How far should we go to integrating women into combat arms?
Universal fitness standards for all combat arms?
Maturity / personality test for aspiring entrants?
Do we take all men if we put women through a selection process, or put the men through the same thing?
Sound off below!
By: Brant
Posts
4 comments:
It is all decadence.
Bad idea.
Most women don't want to join the military.
Almost all women fail to meet the physical standards required.
To achieve "equality" would require such standards be neutered.
Unit cohesion will suffer because relationships will occur.
Much of the male appeal of the military will be lost.
Additional (expensive) facilities and equipment will be required.
With current deployments there will be major cultural issues.
Women in combat offers additional problems without improving performance.
I tend to disagree...
Combat arms includes many branches. Can a women fire off an MRLS system? How about steer a TOW? Pilot an armed UAV? Act as a FAC? I would say yes. Would you deny a scrawny / fat guy access to those roles?
Also, women in combat-ready roles (infantry) have already proven extremely valuable in culturally sensitive areas...like Afghanistan. If you really want to engage in true COIN operations, you can't have western men talking to Afghani women...it's culturally anathema. Would this be necessary if we went to war in say the Ukraine? Perhaps not...but we don't always get the choose the places we end up fighting.
Sure, there are machines that can reduce or ameliorate the physical weakness of women. However, what happens when the machine gets broken?
Anyway, this ignores the non-physical reasons I gave, like the effect of mixed units on unit cohesion.
As for female cultural sensitivity -- after years of such programmes, what are the actual results?
I'd go back to my final point: the minute amount of performance improvement offered by having women in combat arms is counterbalanced by the huge problems they bring.
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