I have a question regarding women in the military...

[Solon]

OK, first off, I want to say that I oppose the draft, since I'm at the upper-age for it as of now I have little to worry from it, but I see a lot of speculation about the possibility of women being drafted. Almost all of the speculation revolves around the idea that most of the women would be in supporting roles, it seems that many here are opposed to women being in combat roles, why?

[FireHeart]

1. Pretty good question.

My spouse is a 22 year Navy veteran. She was always angry about not being allowed to serve as she wanted to serve. My daughter is an Army veteran, got both sharpshooter and marksman medals. While this is not unusual, her instructor told me ( and I quote ) "if women were allowed combat duty, I'd have put her up for sniper". Yes, she was that good.

The thing is...men are *always* assumed to be combat capable, while women are *always* assumed be "not able to carry the load".

The answer is simple. If you can, you should be allowed to do. If you can't (male or female) then you shouldn't. That's the bottom line.

[Solon]

2. I agree...

I have heard the arguements before, that women are not "strong enough" (like guys are expected to lift 500 lbs. to pass boot.), I know plenty of women who are more than capable of "carrying the load" its more endurance and the will to fight than anything else. As far as will to fight, my best friend put me to shame in a wrestling match, (I weigh 200 she 110) and I am not ashamed of it either, (women fight dirty ;)). Don't get me started on my sister either (born warrior I swear :))

[TahitiNut]

11. I agree. In addition, ...

... there's a reason not often spoken about: Combat experience ("getting your ticket punched") is the key to advanced promotions and the "boy's club" deesn't want to have many women at the top ranks and share the power. What general officers (scrambled eggs, flags) are female are typically in administrative command roles, almost never field commands. Authoritarianism in a paternalistic culture is like that. :shrug:

[FireHeart]

13. Absolutely

These keys to promotion are automatically (in general) removed from women's grasp. No matter how dedicated or deserving, they will NOT get the upper echeleon promotions unless they have combat training/experience.

Which, of course, they aren't allowed to obtain. Talk about a Glass ceiling. In this case, it's armored glass.

:(

[CoffeePlease1947]

3. I support the draft and women too, and the disabled.

I know this sounds radical. But I think women are just as able of serving in the military as men. Second, 9/10 of military positions are support positions. So someone that has a disability can serve in other areas besides actual combat.

I support the draft because it forces the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful to think about if the war is worth the cost of the lives of one or more of their sons and daughters. You honestly think that Bush would go to war in Iraqi if one of his daughters had to go? I doubt it. We would only risk lives when we had to in just and honorable wars that really defended the country from harm.

I understand not all people can fight, but they can do laundry work a radio, or boil some hot water for the tea. I also think that all people that truly believe in defending the rights of all Americans would be willing to fight in a war like WWII.

Mike

[Solon]

4. For myself I would agree

With no limitations on what position is served besides ability and availability, but by choice only. I couldn't support any draft that has exceptions to it, it is not fair and would put a pinch on all that are forced to serve. The only exceptions are the mentally disabled (obvious) and children (also obvious).

[Skittles]

5. Honestly, until wormen are fairly represented in govenment

and have the ability to PREVENT WARS, men should fight the wars they start. And I am a VETERAN

[Man_in_the_Moon]

6. Erm

I wouldnt assume that women being represented in government will prevent wars.

[Devils Advocate NZ]

7. There is a very good reason why women are not usually allowed in combat...

but it may not be the reason you have heard:

The problem is that males have this instinctual desire to "protect" females. The first manifestation of this desire is not wanting to put women in harms way in the first place - that is, keep them out of combat.

The second way this manifests is that male leaders would be less likely to give orders to female soldiers that are almost certain to get them killed. They would for instance given the choice of a male soldier and a female soldier, be more likely to order the male to attack a machine gun post.

Finally, in an attack, the male soldiers would take greater risks to save females, and would bunch up in an unconcious effort to protect the females.

This is not about female weaknesses but male weaknesses. I can't emphasise that enough. It is not that females are no good at combat, but that males have a tendancy to endanger the mission to protect females.

Females do just fine in combat, but under one special condition that the Soviets in WWII discovered: They put female troops into all female battalions - everyone from the lowliest private to the commanding officer was female. This prevented the "protect" instincts from kicking in and thus these all female battalians became some of the best formations the Soviets had.

In other words, mixing males and females in combat formations has the effect of causing males to act in ways that are detrimental to the success of operations and can cause more soldiers to be killed than otherwise would be the case.

