Women In Combat, fueling the debate in the US

[CmdrWilkens]

So I came across this article in the Washington Post and thought, ya know we haven't really talked about this in a bit. By us I don't mean the board but rather the US in general. We've sortof half forgotten the policy and its implicaitons, we've forgotten the reasoning. So anyway given that I won't ramble more but rather get to the story.

Woman Gains Silver Star -- And Removal From Combat
Case Shows Contradictions of Army Rules

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 1, 2008; Page A01

KHOST, Afghanistan -- Pfc. Monica Brown cracked open the door of her Humvee outside a remote village in eastern Afghanistan to the pop of bullets shot by Taliban fighters. But instead of taking cover, the 18-year-old medic grabbed her bag and ran through gunfire toward fellow soldiers in a crippled and burning vehicle.

Vice President Cheney pinned Brown, of Lake Jackson, Tex., with a Silver Star in March for repeatedly risking her life on April 25, 2007, to shield and treat her wounded comrades, displaying bravery and grit. She is the second woman since World War II to receive the nation's third-highest combat medal.

Within a few days of her heroic acts, however, the Army pulled Brown out of the remote camp in Paktika province where she was serving with a cavalry unit -- because, her platoon commander said, Army restrictions on women in combat barred her from such missions.

"We weren't supposed to take her out" on missions "but we had to because there was no other medic," said Lt. Martin Robbins, a platoon leader with Charlie Troop, 4th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, whose men Brown saved. "By regulations you're not supposed to," he said, but Brown "was one of the guys, mixing it up, clearing rooms, doing everything that anybody else was doing."

In Afghanistan as well as Iraq, female soldiers are often tasked to work in all-male combat units -- not only for their skills but also for the culturally sensitive role of providing medical treatment for local women, as well as searching them and otherwise interacting with them. Such war-zone pragmatism is at odds with Army rules intended to bar women from units that engage in direct combat or collocate with combat forces.

Military personnel experts say that as a result, the 1992 rules are vague, ill defined, and based on an outmoded concept of wars with clear front lines that rarely exist in today's counterinsurgencies.

"The current policy is not actionable," concluded a Rand Corp. study last year on the Army's assignment of women. "Crafted for a linear battlefield," the policy does not conform to the nature of warfare today and uses concepts such as "forward and well forward [that] were generally acknowledged to be almost meaningless in the Iraqi theater," it said.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, noncombat units in which women serve face many of the same threats that all-male combat arms units do and are performing well, commanders say. "Army personnel were consistent in their perception that a strict adherence to the Army policy would have negative implications" and that the policy should be revised or revoked, the Rand study said.

The Caretaker and Boss

Brown never imagined she would be a soldier, let alone one decorated for gallantry in combat. Growing up in central Texas, she had bounced around to nine schools, moving frequently with her brothers and mother, a nurse, before going to live with her grandmother Katy at age 15.

Despite the itinerant life, Brown excelled academically. She graduated from high school a year and a half early -- a day after turning 17. She planned to enroll in college, but that changed when her brother Justin, who was a year older and like a twin, was drawn to the Army.

Justin had long dreamed of becoming an infantryman, and one day they stopped by the recruiting office together, Brown said in an interview in Khost. On impulse, she offered to join with him. Grinning, they announced the decision to their grandmother, who said she "didn't feel it was the right time with the war on."

But Brown persuaded her grandmother to allow her to join with her brother before she turned 18. Justin "was older, but she was always the caretaker, always the boss," Katy Brown said.

He joined the infantry and Brown enlisted as a medic in November 2005. In 2007, they deployed to Afghanistan. When word came in March that year to Brown's medical unit at the large U.S. base in Khost that a small outpost of mainly infantrymen and engineers needed a female medic, her leadership did not hesitate.

"Brown," she was told, "you're going."

The outpost in Paktika province was little more than a cluster of tents walled off with dirt-filled barriers. There were no flush toilets or running water, and Brown worked in an 8-by-5-foot medical aid station barely big enough for a stretcher. "I loved it," she said.

Then, when fighting against the Taliban intensified in the spring, Brown was placed with Delta and Charlie troops as a line medic, spending days on combat operations. "It was more like a constant mission, because . . . there was more Taliban acting up," placing roadside bombs and attacking bases, she recalled.

