war effort). That article was written in 2003, so I am curious what new evidence is out there, given the GWoT experiences, against the practicality and effectiveness of women in combat.This would seem to be the standard of proof, given that in war, only victory matters.