Just wanting it to be so can not make this fact change, it is an instinctual reaction of males (well most of them that is), and as combat has a way of reducing people to their instinctual level, is nearly impossible to overcome.

I would have no problem with females in combat, but to be there, I believe they would have to be in all female units.

[FireHeart]

8. Say WHAT?

"The problem is that males have this instinctual desire to "protect" females. The first manifestation of this desire is not wanting to put women in harms way in the first place - that is, keep them out of combat."

You have got to be kidding. Consider the mass graves in Bosnia, etc. The Holocaust. The Rape of the Sabine women. The list is endless.

I see no "instinctual desire" to protect anyone. You go and tell your hypothesis to all the graves of women in this country alone. Tell them how the men who butchered them had an "instinct" to protect them.

Hogwash. Men used to kill women for trying to learn weaponscraft. In many American Indian tribes, even TOUCHING a male's weapons was a death sentence. Same in Europe and elsewhere. Women were not permitted to learn to defend themselves. Tell me, how many of those graves would be filled if they had been taught to protect themselves?

There are a lot of vets on the DU. Let me ask you, who would you want on your flank? Two women who worked their asses off to prove themselves worthy of combat, or two men, nursing the "conscript syndrome" (not wanting to be there, not wanting to carry the load).

If you had a choice...whom?

However...I do agree that all female units, especially fast attack and withdraw units, would be very efficient. I am also in favor of all female submarine units and so-on. But not because of any belief in an "instinct". Just because they would be more efficient.

Edited for content.

[waggawagga]

9. No, He's Probably Right

The Israelis studied the possibility of including women in combat roles and decided against it when men did start behaving the way he's talking about. I also don't think he's relating the history of the Red Army accurately. Women absolutely did serve in their military but there was never (so far as I'm aware) infantry units composed only of women. In the army they served in support roles (many of them crucial and many which did involve exposure to combat). Some women also served in the air force as combat pilots (and apparantly were very successful at this). Throughout the history of warfare, though, there's really no example of women serving as infantry where this worked (which doesn't mean it's not possible but one shouldn't think this precedent exists).

I think the previous poster is also glossing over that women, here not talking about individuals but as a group, might have their own instincts which could make their integration into ground combat units difficult. After reading the full report of what happened when the 507th Maintenance Co. was ambused in Nasiriyah (this was an integrated unit) the impression I got was that the small groups where women were involved were more likely to make critical mistakes (the traffic accident) or surrender quickly. A basic instinct which has to be shaped for people to become soldiers is fight or flight. Are women more likely to flee from danger? This is the companion to the male instinct which makes them protective of women: a man fights while a woman grabs the kids and runs away. You're talking about something very basic in human beings. In fairness the members of the 507th Maintenance Co. weren't really trained as combat soldiers. But this incident is interesting several of the male soldiers did put up a "Custer's Last Stand" level of resistance (some of whom surrendered, survived, and were decorated) while the one woman who surrendered apparantly did so right away (along with the group of male soldiers who were with her).

There's no doubt in my mind that there are women who have the toughness and ethic to be "warriors" (which is what we're talking about, there's no point sugar coating this). It's also true that many combat roles today don't involve any requirement to serve as infantry (which is consistent, again, with how the Red Army and the IDF used women soldiers, as signals troops, support for artillery, and so on, roles which didn't require the actual soldiering of rifles but still put you near the front lines). If the story of the 507th Maintenance Co. showed anything, though, it's that such units can easily become part of the front lines.

Integrated ground combat units as a general, though? Or even segregated units with women only? My gut feeling, this will never happen, and for the reasons discussed above. However impolitic this might be if these instincts exist there's probably no level of training which would enable the military to neutralize them. Unit cohesion in combat (how soldiers act together as a group) is incomparably more important than how a soldier might act as an individual.

Lastly, and this might sound impolitic as well, how would the volunteer military deal with the problem of mothers in combat? Many soldiers today are parents. I can't remember where I read this, it might go back to the studies Israelis did, but a female soldier who was sympathetic to the idea of women in combat suggested that single women w/o kids could probably do the job of combat infantry but she thought mothers couldn't because a woman's instincts at this stage of her life were so vastly different (both in terms of her ability to be violent and her desire to survive). That sounds right to me.