"What we would do is go out for four or five days, come back to the FOB [forward operating base], get resupplied for eight hours then go right back out," she said. "If we got tips Taliban were in a village, we went there."

Mortars and Fire

At dusk on April 25, 2007, Brown's platoon had just finished searching for a Taliban leader near the village of Jani Khel. The convoy of four Humvees and one Afghan National Army pickup truck had turned into a dry streambed when a pressure-plate bomb exploded under the rear Humvee.

"Two-One is hit!" Staff Sgt. Jose Santos yelled. Looking back, Brown saw the Humvee engulfed in a fireball as its fuel tank and fuel cans ignited. Insurgents about 100 yards to the east opened up with machine guns and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, as Brown and Santos ran without cover to the burning vehicle.

Four of those injured crawled or were thrown from the Humvee, while a fifth, Spec. Larry Spray, was caught inside by his boot and was on fire. Sgt. Zachary Tellier managed to pull him out.

Brown and a colleague then grabbed Spec. Stanson Smith, who was in shock and blinded by blood from his lacerated forehead, and dragged him by his body armor into a ditch about 15 yards away. Tellier helped Spray limp over.

No sooner were they in the ditch that insurgents began firing mortars. Brown threw her body over Smith, shielding him as more than a dozen rounds hit nearby. The ammunition inside the burning Humvee then started exploding, including 60mm mortars, 40mm grenade rounds and rifle ammunition. Again, Brown lay over the wounded.

Robbins, the platoon leader, repositioned his Humvee near the injured and was incredulous that Brown had survived. "I was surprised I didn't get killed and she'd been over there for 10, 15 minutes longer," he recalled.

"There was small arms coming in from two different machine-gun positions, mortars falling . . . a burning Humvee with 16 mortar rounds in it, chunks of aluminum the size of softballs flying all around," said Robbins, of Portsmouth, R.I. "It was about as hairy as it gets."

Santos, the platoon sergeant, drove the pickup over to get the wounded to safety. "It was pretty much just like a miracle run," Brown recalled. With another soldier, she hoisted Smith onto the truck, while Spray crouched behind the back window and Brown dived onto a bench in the back. There, Brown put pressure on Smith's head, which was bleeding heavily, and also held the hand of Spray, who was charred and shaking.

"Talk to him," she told Spray, trying to keep Smith conscious. Spray, his face contorted with pain and fear, responded: "It's going to be okay."

Santos drove to a more protected position, while Brown bandaged Smith and Spray, gave them IVs and readied them for the helicopters that arrived 45 minutes later. Brown "never looked around or anything," Robbins said. "She was focused on the patients the whole time. She did her job perfectly."

Smith and Spray were flown to the United States, and Tellier received a Bronze Star for pulling Spray from the Humvee. He was killed five months later in another firefight.

Brown stayed in the field for two more days, while U.S. Apache helicopter gunships attacked insurgents and blew up the damaged Humvee. Within a week, however, she was abruptly called back to the sprawling U.S. base in Khost.

"I got pulled" by higher-ups, she said, because her presence as "a female in a combat arms unit" had attracted attention.

'I Didn't Want to Leave'

President Bush has forcefully backed the Army's restrictions, asserting in a January 2005 interview with the Washington Times that there should be "no women in combat." Since her heroic actions, however, Brown was promoted to specialist and has been congratulated by Cheney in Afghanistan, praised in a meeting with Bush at a NATO summit in Romania, and offered a job on the White House staff.

Military officers in the field and independent experts have said it is both infeasible and contrary to the Army's own warfighting doctrine to prevent women from serving in proximity to -- or together with -- all-male combat units in today's war zones. They contend that if the goal of the policy is to protect women from capture or bodily harm, it cannot be done in the scramble of conflicts such as those in the Middle East.

Across Afghanistan, female medics such as Brown are regularly sent to serve with combat units. "The real catch was to have a female medic out there because of the cultural sensitivities and the flexibility that gave commanders," said Maj. Paul Narowski, the executive officer of Brown's battalion. "It is absolutely not about gender in terms of how well they will do," he said, adding that he does not know why Brown was pulled out.

The only other female Silver Star recipient in the past 60 years was Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, a military policewoman in Iraq who the Army said had responded to a 2005 insurgent attack on a convoy by firing grenades.

