Women in Military Service & Combat (not just USA)

[Granite_State]

And that's because we value strength and stupidity. In fact, we're 0 - whatever since WWII. Which was the last war we allowed women to fight. We don't lose war because we allow women in the military, we lose war because the MEN that lead our military (and government) are idiots.



Thanks. I wrote it.

Injury is caused by excessive PPE and wrong-sized gear. And our stupidity in embracing Light Infantry. BTW, the guys who are kicking our asses are weaker and smaller than western women, and do NOT deploy as light infantry, but intelligently use motorcycles, four wheelers and light pickups to get to where they kill us. While we waddle around in michelin man gear, with our engorged biceps, and supplement fed bodies which are fundamentally worthless in modern combat. Oh, and our airborne/light infantry fetish.

I think your cav bias is showing. Agree on the PPE, agree on the biceps and supplements. But there are places only light infantry can go. If anything, our insistence on "commuting to work" has been the problem. And I say this as a guy with a USMC LAR background.

BTW, the pregnancy thing ended post Gulf War I. Females who go outside the wire just do not get pregnant.

I doubt this is true. I KNOW this is not true when it comes to FOBs, carriers, etc.

That's because the teenaged, cannon fodder army of yesterday is born to lose. Get rid of "up or out", stop treating soldiers like children and start expecting them to do their jobs, and all the other b.s. falls away. We don't have an integration problem; we have a professionalism problem.

That's the mentality where any problem, no matter how intractable or self-inflicted, is simply "a leadership challenge." We've got enough of those as it is. If the problem is professionalism, why do those closest to Army SF say the problem will be even worse there?:

http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/her...is-a-bad-idea/

[AmericanPride]

All else aside, I personally don't know how anyone who has led teenaged soldiers/Marines/sailors/airmen from this sex-saturated generation, or even someone who has lived in a college dorm in the last couple decades, could think women in combat arms units is a good idea.

This is a problem of normative structures, not of the objective material impact of women participating in combat. The U.S. is introducing by piecemeal a foreign concept into a closed society. This is like dipping your hand into the cold pool water and waiting and hoping that the rest of your body will warm up to it. But the normative structures are changing - rapidly - not least because of the changing role of the military in U.S. society which has been brought to the forefront of our attention by war.

The recent changes in the military retirement system and other proposed personnel policies reflect a military entering into a new stage of modern professional and work ethic. This is a consequence of a host factors, among which is the underlying cultural and intellectual reliance on a 'volunteer force'. This is more about labor economics than culture because the culture will change as the economics change. The U.S. labor market is extremely competitive and the state no longer has the social capital or the political will to compel military service. Thus by consequence of economic restraints, the military needs more women to enter into service.

This is also about expectations of combat performance as well as attrition. The U.S. has the world's third largest population and could easily field a mass army capable of 'victory' in any conventional war. In this context, women are not necessary and so the luxury of domestic cultural norms regulating female roles can be maintained. However, we do not want mass casualties. We do not want to fight a large conventional war. We want a 'smart', technological, flexible military. This is reflected in our recruiting standards which make between a quarter and a third of applicants ineligible. These are aspects of the American military mind that dictate the economic necessity of women in combat.

There is also an underlying question tugging at all of this and that is: what wins wars? Is it the heroism and skill of the individual soldier and do women by their nature lack something necessary for victory on the battlefield? That sounds very romantic and certainly protects the pride of manhood. Or is it by cold calculation of a combination of technological prowess, material wealth, and the massing of combat power on a single target? I would venture to guess that if we were to replace all the men in the military with women, keeping all else equal, our military outcomes would be the same.

EDIT: One other thought. There was a study awhile ago (I'll try to find it if I can) that examined the differences in men and female athletes and found that a substantial difference in their abilities can be linked to the segregated upbringing of the sexes. Girls are simply not held to the same expectations of boys when it comes to athletics and this is reflected by the amount of time, resources, etc dedicated to their training and development as they grow up. This results in differentiated outcomes. The same is true for military service - though that is changing some. Unless there is a fundamental difference in the female temperament or nature, women and men being held to the same standards (this is different than saying women should be held to men's standards) should not affect anything.

[Granite_State]

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w...mbat-positions

As anticipated.

[AmericanPride]

Have there been any research into the role(s) women have played in the Ukrainian Army in the on-going Russia-Ukraine conflict?

From a 2015 article:

“I always felt ashamed that I wasn’t in the war when some 18-year-old guys, even if they’re not patriots, have to go,” said Lera Burlakova, 29, who quit her job as a journalist last December to serve as a front-line soldier with the Karpatska Sich volunteer battalion in Pisky.

“If you want to look in the mirror and not turn away, you have to go,” she added. “But I don’t think all people have to do it. Some people are really scared, and that’s the way they are. And maybe they shouldn’t be there, in the war, and die without reason.”

