Women in Combat

Having served in both all male and mixed units, I can tell you that women are not the equivalent of men when it comes to military tasks. It is not disparaging to note the obvious. These same women were generally dedicated, smart, and hardworking, but many things in the army require brute strength, and women simply do not have it. One study the army did showed that after one year of dedicated working out, 3 hours a day with expert supervision, the average woman can attain 70% of the strength of a man who does not work out. It is not good enough to replace a male soldier with a female soldier that can not do the same job, not to mention that no one has 3 hours a day to work out when they have other duties to learn and train on.

I can note many examples, but suffice it to say that in the experiments where they would have units that were all women, they were combat ineffective. In contrast, all male units excel. For example, while women serve in Patriot Missile Batteries, and are perfectly capable of watching the screen, they are generally much slower and less capable of setting up the missile site to begin with: Some of the cables that are run from the command post to the missiles weigh close to 100 pounds alone. The battery is much less useful if it can not be set up quickly and efficiently.

To be fair, that is because the army and its tools are designed for men. Items that are designated "one man lift" are really meaning "man." If the army was designed to be populated by women and take advantage of some of their natural abilities such as flexibility and smaller stature, our equipment would be significantly different, perhaps smaller tanks, for example.But the fact is the army is not designed for women, and they do not perform as well as men at key tasks requiring strength, and should not be placed in a position where their weakness gets themselves or someone else killed whenever possible.

One of the problems with the PC army is that every General gets approved by the Senate, and the chances of a General getting promoted to the next rank or assignment after discussing this topic honestly is pretty bleak. For example, before women could be mechanics, mechanics had to be able to carry their tools 100 meters to get to the broken truck, as a performance standard. Since women could not do that, they simply did away with the requirement and now the broken vehicle has to get to the mechanic.When women first were given the opportunity to go to airborne school, they had to meet the male standards. Later, they decided that women could meet separate standards. Later still, they reduced the male standards to the female standards (for the run times) so that there was not a segregated training environment. I can understand that this is not the fault of individual women and that those that can meet the standards should be given the opportunity, but I believe that the number of women who could meet the same standards as men and choose to do it (rather than being an olympic level track star) would be so remotely small that the cost of integration is simply not worth it.

In the units I commanded, I would have generally preferred to be a man short rather than fill that position with a woman, because she would not be the equivalent, and the unit cohesion would often be reduced simply because the males get tired of doing her work...while being a man short they can more easily understand why they have more work to do.

And as to whether it is appropriate to discuss it now while women are serving in a war, it seems to me that now is when it has to be discussed, because those women are over there, and it may be that they should not be in the positions they are in...I think we can just recall that most famous female soldier, Jessica Lynch, who could not even fire her own weapon: She herself did not fire a shot and spent most of her time in the humvee huddled in a protective ball to want to have an honest debate over whether this is the best use of people.

For example, taking some of the males out of the cushy remf jobs and putting them at the front would maximize the assets that the army has, provide meaningful work where the females would be equal to the task, and provide the frontline with soldiers more likely to be able to accomplish the mission.

I would rather have a male homosexual in the foxhole with me than a draftee, and I would rather have a male draftee than a woman, because the men would be physicaly capable of doing the job.In general, the women that I have met that are close to being as strong as the average man can not run as fast, and women who can run fast are not as strong. I have not met one woman who could do both, though I would bet that Jackie Joyner Kersey could, but she is an olympic athlete.

I agree that there are things such as tolerance that women can do better, but there is no point in designing our military around those tolerances, because the vast majority will still be male. Therefore the equipment that we have will need to be designed for the lower male capability or frailties. So, women can't capitalize on those talents, and testing for them may be interesting, but of no military value.

The sliding scale within the military has always bothered me, where on the physical fitness test the older you are the worse you can do. I would think that there would be a minimum standard for all, though perhaps a sliding scale for excellence. But I don't really need the test to tell me that when I see 3 women carrying one box designed to be carried by one man, that whatever standards they are held to is not the standard we need.

What is the point of the Army?

When we were not at war, social experiments were tolerable. We all laughed as our scouts learned to look for porta-potties because that would be a sign of females, and therefore a higher headquarters to attack. They could even estimate the number of people at the headquaters by counting the number of potties, and some could slip in and look at the delivery date and see how long the unit has been there, and when they are leaving (or in war look at the pile, and estimate how long they have been there). When 1/3 of the females in one of my units were non-deployable because of pregnancy at any given time (increasing the burden on the males in a much more direct way than if they just were not assigned there), it was a pain, but not life or death. When 100% of the women would fall out of unit runs (which are at a pace such that the old men can make it) and none of the males, we would make excuses.

Now we are in a period of probably unending war for a decade or more, and we need to be more serious about the standards we are enforcing. We are already doing that with commissioning, and we are kicking out cadets who would have been commissioned in 1999, because we don't have the luxury of giving a marginal cadet the opportunity to grow as a platoon leader, becuase he may very likely be deployed in less than a year.

I know that it is easy to point and say many of the same arguments were made about a segregated army, but the difference is that 25 years into the social experiment with desegregation, we had men of all races who were capable of meeting equal standards. 25 years into this social experiment, we do not have women who are capable of meeting the same standards.