"I didn't want to leave," Brown said, after being pulled from the platoon. Robbins said he and his men, who called Brown "Doc," also wanted to keep her as their medic.

"I've seen a lot of grown men who didn't have the courage and weren't able to handle themselves under fire like she did," said Staff Sgt. Aaron Best of Canton, N.C., Robbins's gunner that day. "She never missed a beat."

So anyway here's a story that maybe could finally nudge this government into looking into what roles women are allowed to serve in. I'll admit I still question a few (line infantry being one) but even that questioning gets weaker with each of these stories you hear.

[General Zod]

Don't most other nations let women serve on the front line?

[Raxmei]

We're performing an occupation. You can't avoid putting women in combat without keeping them out of theater entirely. As long as they are physically capable of doing the combat arms job (which many female soldiers aren't, but some are) you might as well cut back the half-assedness.

[Singular Intellect]

As a sexist male myself, I understand the viewpoint of trying to keep women out of harm's way and feeling the need to protect them more so than males. Particularily given women prisoners can potentially be even more abused than your average male prisoner, for obvious reasons.

That said however, the excuse "that's how I feel", just doesn't cut it. If women are willing to volunteer for equally dangerous missions, are qualified and fully aware of the risks, there's no reason they shouldn't be allowed to do so.

[White Haven]

The US military has trouble with the concept of asses in general, half or otherwise. Therein lie many of the problems.

[Coyote]

This administration won't do a thing, but the next one will have to face reality at some point.

[Eleas]

As a sexist male myself, I understand the viewpoint of trying to keep women out of harm's way and feeling the need to protect them more so than males. Particularily given women prisoners can potentially be even more abused than your average male prisoner, for obvious reasons.

This is an intriguing statement. Precisely which "obvious reasons" would that be?

[Eris]

Particularily given women prisoners can potentially be even more abused than your average male prisoner, for obvious reasons

While I see how you're tempering this claim with a statement about full consent and awareness, I don't see how this is obvious. Women can be beaten - men can be beaten. Women can be raped - men can be raped. You can do things like mutilate a woman's breasts, but you can also mutilate a man's testicles. I don't think it's a question of capability but a question of whether in fact they do get abused more as prisoners, or more severely. For this, I would request you provide a study instead of relying on your gut feeling.

Certainly it's at least not obvious.

[General Zod]

Certainly it's at least not obvious.

The only thing I'd give women one more up on over men on the abuse angle, is that men can't get pregnant from being raped.

[Ritterin Sophia]

I've always disagreed with keeping women out of combat positions, I frankly don't care if they can pass the same rigorous training (I of course mean without lowering standards for women simple because they're women, as I've heard from one female firefighter who complained about being held to the same standards as the men) that is expected of men in those combat positions. I've also felt that women should be required to sign up for selective service same as me, but maybe that's just me.

[Sidewinder]

Regarding the controversy over whether or not women should be in combat, this essay helps to explain some of the reasons why "No," is the most common answer.

Women and the Military
Ralph Zuljan

Although a discussion of the role of women in the military generally breaks down into a familiar debate on brains versus brawn in combat, there is a central point that such discussions tend to ignore. As a species humans are subject to a survival model similar to that of any other species. Individually, in the short term, we survive by finding food, shelter and the like. In the long term, we survive through reproduction. Perhaps an analogy for the short and long term survival of societies may be drawn as well. I realize that this treads on notions of social Darwinism and such ideas have limited application. However, I would consider it as more of a social learning process that differentiates social functions on the basis of profound physical differences. To suggest that a statistical variation in upper body strength or the like is all that underlies the historically evident exclusion of women from battle seems rather trite. Likewise, the historical record makes clear that evidence of female fighting ability is not enough to overcome the long-standing exclusion of women from battle.

A cursory look at the history of women in the military suggests that women are only involved in combat on an equal footing with males insofar as immediate survival of the social grouping is at stake. From early tribal collectives to the Soviet experience in World War II and the Israeli experience in the first years after achieving statehood, when the society is threatened with imminent destruction, there is little or no regard given to gender differentiation in combat. This makes intuitive sense since there is no point in worrying about future survival of a society if it is at risk of destruction in the present. However, once a social grouping achieves a level of security, women tend to be removed from combat and all associated activities. From the earliest city states to the present day, fighting in an organized armed force has tended to be a male function except in the most desperate of circumstances. Females have tended to be reserved for carrying out their reproductive function. A large set of social norms is built around this basic differentiation but at its core the distinction seems to lie in the reproductive process.

