There are dozens of reasons to bar women from combat roles. There's the risk of sex, rape, and pregnancy. There are the issues of strength and the ability of women to endure the wear and tear of combat arms. Smaller bodies break down faster. Men will also go to great lengths to protect women in danger, it's an instinct that overrides any training that soldiers experience. That in turn undermines combat effectiveness. Women will also turn sex to their advantage. For example -- women will flirt with their peers and charm them into carrying their load for them. Women will sleep with their superiors to earn a better fitness report. These are things that have happened, do happen, and will continue to happen. As we've seen in the past, training standards are flexible. Once we enact a policy (such as the new Marine PFT for women) the standards will be adjusted to meet the required outcome. That's just politics. I can see only one real reason to integrate combat units, it's not a manpower shortage it's to feel better about ourselves.
There are many roles in the armed services that women are just as qualified at. Allowing women to join was the right decision, allowing them into combat arms is not. They are less capable, and their inclusion will undermine the performance of men in the field.
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If a soldier ignores his orders and training to play the White Knight to protect his gender- challenged teammate, he deserves to get killed, sorry.
Plus, the Israelis don't seem to have had much problems with this crap...Maybe they are simply made of sterner stuff than you Yanks?
So what you're saying is that US troops are poorly trained, and can't be relied upon to follow orders, so they'll have problems not seen by the British, Israeli it Russian armed forces?
Allowing women to join was the right decision, allowing them into combat arms is not.
They can...
Peel spuds
Type
Swab Decks
Cook
Clean Laundry
Sharpen the weapons
Fetch coffee/sammiches
Reload the guns
Sweep/vacuum/wax/polish floors
Keep quiet
Clean toilets
Sew up the bullet holes in uniforms
Do all this for less money...
As long as they know their place.
To paraphrase 'G.I. Jane': "If a soldier rescues a man, he gets called a hero. If a soldier rescues a woman, he gets called soft."
P.S. How is it going, everyone? I've been commenting hardly at hall for the past month (been busy with Honours thesis). Have I missed out on any tasty quotes?
Very few women are convicted, or even suspected, of rape. If it's rape you're worried about, bar the men!
There are many kinds of strength, stupid. It takes an hideous amount of strength (and wear and tear) to give birth to a child, for example. Smaller bodies may be more wiry, and some men have smaller bodies than some women. Women will go to great length to protect their children, an even stronger instinct.
So, men have never turned sex to their advantage? That's hilarious! Men will flirt with their peers and charm them into cooking and cleaning for them.
This reminds me of Elayne Boosler's joke: "We have women in the military, but they don't put us in the front lines. They don't know if we can fight, if we can kill. I think we can. All the general has to do is walk over to the women and say, 'You see the enemy over there? They say you look fat in those uniforms.'"
Any woman who can carry a two-year-old while juggling a couple grocery bags, a purse, and a keychain is capable of carrying a pack and a weapon.
These gender stereotypes are just sad anymore; I've seen a lot of soldiers who aren't any bigger than many women, and they somehow pull it off.
Still denying that men get raped, too.
"When the Defense Department released the results of its anonymous sexual abuse survey this month and concluded that 26,000 service members were victims in fiscal 2012, which ended Sept. 30, an automatic assumption was that most were women. But roughly 14,000 of the victims were male and 12,000 female, according to a scientific survey sample produced by the Pentagon.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/20/victims-of-sex-assaults-in-military-are-mostly-sil/#ixzz306mIcEEF
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There are thousands of reasons to ban humans, no matter what gender, from the battlefield. If humans must fight, then everyone past the age of majority and who desires to do so, should be permitted to do so.
Tell you what: We set up a ring, put you in one corner and put any of the women I trained in the other. If you're capable of walking out under your own power a few minutes later, then you can mouth off about women in combat.
For roles requiring strength, less women than men will succeed. That's plain statistics. I'm OK with that.
Now, for the few women who succeed anyways, where's the problem?
"women will flirt with their peers and charm them into carrying their load for them. Women will sleep with their superiors to earn a better fitness report."
I'd like to see you repeat that in a locked room with a few female soldiers.
yes, men have an instinctive reaction to defend women --- usually, anyway, barring exceptions like sociopaths and such. humans in general have a similar instinctive reaction to not kill other humans; it's what lets us build such remarkably large societies and not wage any more wars than we actually do.
military forces have this gee-nifty way of training people to ignore their instincts and substitute a different set of reactions; they call it "boot camp". biology isn't destiny, and instincts are not implacable forces of nature.
"There are dozens of reasons to bar women from combat roles. There's the risk of sex, rape, and pregnancy."
I didn't realize our enemies were shooting sperm-loaded bullets.
Women on the battlefield isn't really anything new. For how much people like to talk about WW2 they sure do hate to remember things like brutally effective Russian women with sniper rifles, or how the French Resistance wasn't a bunch of pansies that rolled over with the government, and that the Allies were only marginally less racist than the Axis.
Most of that shit you said about women was used as arguments against black men being in the army. It was bullshit then too.
So you think a woman who entered the military knowing full well her job entails being regularly shot at will bat her eyelashes and ask the new recruit to carry her books like a cheerleader from a horribly outdated high school movie and sleep her way to better grades? Well, somebody can't get over their awkward teen years.
> The USSR did not seem to have a problem with that kind of things. Some of their sniper had higher body counts than most male soldiers in the USA.
Only during World War II. Afterwards, only men served.
@ Unbeliever
I'm sure someone will letthese women in on the joke that they're not actually in the army and they've just been marching around with assault rifles in enemy territory for no reason. And of course, Nikolai Pankov just forgot to shout April Fool's! when he made a call for more women to enlist in January. Also he forgot April Fool's is in April.
There are women in Israel's IDF, as part of their National Service. Some decide to go career.
Can you Say 'Krav Maga'? I know you can.
@ Unbeliever
@#1660063:
Are we talking about USSR or Russia?
Considering the first photo is dated for 2009 and Pankov, currently Deputy Defense Minister for the Russian Federation, made that appeal in January of this year what do you think? You said from WW2 onwards not from WW2 to the collapse of the Soviet Union, so don't try to backpedal and claim you were only pointing out temporary shifts in policy.
That entire site. WTF.
I am ashamed to know that any of those people call themselves gamers.
They're obviously the ones that gave us the "basement-dwelling, unwashed troll" stereotype.
Pointing out that they stopped only to restart because barring women from service was an incredibly stupid idea as a rebuttal to an example of effective female service to a military that didn't at the time have their collective heads up their asses serves what purpose exactly? Oh, and by the way women still served as officers after being shooed out of frontline roles, so no it still wasn't "just men" that served.
You know what, never mind. Say what you like.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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