"Women will still be barred from serving in infantry combat units, defense officials say, but the changes will formally open up new positions at the combat battalion level that, until now, have been off limits.The article goes on to note that on today's battlefield, the line between "front line" and "rear echelon" can get kinda blurry.
The new jobs opening up for female service members will be combat support positions, including communications, intelligence and logistical positions, defense officials add. Typically, these jobs have been made available at the combat brigade level, but not at the lower battalion level, which was deemed too close to combat situation."
On this particular move, I have no objection. Women already serve in support roles admirably well in other levels, and having them at Battalion will probably not affect things much at all.
My concern comes from the direction these moves are taking. The ultimate goal seems to be to get all restrictions removed from women in combat, to the point where I, as a Sergeant and Infantry Fire Team Leader, may have a woman serve under me directly in combat.
Truly, my concern isn't actually women in combat, per se. One only needs to glance at the IDF, for example, to see that this can be done. My concern is due to the fact that the decision makers on this issue are likely to be influenced by politics, and they will be more concerned with doing what is "fair", rather than what is effective.
As I've pointed out time and again, the military is not supposed to be fair. It isn't about fair, because what the military is about is war, and war isn't fair. The purpose of the military is to "break stuff and kill people". Anything that supports this goal should be kept. Anything that contradicts it should be removed. You don't have time to worry about fair, because if you take time out to worry about that, people will die.
This is a fact that decision makers under hostile fire must face time and again. Take, for example, a situation where I have two soldiers, Joe and Bob. I need to get a soldier across the street (which is being fired on by the enemy), so I can have a support by fire position on some objective. If I know that Joe is faster than Bob, I'm going to send Joe. Every time. It doesn't matter if Joe went last time, or the time before that, or the time before that. Fact is, Joe is more likely to accomplish the objective, so Joe it is.
If our goal is to have women in combat, that is fine, but decisions need to be made far in advance to make this happen. It needs to be understood that this is a gradual change, and careful preparation will be needed to make this happen.
For starters, physical standards must be the same. As it stands now, if I do 42 push ups, 53 sit ups, and run a 16 minute 2 mile, I barely pass the PT test. If a woman does the exact same thing, she excels. While this may be more "fair", recognizing that women are in general physically weaker than men in some areas, it does not make for a good combat soldier. If it is deemed that X standard is what is necessary for an infantry soldier to excel in combat, then every infantry soldier must be able to meet X standard, not just those who happen to be born with a penis.
It should be pointed out that this standard excludes many men, not just women. It isn't sexist, because it is an absolute. Just as I feel no shame in not being capable of being a Navy SEAL (My testicles are orders of magnitude too small for that), a woman who cannot meet the standard of the Infantry and must therefore serve in support should not feel shame in that either. If it was easy, it wouldn't be elite, and we wouldn't get those bitchin' blue cords.
Secondly, there are psychological aspects that would have to be considered. Before you jump me, women, I'm not talking about the minds of women. I'm talking about men.
There are some facts about the mind of the majority of males in our society that must be considered. The primary one is this: Men tend to protect women.
As anecdotal evidence of this, ask a group of your male friends if they would interfere if they saw a man strike another man. You would likely get varied responses, like "Well, did he deserve it?", or hedged conditions like "Only if it got out of hand". Then ask that same group if they would intervene if a woman were punched by a man. The responses will be markedly different. Perhaps not every man would intervene, but I guarantee the responses would be sharply contrasted nonetheless.
If that is the difference in mindset when it comes to a simple domestic dispute, imagine the difference in seeing women around you in lethal danger, or actually dying. If you like, you can read a real world account from a Marine officer on how his men acted differently around women in their midst, even in combat.
That is not to say that these problems are insurmountable. Physical standards will exclude many women, but not all. Training can be designed to limit the protective instincts of men in specific situations. For example, humans are intensely disinclined to kill others of their own species (See "On Killing" by Lt Col Grossman), but our military's training has reduced this reluctance in high stress situations dramatically. This training does not seem to bleed greatly into normal life, as demonstrated by the fact that military veterans are no more or less likely to be productive members of society than any other citizen. If we can remove instinct in certain situations for this one thing, why not others?
What it is to say is that these problems do exist, and I have very little faith that those in charge will take these problems seriously. Instead, they will do what they always have done. They will simply steamroll the policy into existence. Then they will leave it to grunts like me, who don't have the luxury of being "Echelons above Reality", to deal with the consequences.
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