[Lexingtonian]

17. It's simpler than that

Basically, males are substantially more dispensible. If 50% of the age-15-to-40 males of a society get killed or wounded in warfare, it's a bad thing but the society continues on and makes up the numbers in the next generation. If 50% of the women of childbearing age get killed there's pretty inevitable catastrophic shrinkage of the population and much greater problems dealing with orphans, family breakups, and such. If the warfare stretches out over more than one generation with that proportion of its women killed it sends the society into tailspin and into demographic catastrophe.

The Iroquois tribes are a pretty good case study in this- they survived centuries of intramural warfare where male casualty figures were greater than 50% per generation by becoming matrilineal. But the smallpox epidemic of 1632 among the Mohawk drastically reduced them by killing many childbearing age women. They had a baby boom in 1633, btw, but it took several generations for tribe to recover from that trauma and others (removal from their lands during/just after the War of Independence) that followed.

(Gruesome alert- sensitive readers should skip the next paragraph)




Secondly, my parents have an acquaintance who was in the 'military' SS. Most of his unit's missions were in rear areas of the Russian front, hunt downs of raiding partizans -Russian guerilla and infiltrator units- in the Pripet Marshes. One of the missions put them on the track of an all-female sniper/saboteur unit which they eventually cornered and annihilated to the last woman. He says they were on the whole considered better shots than the male snipers- but couldn't march as fast and died a lot faster from typical small arms wounds than men, and despite training were certainly no matches at the hand-to-hand level with veterans such as his troop. His unit quickly learned to exploit their opponents' lesser capabilities at marching and throwing- they wounded (and thereupon or thereby eventually killed) most of them with small slews of hand grenades thrown from behind fallen trees and such at fifty yards or so distance where they were not in much danger from the same. Zero chivalry there- or much of elsewhere on that front. And if wounded so as to serious bleed while having menses (the Pill wasn't yet developed) women almost invariably died- meaning a 10-15% chance of lethality for them from otherwise merely incapacitating wounds. It was the combat mission that this old man finds emotionally hardest to deal with in retrospect. And he thinks, among more semi-chauvinistic things, that their command gave them a death sentence by putting that unit in the unsupported situation- at such gross tactical disadvantage- that they did.

So I'm not much for putting more than a few willing and knowledgeable women into front line combat. Young men are supposed to do the dying that it takes, and for good reason.

And a quibble with the clause-
woman's instincts at this stage of her life were so vastly different

I'm for replacing "instincts" in that sentence with "priorities"- it's not innate, it's a result of change in social role.

[Solon]

18. Problem isn't instinct

so much as culture. To be honest the differences between learned behavior and instinctual behavior is a gray area. It is ridiculous to pin certain male or female characteristics as instinctual simply because they are prevasive. I doubt our instincts extend much beyond eating, sleeping, fucking, and shitting. Even if instincual, they can be conditioned out. I think that paternalistic behavior on men, and the "flee over flight" behavior of women are learned. What about women in the old west, they were far flung, and addition, more times than not, on their own. They learned to defend themselves, whether from native tribes, or miscreant "cowboys", and defended themselves viciously in some cases. Is it any surprise that the first states to allow women sufferage were in the west? Necessity rules first and foremost, and human are much more flexible and resiliant than most even know about. We should never limit ourselves to certain roles due to some perceived biological reasoning, but move beyond them. Hell even the division between the sexes is not exactly cut and dried.

[Devils Advocate NZ]

27. It is definately instinctual.

You just have to look at the pervasiveness of this particular instinct - we are not the only animals that have it. From lions to chimps, this instinct is one of the most basic of all social animals.

You could argue that without this particular instinct, evolution couldn't have occured, becuase it is the basis of natural selection. When we talk about the strongest surviving one of the base reasons for this is the ability to ensure that your genes spread, and competing genes die out. This is accomplished among other things by battling competing groups, and either killing the females or taking them into your group. Thus the weaker male genes (the ones that lost the battle) no longer spread, and the stronger male genes spread further.

Every time you watch two males of any species fighting for the right to mate with a female, you are watching this instinct in action. The male that is already paired to the female is "protecting" her, while the unattached male is trying to seize her.

This is no different to what I am talking about. It manifests itself differently for us, and we don't even necessarily realise that we are doing it, but there is always that element in play.

[Devils Advocate NZ]

24. My mistake - wrong war.

The all female combat units were formed in the First World War, just before the Russian Revolution. One of them first fought the Germans, and then when the revolution really got going fought against the Communists.

