Women in combat: Will they have to register for the draft?

PJ_Soul wrote:

Dirtie_Frank wrote:

Combat arms is no place for women.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012 ... ourse.html

WASHINGTON -- The first two female lieutenants to volunteer for the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course failed to complete the program, the Marine Corps said Tuesday.
The first woman did not finish the combat endurance test at the beginning for the course in late September. Twenty-six of the 107 male Marines also did not finish the endurance test.
The second woman could not complete two required training events “due to medical reasons,” said Capt. Eric Flanagan, a Marine spokesman.
She is receiving treatment and is in “good condition,” Flanagan said, though the Marine Corps is not releasing specifics about her medical condition or any identifying information about either of the women.
The women will now attend their primary military occupational specialty schools, Flanagan said.

The Corps decided earlier this year to allow female lieutenants to attend its school for infantry officers as part of a larger effort to gather data on how to expand the role of women in combat. Male infantry officers must complete the 10-week course after graduating from The Basic School.
In addition to allowing women to volunteer for IOC, the Marines will allow enlisted women to volunteer to train with the infantry training battalion for research purposes. The Corps will give men and women volunteers a strength test to see how they respond to heavy machine gun lift, casualty evacuation and “march under load” assessments, according to a service-wide message released in April.
As part of the assessment process, the Marine Corps will assign some active-duty female officers and high-ranking enlisted female Marines to certain jobs in combat-related battalions for the first time. The units -- including artillery, tank, combat engineer, combat assault, low altitude air defense and assault amphibious battalions -- are all in the women’s existing specialties. Female Navy medical officers, chaplains and corpsmen now may also be assigned to those battalions.
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos will use the information gathered in the test programs and initiatives to make recommendations about how to change the policies that currently bar women from combat.

Well duh. Haven't you all seen G.I. Jane? (it's actually a pretty entertaining movie). Very few women will be able to qualify for combat. The point is they deserve the opportunity to try. And every once in a while a woman will manage it. Like, the ones who are physical freaks of nature.

It then becomes a waste of time, money and space.

Dirtie_Frank wrote:

Combat arms is no place for women.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012 ... ourse.html

Great, tell that to the women who've been serving in combat during the last 10 years. :roll:
Not sure why people think we should exclude half the population who've already demonstrated they're willing to serve.

Dirtie_Frank wrote:

Who Princess wrote:

Dirtie_Frank wrote:

Combat arms is no place for women.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012 ... ourse.html

Great, tell that to the women who've been serving in combat during the last 10 years. :roll:
Not sure why people think we should exclude half the population who've already demonstrated they're willing to serve.

The women who have been serving do a extraordinary job. These jobs they are talking about is Infantry, Special Forces, Rangers, Artillery,etc. The women who are serving in AFG are in different MOSs. Maybe you should get your facts straight before commenting on what people are talking about. :roll:

Get my facts straight, OK. Two women washed out of the marine infantry officer course and you call that the final word on women in combat.

20 years ago the military said women weren't able to fly fighter jets. Turned out to be wrong, imagine that. Plenty of men washed out of the officer course in your article yet I'm not making sweeping generalizations about men and their abilities. Nor about the attitudes that keep women from rising in the ranks.

And of course I'm sure I know NOTHING about being a women and facing stereotypes and discrimination.

Dirtie_Frank wrote:

The women wanted to do it. How much money and time are we going to waste, it is hard enough when 26 out of 100 men wash out. The facts are facts women and men are different. How many are going to be able to life the 155mm round on an artillery team, How many are going to be able to climb a mountain with a 90lb ruck sack on their back while going through Ranger School. I have been in the military and around it for the past 13 years. The only way this will work is if the reduce the standards for the women to compete in the jobs.

I'm guessing those men who washed out wanted to do it too. Do you suggest reducing the standards so more men can participate? Somehow I doubt it.

I don't believe that standards should be reduced for women and I think it's insulting that you suggest that they'd need to be. I wouldn't expect every woman to make it but some will. My problem with your blanket statement is that it's based on an article on TWO women. Since the armed forces rely on volunteers, give more of those volunteers the opportunity.

How much time and money are we going to waste? I thought the military specializes in those kinds of things.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/01/27/s ... e-veteran/

Yesterday’s column on women in combat elicited a number of passionate responses from both sides. Some of them came from proponents of the move, frequently citing alternate motives on my part. These ranged from “trying to keep women pregnant in the kitchen” and “Republicans want to lock women in the 1950s” to whichever variant of the GOP’s “war on women” you’d care to name. Many others lent a more sympathetic ear. One in particular, though, caught my attention. It was from one of America’s female veterans who served in Iraq, delivered with a first hand, been there, done that background. The Marine in question – who for purposes of publication will go by the pseudonym of “Sentry” – had previously submitted this history and opinion as a comment at National Review, but her story was compelling enough that I checked into her background, contacted her and decided to republish it here in its entirety. I offer the following as a third party testimony to stand your scrutiny on its own merits.

