I'm not in the military. No one in my family is in the military. A good friend of my son is a Marine. This is largely an academic issue to me.
I don't have any heartache with such a concept, so long as we don't get all bent out of shape about captured US Female Soldiers getting raped and otherwise sexually abused. By "all bent out of shape" I mean driven to take military actions that otherwise would not make sense if the captured soldier were not a woman. After all, if we are going to dispense with the notion that women are no different from men in combat, this extends to the quaint notion that women getting abused in captivity is somehow worse than men getting abused in captivity -- comes with the territory when dealing with the bad dudes who we often tangle with who haven't taken the trouble to read the Marquesse of Queensbury rules of fighting or the Geneva Convention rules of engagement. Isn't this at least partly a point of "Saving Private Ryan," that for a PR issue, a superficial war morale issue several good soldiers were taken out of the task of fighting krauts and instead dieing so one otherwise obscure soldier might go home safe and sound? Does a potential exist for such twisted priorities if women get into combat? Something to think about now rather than after deploying them to combat.
I did serve in the U.S. Army, and I don't believe that women should serve in combat.
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In a fight to the death I doubt that the women will do that well. I will probably get roasted for saying this but men and women are different and when it comes to fighting and survival leave it to the men. Just the way I see it.
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In a fight to the death I doubt that the women will do that well. I will probably get roasted for saying this but men and women are different and when it comes to fighting and survival leave it to the men. Just the way I see it.
Well, physiologically, pound for pound, men have 20% more muscle mass than a woman of the exact same height. I agree with Alsatian...if women want to trade shots in combat, then they must accept the fact that if captured, they will be abused...probably much more so than male prisoners. I'm against it, because I feel that male soldiers will take extra effort to keep females from being captured, and will take extra effort to recapture them from the enemy when they are taken prisoner. Women in combat is bad business for all concerned....
There's a good point made in this article, essentially that there's a difference between incidental and intentional combat. I'm aware of a number of cases where women have performed exceptionally well in the former. However, having worn out more than my share of boots over the years, I don't believe it's reasonable to think that they could sustain long-term combat operations where your raison d'etre is to find and destroy the enemy.
Watch "Restrepo" and (aside from hijinks and shenannigans) think again how well women would perform in that environment? "Burning the poop"? Yeah, in the year I was in Iraq I can't recall one instance seeing a female Soldier at the burn barrels. Equal? Hmmmm. And once you get to the top of the mountain, you've got to be able to kill your enemy. I can't see other than a VERY exceptional female (really, I can't see other than very exceptional males, either) doing that in the mountains of Afghanistan.
I'm not too confident in the experience of this panel if this was truly their recommendation. Just guessing, but the farther away you are from the dangers, the more inclined leadership seems to support social engineering like this boondoggle.
......the farther away you are from the dangers, the more inclined leadership seems to support social engineering like this boondoggle.
100% dead on accurate.....and down in the trenches, things get downright medieval and stay there....no place for social engineering experiments...that costs lives unnecessarily.
Women in combat arms