My previous post was based on memory, and when you called me on my error I went to google to see where I had gone wrong. Here is a sample of what I found:

Maria Bochkareva, the third daughter of a peasant family, was born in Tomsk, Siberia in 1889. Badly beaten by her alcoholic father, she left home at fifteen to marry Afansi Bochkareva. The couple moved to Tomsk, Siberia where they worked as labourers on a construction site. A good organiser, Maria eventually became foreman of a team of 25 male workers.

<SNIP>

Over the next three years Maria was wounded twice and decorated three times for bravery. In May 1917, Maria persuaded Alexander Kerensky, the country's new leader, to allow her to form a Women's Battalion. Initially Maria had 2,000 women under her command, but after fighting for three months on the front-line, numbers had fallen to 250.

On 25th October, Bochkareva and the few remaining members of the Women's Battalion attempted to defend the Winter Palace against Bolshevik forces. After the defeat of Kerensky's government, Maria Bochkareva fled to the United States. Her memoirs, Yashka, My Life, was published in 1939.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWbochkareva.htm

As for the female "flight" instinct you refer to, I disagree. Females were always the last line of defense, and thus were the most tenacious fighters - if they fail, the entire tribe (family, or other grouping) falls. If you read the last paragraph above, you will see that this Womens Battalion fought until the very end - I am sure many men had run away by then.

As for your reference to the 507th, I disagree with your interpretation of that. Yes some males put up a foolhardy "last stand", but how much of that was due to the "protect" instinct I am talking about? As for the female who surrendered, you point to the fact that there were males who also surrendered at the same time. This shows that the situation they were in was hopeless, and that even a "last stand" was pointless - the men gave up just as quick as the woman, so this incident is irrelevant.

Basically, you are saying "women can't fight as well as men" which I TOTALLY DISAGREE with. What I am saying is that MEN can't fight effeciently in the same units as women because their instincts change from "kill the enemy" to "protect the women". I am not saying women NEED protection, they don't. What I am saying is that women can't rely on men to treat them as just another guy in combat, and this could get them all killed.

Thus I say women can and should be in combat, but in all female units, but the prevailing attitude amongst militaries around the world is that women should be intergrated into male units, thus causing the problems that they then point to as reasons for not having women in combat.

[Nevernose]

26. The Red Army did indeed have all-women combat units

A photo of the WWI-era "Women's Death Battalion":



http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wdeath.htm

[Devils Advocate NZ]

22. You are talking about a different instinct

In all the cases you refer to it is a case of raping ENEMY women. That is the flipside of the protect instinct - you want to "protect" women on your side (to ensure the next generation) and mate with or kill the women on the enemy's side (to prevent the next enemy generation). Did you know that some male animals rape females from competeing familial groups? It's the same thing. These males are instinctually trying to ensure that their genes spread while competing genes die out.

Another aspect is that one male can impregnate many females, and thus a populatation can sustain far greater losses of males than females. Over millions of years this has turned into an instinctual "save ours, kill theirs" mentality.

Of course, not ALL males have this instinct, but they are merely the exceptions that prove the rule. Just like most women won't harm their babies, most men won't harm women (who are not their enemy). Yet some women do harm their babies, and some men do harm women who are on their side, so to speak.

Where do you think things like "Women and children first" come from? Did prehistoric man just decide one day "Hey this female, while good for sex, is pretty useless. I know I'll treat her as something to be treasured and protected!"

Of course not. Males protected females because they were MORE HIGHLY VALUED than males. If they weren't, then there would be no need to protect them, after all what would they be losing?

As time went on, and humanity evolved, this instinct became more and more unnecessary. Weapons allowed a women to be just as effective in combat as men, and their own instincts and physical and mental strengths make them well suited to modern combat.

Also as time went on, some men came to see women not as highly valued and thus in "need" of protection, but because of their "need" for protection that they must be weak. Many of these men rose to prominence in religion and politics, and thus we have the world we have today, where the values have been flipped upside down.

Women are better leaders, and can be just as ruthless (if not more so) than men. From Queen Boudica and Joan of Arc to Margret Thatcher, women have long fulfilled wartime leadersip status as well if not better than men.

You can deny the existence of instinct as much as you want, but we are essentially animals. We have too have instincts that developed over millions of years starting even before we began walking upright. The only difference is that we now have the ability to ignore our instincts (even though this often gets us into trouble). Just because we have them doesn't mean we will follow them, but as I said, combat can revert people to their instinctual nature, and thus we are more likely to follow them under such extreme conditions.