I’m a female veteran. I deployed to Anbar Province, Iraq. When I was active duty, I was 5’6, 130 pounds, and scored nearly perfect on my PFTs. I naturally have a lot more upper body strength than the average woman: not only can I do pull-ups, I can meet the male standard. I would love to have been in the infantry. And I still think it will be an unmitigated disaster to incorporate women into combat roles. I am not interested in risking men’s lives so I can live my selfish dream.

We’re not just talking about watering down the standards to include the politically correct number of women into the unit. This isn’t an issue of “if a woman can meet the male standard, she should be able to go into combat.” The number of women that can meet the male standard will be miniscule–I’d have a decent shot according to my PFTs, but dragging a 190-pound man in full gear for 100 yards would DESTROY me–and that miniscule number that can physically make the grade AND has the desire to go into combat will be facing an impossible situation that will ruin the combat effectiveness of the unit. First, the close quarters of combat units make for a complete lack of privacy and EVERYTHING is exposed, to include intimate details of bodily functions. Second, until we succeed in completely reprogramming every man in the military to treat women just like men, those men are going to protect a woman at the expense of the mission. Third, women have physical limitations that no amount of training or conditioning can overcome. Fourth, until the media in this country is ready to treat a captured/raped/tortured/mutilated female soldier just like a man, women will be targeted by the enemy without fail and without mercy.

I saw the male combat units when I was in Iraq. They go outside the wire for days at a time. They eat, sleep, urinate and defecate in front of each other and often while on the move. There’s no potty break on the side of the road outside the wire. They urinate into bottles and defecate into MRE bags. I would like to hear a suggestion as to how a woman is going to urinate successfully into a bottle while cramped into a humvee wearing full body armor. And she gets to accomplish this feat with the male members of her combat unit twenty inches away. Volunteers to do that job? Do the men really want to see it? Should they be forced to?

Everyone wants to point to the IDF as a model for gender integration in the military. No, the IDF does not put women on the front lines. They ran into the same wall the US is about to smack into: very few women can meet the standards required to serve there. The few integrated units in the IDF suffered three times the casualties of the all-male units because the Israeli men, just like almost every other group of men on the planet, try to protect the women even at the expense of the mission. Political correctness doesn’t trump thousands of years of evolution and societal norms. Do we really WANT to deprogram that instinct from men?

Regarding physical limitations, not only will a tiny fraction of women be able to meet the male standard, the simple fact is that women tend to be shorter than men. I ran into situations when I was deployed where I simply could not reach something. I wasn’t tall enough. I had to ask a man to get it for me. I can’t train myself to be taller. Yes, there are small men…but not so nearly so many as small women. More, a military PFT doesn’t measure the ability to jump. Men, with more muscular legs and bones that carry more muscle mass than any woman can condition herself to carry, can jump higher and farther than women. That’s why we have a men’s standing jump and long jump event in the Olympics separate from women. When you’re going over a wall in Baghdad that’s ten feet high, you have to be able to be able to reach the top of it in full gear and haul yourself over. That’s not strength per se, that’s just height and the muscular explosive power to jump and reach the top. Having to get a boost from one of the men so you can get up and over could get that man killed.

Without pharmaceutical help, women just do not carry the muscle mass men do. That muscle mass is also a shock absorber. Whether it’s the concussion of a grenade going off, an IED, or just a punch in the face, a woman is more likely to go down because she can’t absorb the concussion as well as a man can. And I don’t care how the PC forces try to slice it, in hand-to-hand combat the average man is going to destroy the average woman because the average woman is smaller, period. Muscle equals force in any kind of strike you care to perform. That’s why we don’t let female boxers face male boxers.

Lastly, this country and our military are NOT prepared to see what the enemy will do to female POWs. The Taliban, AQ, insurgents, jihadis, whatever you want to call them, they don’t abide by the Geneva Conventions and treat women worse than livestock. Google Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca if you want to see what they do to our men (and don’t google it unless you have a strong stomach) and then imagine a woman in their hands. How is our 24/7 news cycle going to cover a captured, raped, mutilated woman? After the first one, how are the men in the military going to treat their female comrades? ONE Thomasina Tucker is going to mean the men in the military will move heaven and earth to protect women, never mind what it does to the mission. I present you with Exhibit A: Jessica Lynch. Male lives will be lost trying to protect their female comrades. And the people of the US are NOT, based on the Jessica Lynch episode, prepared to treat a female POW the same way they do a man.

I say again, I would have loved to be in the infantry. I think I could have done it physically, I could’ve met almost all the male standards (jumping aside), and I think I’m mentally tough enough to handle whatever came. But I would never do that to the men. I would never sacrifice the mission for my own desires. And I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if someone died because of me.

- Sentry
I will close by noting that the picture on the front page of the site associated with this letter is not of the author. Also, the text has not been edited from the original in any way other than to remove some page breaks which make publication messy.