Women are still officially barred from front-line service in Ukraine’s regular army, and most of the women who have served in combat have done so as members of civilian volunteer battalions.

So, as Ukraine continues to rein in the volunteer battalions by integrating them into the regular army or National Guard, new questions are emerging about the future role of female soldiers who have proven themselves in combat and are consequently reluctant to be relegated to support roles behind the lines.

“We have a war, and women are serving,” Burlakova said. “And if a woman wants to be in combat, if she passes the tests, doesn’t break, and has already taken part in the war … then yeah, of course she should be allowed—she shouldn’t have to be a cook.”

http://dailysignal.com/2015/08/11/me...omen-warriors/

[Compost]

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.

[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.

[Red Rat]

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.

That's one hell of an assertion. Would you like to back that up with evidence? I have not seen any significant moral or philosophical contributions to the debate, nor have I seen any serious sociological or anthropological studies of the wide-ranging implications of this move. This is bemusing as primarily this debate should not be about combat effectiveness, but about the wider ramifications of treating men and women as not just equal, but the same.

[Granite_State]

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.

Never mind that the physical concerns with integration pale in comparison to those of cohesion, fraternization, pregnancy, and injury. Tell your tale of exoskeletons and miniaturization to:
-A soldier from the 101st Airborne in the Korengal.
-A Marine from 3/1 in Fallujah.
-Any soldier or Marine jumping or climbing up a canal with a 25 pound ECM on his back.

This revolt against reality will end about one week in to a real war.

[Compost]

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.

Evangelism can be emotionally and socially rewarding and the current politically correct view is that US infantry units should be promptly changed from all-male to mixed male-and-female. That would yield a lot of empirical data when those light infantry platoons and companies are inevitably committed to close quarter combat against adversary platoons and companies that are likely to be all-male. But if the empirical data is unfavourable, what costs will have been incurred and how long will it take to save face and then revert to ‘all-male’ light infantry ?

The proven path for military force development is to test before implementing. Statistical gaming is an alternative but in this case there is already so much PC and anti-PC opinion that computer models and their results would be suspect. In my opinion the viability of having females in light infantry units - operating without or with niceties such as exoskeletons - could be cheaply and appropriately tested in several series of ‘round-robin’ gridiron or ice hockey matches: each matching an all-male team against a male-female team with all teams in a ‘round-robin’ composed of all members from a pool of goodmale light infantry and all members of a somewhat smaller pool of pool of comprehensively trained females. For example, four series with six teams in each would require 60 matches which played at the rate of two per week would usefully test powers of endurance and recovery.

Is there an alternative way of testing human suitability for the basic all-purpose combat arm which has been on the winning and loosing sides throughout human history ? And seriously is it even necessary ? Recent history has shown that technological advances continue to be a sometime substitute for the aggressive, other instinctive and physiological capabilities of human light infantry. That history indicates also that females continue to coldly calculate that it is adviseable to avoid face-to-face combat against males. Females also somewhat similarly avoid integration into intensely male units.

[120mm]

I think your cav bias is showing. Agree on the PPE, agree on the biceps and supplements. But there are places only light infantry can go. If anything, our insistence on "commuting to work" has been the problem. And I say this as a guy with a USMC LAR background.

Then the light infantry can ditch their wheels for a short time and fight as infantry. Just like the insurgents do. The problem with "commuting to work" is that we load teams and squads up on trucks and armored vehicles like sardines. Instead of putting one soldier on one quad bike, or 2 to 3 soldiers on one pickup truck. The future dead bodies in the back of an APC are completely divorced from combat until they are kicked out or burned alive.

It's not hard to figure out. Unless you are US military, and then it's freaking unpossible.

I doubt this is true. I KNOW this is not true when it comes to FOBs, carriers, etc.

I will bet you any amount of money you care to name that more muscle headed men eliminated themselves from theater due to power lifting accidents, then women from pregnancy. And in a truly professional military (vice a welfare agency with green uniforms) pregnancy in combat zone would result in a ride back and one's ass kicked out.

That's the mentality where any problem, no matter how intractable or self-inflicted, is simply "a leadership challenge." We've got enough of those as it is. If the problem is professionalism, why do those closest to Army SF say the problem will be even worse there?:

A professional army doesn't require leadership/babysitting to the extent that a welfare agency/mass army needs. In a truly professional military, problem children get fired. Period. Quit recruiting idiots for college money. Every single recruit should enter with the idea of becoming a professional soldier and be asked to leave if it doesn't work out for them.

http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/her...is-a-bad-idea/

Unprofessionalism is not restricted to "Big Army". Many of our SF units have institutionalized a kind of ego-driven "frat boy" culture. See V Group.