It is a silly religious notion that we are somehow different from the rest of the animals - we aren't, and that belief comes from the same place as the belief that women are the "weaker sex".

[Clete]

10. I find your argument chauvinistic and untrue.

Men only have an instinct to protect young, unattached women they think they have a chance of scoring with. Trust me I know. No one is ever trying to protect me a gray haired old woman. My son-in-law absolutely ignores me shoving wheel barrows full of rocks, where I could use a hand. There is no instinct there to protect or help.:-)

Also, go back in history to the Spartans. Spartan warriors were encouraged to have homosexual liasons with other warriors, because it was believed they would fight harder to protect their lover. Couldn't it work this way with women than the other way, too? Better fighters maybe? Also, the Greeks in their literature had no problem with killing and ravaging Amazons when they were the enemy. Being women had nothing to do with it.

[Devils Advocate NZ]

28. Actually, sad to say its true.

Which is what makes it an instinct. Males protect females because they are valued as mates. This value comes from the ability to procreate. Once the ability is gone, then the value diminishes, instinctually speaking. Instincts aren't "politically correct" they are based on evolution - in particular natural selection.

But don't be disheartened, old males aren't valued either, because they can no longer protect the females against younger males.

As for the Spartans, you are essentially correct - with primitive weapons such as swords clubs and spears there is an advantage to this "protect" instinct, which is why it developed in the first place.

But modern combat conditions are very different. What worked well in the past to protect, now merely makes you a juicier target. For example the insticutal reaction is for the males to keep the females close together and surround them. When you are talking about hand to hand combat, this protects the females from most of the attack. In modern combat this is merely a bullseye for heavy artillery. The more tightly grouped a formation is, the easier it is to kill every last one of them.

That is why trench warfare is out of date. Thousands upon thousands of Iraqi's in the first Gulf war were slaughtered because of tight groupings of trenches that (in the old style of fighting) were impenetrably strong. But with modern weapons all this did was make it EASIER to kill them all.

So comparing the Spartans to modern combat is wrong. The Spartans today would be slaughtered if they used the tactics they used then.

As for killing enemy women, I explained this in full in another post above, but I will just say that this is the same instinct reversed - "protect women on our side, kill or capture women on their side". Its just natural selection at work.

[oldcoot]

12. It is about status and not protection

The real reason that women are not allowed in combat roles is to protect men's status in society. It is not to protect women. While some men may express a desire to protect women, this desire is learned and not instinctual. As other posters have already pointed out, men have had no problem slaughtering and raping women during a time of war. Even in peacetime, women are frequently the victims of violent crimes. Husbands, who should have an instinctive desire to protect their wives, frequently abuse and kill them. In the Middle East, female rape victims are sometimes murdered by their fathers and brothers for bringing "dishonor" to the family. Where are their protective instincts?

Most people also have no problem with women working in dangerous jobs as long as they are low paying and low status. For example, one of the most dangerous jobs is that of a convenience store clerk. I have heard of many cases where male and female convenience store clerks were murdered. Yet I have never heard a single male politician or community leader demand that convenience stores stop hiring women to work as clerks. Why is that? Are the women who work in convenience stores any less womanly than the women who join the military?

However, many do fear women entering dangerous occupations if those occupations are traditionally male occupations. Women who enter male dominated fields such as police work or join the military experience sexual and verbal harassment. The purpose of this harassment is to "keep women in their place" and not to protect them. The idea that a woman can do a job as well as a man is still a threatening idea to some men. A woman who has seen combat also might be less likely to tolerate a subordinate role in society.

[CoffeePlease1947]

14. Fine, make gays and lesbians the officers, and man and women under them.

This would solve the over male protection. J/K of course.

Mike

[TahitiNut]

19. Nonsense.

As a Vietnam vet, I agree with Clete and oldcoot. The same people who spout this nonsense are among the first to call for lynching Calley and decry the killing of women (VC) in 'nam -- without ever associating the two. The VC and its combat command structure was about 40-45% female. Sure as hell didn't slow them down.

This myth is paternalistic nonsense (too many John Wayne movies?) and has nothing to do with behavior in combat. The predominant reason, in the "moment," troops fight courageously in combat is their 'fraternal' attitudes towards their buddies/comrades. Combat isn't when guys think grand global political thoughts. It's about "standing up for your buddy" and "taking his six". It's no different when the 'buddy' is female, but adherents to this mythology would have us believe it's so. Nonsense. :eyes:

[Devils Advocate NZ]

30. Not at all.

The killing of enemy women is the flipside of the "protect" instinct. You try to protect your females, while trying to kill off or capture the enemy's females. Instinct is not "politically correct", it is based on millions of years of evolution.