It takes a female roughly nine months to produce one offspring. A male merely participates in the conception process. This difference is only enhanced by the roughly thirty year limit to the female reproductive period when contrasted to the puberty to death period of males. Interestingly enough, that thirty year reproductive period for females would also engulf the most common age group engaged in military service. Consequently, males are relatively expendable and their possible loss to a society is relatively less impacting. To put this in perspective, if 50% of the reproductively capable males were eliminated from this society, it would be relatively easy to recover the population loss when compared to a 50% loss of reproductive females. After all, one male can fertilize numerous females but one female can only produce one offspring per year -- more or less. From a collective perspective, there is a greater risk to societal survival if females are lost in combat than males and the higher that percentage is the more likely the society will fail to reproduce successfully. Hence, it will fail to survive.

The conclusion I would draw is that females are withdrawn from combat activities because, from a collective perspective, their time consuming reproductive function is an equally important but gender specific element in the long term survival of the collective. If there are sufficient males available for existing threats, it would seem rational to preserve the females -- at the expense of the males -- in order to carry out further reproduction. The success of this social differentiation is reflected by its universal application by societies. In a period of peace female (re)production increases the pool of expendable males and in war it provides replacements. Females are therefore dedicated to the (re)production of new generations of soldiers to replace those lost in combat and the long term survival of the society. Males are dedicated to the short term survival of the society.

I would think this implies that, from the collective's perspective, reproduction is an equally important factor in the successful building of a society and state and the collective's security. Social collectives that thrive in a world where warfare is commonplace can only do so in the long term if they are capable of replacing their casualties and they can only do so through reproduction. It is a function that is still very much gender specific.

Turning to the present day, I can see no mental or physical reason that women cannot participate fully in the military. Perhaps the only reservation is that which has already been expounded. There is a fairly common belief that wars today are meaningfully different from those in the past. Yet, none of the western states has engaged in a significant war for more than fifty years now. This is not an excessively long period of peace for a given set of states in the international system. The wars that have been engaged in recently are minor and local in scale. They do not reflect the expectations of a major war and the potential casualties resulting from an experience such as the world wars. I do would wonder what the social implications would have been if the military casualties of the world wars had been equally distributed among males and females. Furthermore, it is assumed that the armed forces will remain relatively small organizations which would reduce the risk of catastrophic loss of reproductive capability. One of the greatest assumptions, however, and an expectation derived from some recent experiences, is that of near zero casualties. In so far as all these assumptions are correct, there is really no meaningful differentiation between males and females with respect to military service. Equality in the armed forces is therefore a reasonable direction to pursue. However, if these assumptions are ever shown to be in error, the societal consequences could be severely damaging for the long term. The historical record shows that integrating women into the military services entails a risk to the reproductive viability of the society that does so. Whether or not supporting a currently fashionable ideological position is worth this risk is the only question worth asking.

As for the dangers a female POW faces, "gut feelings" ARE relevant, in that one who is perceived as being weak and unable to fight back is more likely to be the target of abuse. (Yes, I know some women are capable of matching or even excelling a man in terms of physical and mental strength and endurance, but good luck changing the opinions of the BILLIONS who think of women as "the weaker sex," including bin Laden's merry men.)

[Coyote]

Yes, one argument I heard is that placing women in combat would expose them to dangers above and beyond the ordinary punitive measures men would face (upon capture). z.B., a man might be raped in captivity, a woman definitely will be, and in some cases probably used as a "comfort woman".

A lot also depends on the enemy being faced, too.

[Hawkwings]

I just hope it doesn't lead to standards being lowered because loud whiny people think that women are being "unfairly tested" and there needs to be "gender equality" in the armed forces.

[Eleas]

Yes, one argument I heard is that placing women in combat would expose them to dangers above and beyond the ordinary punitive measures men would face (upon capture). z.B., a man might be raped in captivity, a woman definitely will be, and in some cases probably used as a "comfort woman".

A lot also depends on the enemy being faced, too.

While this is true, I don't see how this is relevant. Unless you can, in fact, cite a study that shows women POWs to be more likely targets of abuse, then torture is torture. In regards to prisoner abuse, there's no significant difference between being systematically raped or systematically forced to eat crushed glass and feces, being whipped to unconsciousness, or any other of the charming ways of breaking spirits that humans have devised. Rape becomes another form of torture, and it's simply another artefact of existing gender structures that puts rape (of females) in an entirely different category.

[Singular Intellect]

While I see how you're tempering this claim with a statement about full consent and awareness, I don't see how this is obvious. Women can be beaten - men can be beaten.

It's a well established fact that, generally, women are far less stronger and durable than men. You can argue about equality all you want, but biology doesn't give a shit.

Women can be raped - men can be raped.

Yes, but which scenario do you think is much more likely in captivity with a majority male army?

You can do things like mutilate a woman's breasts, but you can also mutilate a man's testicles. I don't think it's a question of capability but a question of whether in fact they do get abused more as prisoners, or more severely. For this, I would request you provide a study instead of relying on your gut feeling.

Certainly it's at least not obvious.

Women are physically weaker and less durable than their male counterparts. Women are much more likely to get raped in a majority male army than a male prisoner.

Which of those two factors is not obvious to you?

[Havok]

The arguments I have usually heard are strength based. "A 120lb female soldier isn't going to be able to pull a 210lb soldier in full gear out of harms way if he gets injured.", or whatever version fits.
That argument seems to hold water, but outside of infantry, I believe women have the ability to do every job left in the military.

CmdrWilkens
Do you think the lack of conversation on the topic recently has any correlation to the fact that we are actually embroiled in a sustained conflict and the mouthpieces that you would normally hear have shut the fuck up because they REALLY don't want to be there and the women that REALLY do, are?

[Dracofrost]

If the arguments against are strength based, why not simply hold the females to the same strength standards as male infantryman? It seems simple enough, and if the women really want it, they can work out and train until they can pass the requirements. Just look at the World's Strongest Woman competition if you have any doubt that a woman can become really fuckin' strong if she wants to. I mean seriously, Jill Mills at 170 lbs can bench over 300 pounds and deadlift and squat over 500. Yes, she could pick that 210 pound infantryman up off the ground with one hand, despite weighing 40 lbs less than him. Now, she was World's Strongest Woman 2 years running, so that's a rather extreme example, but it's just to prove that the capability is there.

[Havok]

If the arguments against are strength based, why not simply hold the females to the same strength standards as male infantryman? It seems simple enough, and if the women really want it, they can work out and train until they can pass the requirements. Just look at the World's Strongest Woman competition if you have any doubt that a woman can become really fuckin' strong if she wants to. I mean seriously, Jill Mills at 170 lbs can bench over 300 pounds and deadlift and squat over 500. Yes, she could pick that 210 pound infantryman up off the ground with one hand, despite weighing 40 lbs less than him. Now, she was World's Strongest Woman 2 years running, so that's a rather extreme example, but it's just to prove that the capability is there.

Well yes, but unfortunately the military does test for and frown upon steroid use.
Seriously, the military doesn't want muscle bound soldiers. It weighs you down, slows you down, fatigues you easier. The average woman would have to have far too much muscle and spend far more time developing it to compete with just an average man to make an effective infantry soldier.

[Eris]

While I see how you're tempering this claim with a statement about full consent and awareness, I don't see how this is obvious. Women can be beaten - men can be beaten.

It's a well established fact that, generally, women are far less stronger and durable than men. You can argue about equality all you want, but biology doesn't give a shit.

And so? I was directly rebutting your point about abuse rates. This is completely tangential to that.

Women can be raped - men can be raped.

Yes, but which scenario do you think is much more likely in captivity with a majority male army?

Doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the statistics are. Care to provide some?

You can do things like mutilate a woman's breasts, but you can also mutilate a man's testicles. I don't think it's a question of capability but a question of whether in fact they do get abused more as prisoners, or more severely. For this, I would request you provide a study instead of relying on your gut feeling.

Certainly it's at least not obvious.

Women are physically weaker and less durable than their male counterparts. Women are much more likely to get raped in a majority male army than a male prisoner.

Which of those two factors is not obvious to you?

[/quote]

The first of those factors is a complete red herring. Keep the standards the same - if we see fewer women front line infantry, then so be it. I never said anything about qualifications, but rather about this 'risk' thing you seem to think is obvious.