As for the VC, can I ask you how many VC were killed in comparison to US soldiers? 10 to 1? 20 to 1?

I am not talking about women "slowing down" the men, what I am talking about is modern infantry tactics compared to the instictual tactics devleoped over the millions of years when humans and their ancestors didn't have heavy artillery etc.

Males instincts cause us to try and protect females, one of the ways we do that is by sticking close to them. Sticking close to your buddy is all well and good, but seperation ensures that if an artillery shell falls, one of you will have a chance to survive.

That is why the infantry teaches proper seperation. Amongst males, this works because their is little or no instictual imperative for one male to remain close to another male. However this is different when you talk about a male and a female.

On a purely cold-hearted level, sticking close to your buddy (whether they be male or female) is bad infantry tactics. All it does is make it easier for the enemy to kill both of you.

But I am sure you know that, becuase you would have gone through the same kind of training I did. I merely say this for those who don't understand basic infantry tactics in modern warfare.

[Nobody]

20. The protection racket

Devil's Advocate NZ says "The problem is that males have this instinctual desire to "protect" females. "

As another poster pointed out, history refutes that. Women have been "protected" to the point of being unable to protect themselves. Women have also been "protected" by law from higher paying 3rd shifts at jobs until these laws were repealed. Women have been "protected" from suffrage until the 19th Amendment was passed. I read some of the arguments against and they were all about "protecting" a woman's femininity. As if one of her X chromosomes would break off and become a Y by voting.

I don't want to be "protected". I'd much prefer to have the means to protect myself.

This is not to say that all women should serve in combat roles. But any woman who has the qualifications - and having a Y chromosome is NOT a qualification - should be able to serve.

"Protecting" a woman from combat roles has resulted in women being unable to shoot back when fired upon in real life wartime situations. The first Gulf War, Grenada, and I'm sure there were other instances where the enemy front broke through the front lines.

[Devils Advocate NZ]

29. Forget "history" we are talking about evolution here..

The history that you refer to is mans mind overriding mans instincts.

And where in my post did I say that women NEED to be protected? I didn't, and I explained more fully in other posts above. Women don't NEED to be protected, men NEED to try to protect. There is a difference. I am not talking about female capabilities, but about male failings when it comes to modern combat.

And your last paragraph is actually an agreement with what I am saying - this need (instinct) to protect females is actually a detriment when it comes to modern combat and is more likely to get them killed.

Let me make this as clear as I can - I am NOT saying women shouldn't be in combat, I am saying the reason women have been kept out of combat is based on an instinctual reaction in men.

First, men try to keep women away from combat.

Second, once in combat, men do things that endangers everyone, male and female, in an instinctual attempt to "protect" (even thought it doesn't which is why I put protect in quotes) women.

Thus, to overcome this failure of men, women should not be put into combat in mixed sex units - they can't trust men to do their job right. Women should be in all female combat units where this instinct will not come into the equation and thus they will be able to fight just as effectively as men, if not moreso.

There have been very few examples of this, but when it happens (as I described in other posts) it works. But the militaries that do put women in combat units try to integrate them into male units and the end result is usually far from satisfactory, which is then an excuse to keep women out of combat.

So women should not be campaigning to be allowed into male units - this is self defeating - they should be campaigning to be allowed to form all female units, which will be successful, as proven by the Russian Women's Battalion of Death in WWI.

[kaitykaity]

15. As a female veteran, from cushy duty in

heidelberg during the cold war, let me answer
your question with one word.

Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex.

If the women are in the foxholes, there will be
a hole lot of scr&wing going on and not a whole
lot of fighting.

Period.

[Spentastic]

16. Cool

Brilliant solution and I'll join the army.

[TAH6988]

21. The Air Force

has better looking women. :-)

[Spentastic]

25. Can I join all the services

The perks sound good. If everyone is "getting busy" we'll have no time to fight wars.

[OldSoldier]

23. Body strength

It takes more body strength than most women possess to be in the combat arms.

[Spentastic]

31. It could equally be argued

That it takes more mental strength to be president of the United States than most men posess. Didn't stop us men denying women a fair shot at that either.

People should be allowed to do what people can do. Women who pass the bar should qualify.