I first repeat my request for some statistics. And let's make it a general risk assessment of being a POW. Let's say for instance women get raped more often, and men get beaten near to death more often. Shouldn't we then only let women in, since rape is easier to survive without dying until you can be liberated or exchanged? Some numbers, if you will, or you're still just asserting your gut instinct.

[Havok]

Let's say for instance women get raped more often, and men get beaten near to death more often. Shouldn't we then only let women in, since rape is easier to survive without dying until you can be liberated or exchanged?

I agree with some of what you said but this is just fucking stupid. You seem to be implying that a woman who has been rapped repeatedly by multiple people is going to find it easier to recover then a guy who has had multiple ass kickings and this is a better scenario because rape doesn't bring a female physically closer to death?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Regarding the controversy over whether or not women should be in combat, this essay helps to explain some of the reasons why "No," is the most common answer.

Women and the Military
Ralph Zuljan

Although a discussion of the role of women in the military generally breaks down into a familiar debate on brains versus brawn in combat, there is a central point that such discussions tend to ignore. As a species humans are subject to a survival model similar to that of any other species. Individually, in the short term, we survive by finding food, shelter and the like. In the long term, we survive through reproduction. Perhaps an analogy for the short and long term survival of societies may be drawn as well. I realize that this treads on notions of social Darwinism and such ideas have limited application. However, I would consider it as more of a social learning process that differentiates social functions on the basis of profound physical differences. To suggest that a statistical variation in upper body strength or the like is all that underlies the historically evident exclusion of women from battle seems rather trite. Likewise, the historical record makes clear that evidence of female fighting ability is not enough to overcome the long-standing exclusion of women from battle.

A cursory look at the history of women in the military suggests that women are only involved in combat on an equal footing with males insofar as immediate survival of the social grouping is at stake. From early tribal collectives to the Soviet experience in World War II and the Israeli experience in the first years after achieving statehood, when the society is threatened with imminent destruction, there is little or no regard given to gender differentiation in combat. This makes intuitive sense since there is no point in worrying about future survival of a society if it is at risk of destruction in the present. However, once a social grouping achieves a level of security, women tend to be removed from combat and all associated activities. From the earliest city states to the present day, fighting in an organized armed force has tended to be a male function except in the most desperate of circumstances. Females have tended to be reserved for carrying out their reproductive function. A large set of social norms is built around this basic differentiation but at its core the distinction seems to lie in the reproductive process.

It takes a female roughly nine months to produce one offspring. A male merely participates in the conception process. This difference is only enhanced by the roughly thirty year limit to the female reproductive period when contrasted to the puberty to death period of males. Interestingly enough, that thirty year reproductive period for females would also engulf the most common age group engaged in military service. Consequently, males are relatively expendable and their possible loss to a society is relatively less impacting. To put this in perspective, if 50% of the reproductively capable males were eliminated from this society, it would be relatively easy to recover the population loss when compared to a 50% loss of reproductive females. After all, one male can fertilize numerous females but one female can only produce one offspring per year -- more or less. From a collective perspective, there is a greater risk to societal survival if females are lost in combat than males and the higher that percentage is the more likely the society will fail to reproduce successfully. Hence, it will fail to survive.

The conclusion I would draw is that females are withdrawn from combat activities because, from a collective perspective, their time consuming reproductive function is an equally important but gender specific element in the long term survival of the collective. If there are sufficient males available for existing threats, it would seem rational to preserve the females -- at the expense of the males -- in order to carry out further reproduction. The success of this social differentiation is reflected by its universal application by societies. In a period of peace female (re)production increases the pool of expendable males and in war it provides replacements. Females are therefore dedicated to the (re)production of new generations of soldiers to replace those lost in combat and the long term survival of the society. Males are dedicated to the short term survival of the society.

I would think this implies that, from the collective's perspective, reproduction is an equally important factor in the successful building of a society and state and the collective's security. Social collectives that thrive in a world where warfare is commonplace can only do so in the long term if they are capable of replacing their casualties and they can only do so through reproduction. It is a function that is still very much gender specific.

Turning to the present day, I can see no mental or physical reason that women cannot participate fully in the military. Perhaps the only reservation is that which has already been expounded. There is a fairly common belief that wars today are meaningfully different from those in the past. Yet, none of the western states has engaged in a significant war for more than fifty years now. This is not an excessively long period of peace for a given set of states in the international system. The wars that have been engaged in recently are minor and local in scale. They do not reflect the expectations of a major war and the potential casualties resulting from an experience such as the world wars. I do would wonder what the social implications would have been if the military casualties of the world wars had been equally distributed among males and females. Furthermore, it is assumed that the armed forces will remain relatively small organizations which would reduce the risk of catastrophic loss of reproductive capability. One of the greatest assumptions, however, and an expectation derived from some recent experiences, is that of near zero casualties. In so far as all these assumptions are correct, there is really no meaningful differentiation between males and females with respect to military service. Equality in the armed forces is therefore a reasonable direction to pursue. However, if these assumptions are ever shown to be in error, the societal consequences could be severely damaging for the long term. The historical record shows that integrating women into the military services entails a risk to the reproductive viability of the society that does so. Whether or not supporting a currently fashionable ideological position is worth this risk is the only question worth asking.

As for the dangers a female POW faces, "gut feelings" ARE relevant, in that one who is perceived as being weak and unable to fight back is more likely to be the target of abuse. (Yes, I know some women are capable of matching or even excelling a man in terms of physical and mental strength and endurance, but good luck changing the opinions of the BILLIONS who think of women as "the weaker sex," including bin Laden's merry men.)

From an evolutionary perspective, this guy is absolutely right. However the conditions are such that the evolutionary reason we have preserved females from combat are irrelevant. Our population sizes are such that the loss of a few females in combat is a drop in the bucket. Less than a percent of our population is military, less than half of that is female. The loss in reproductive capacity from casualties is statistically insignificant.

[Havok]

I recall hearing or reading... damned if I can remember where, that another reason for not having women in combat is that it is thought or believed that the men would spend more time attending to injured women then other men and risk missions and other lives because of basic protective feelings or emotional attachments that men have for females. If somebody else recalls this, a source would be lovely. My google-fu is weak.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yes, one argument I heard is that placing women in combat would expose them to dangers above and beyond the ordinary punitive measures men would face (upon capture). z.B., a man might be raped in captivity, a woman definitely will be, and in some cases probably used as a "comfort woman".

A lot also depends on the enemy being faced, too.

The Arab Jandarma guarding British prisoners after they surrendered at Kut in 1915 greatly admired them for their "beautiful white peach-bottoms".

I would say that rape of male POWs is far, far more common than is normally admitted, because it's even more humiliating and degrading to a man, and his sense of masculinity, than a woman, in some respects.

[Eleas]

The Arab Jandarma guarding British prisoners after they surrendered at Kut in 1915 greatly admired them for their "beautiful white peach-bottoms".

I would say that rape of male POWs is far, far more common than is normally admitted, because it's even more humiliating and degrading to a man, and his sense of masculinity, than a woman, in some respects.

Ssh! We need to preserve the fiction that when a female has been raped, she is forever soiled, that her life is over, and, of course, that male rape doesn't happen because of the prevalence of heterosexual guards. Never mind that this hasn't stopped prison rape from being common as dirt in all-male penitentiaries the world over, or that the above "rape is a fate worse than death" meme is part and parcel of the same societal structures that lead to rape victims being shunned and blamed for their misfortunes. No, women are much more fragile than men, and besides, we can't help it if we absolutely need to protect the little darlings. While a woman wanting to pursue a dangerous job is cute and all, she's better off at home when the bullets start flying. For her own safety, of course.

As an aside, I'd agree that rape in some respects is a worse blow to a man's self-worth. Conversely however, this Western cultural spectre of rape as being the worst thing you can do to a woman may serve to make the experience that much more awful for her. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that the average woman is aware of rape in ways that most men are not. It's built up as the ultimate horror, a fate literally worse than anything else you could name. And when it finally happens, when the woman suddenly realizes that every horror story she has ever been told about rape is about to become real...

It's not an insignificant psychological factor, I'd imagine, nor a pretty one.

[VT-16]

far less stronger and durable

I thought women were more durable in some respects. Seem to recall some tests done a few years back that showed it. Had something to do with increased endurance, at least.

As far as military training goes, they pass, they get in, they fail, they get kicked out. Such a revolutionary concept.