I was a Gunner’s Mate working in weapons department, we would constantly get these skinny little undesignated seaman chicks (no job/MOS, they do all the deck work – hauling klines, picking rust, painting over it, etc). They never saw us on deck doing anything (because most of our day-to-day was inside the skin of the ship), so they assumed it was a cake job. They would come down and express interest in striking GM, and we would let them start OJT. Once they were doing OJT with us, we would schedule an ammo move or magazine inventory (i.e., take every single can of ammo out of the magazine, count it by lot numbers, and then put it all back). As soon as they had to do something physical, we would never see them again.

During my time in Naval Special Warfare, we had a little bit better time with females at the Teams. They were support (obviously), and were usually pretty motivated to do their job. While there isn’t a support screening/selection process per se, the detailers did a superficial record scrub to try and prevent sending us worthless personnel (of either sex).

While I would have no issue working alongside a Mary, experience tells me that if/when females show up at the Teams as operators, the Mary’s will be few and far between. The vast majority will refuse to disrobe in field conditions (like Mary described), so there will be issues from day one – beside the fact that not a single senior NCO/officer who plans on staying in will tell said woman to do so.

Put two SOC-R’s (riverine special operations craft – YouTube ‘SWCC Jeff’s Boat’) in a three day hide surveilling river traffic in some third world shithole, and you are confined to the 33 x 9 foot area of your boat – usually sacking out right below your assigned gun mount. Once you are in, you don’t get off to go find some privacy for a piss or a dump, everything is done right there next to your brothers.

Consider the result we got from going into Iraq without proper preparation, namely in terms of procuring modern route clearance equipment and up-armoring our rear-area support vehicles. Despite people in the US Army (and, I was one of them…) militating over this pair of issues for years, going back to Somalia and Desert Storm, we did nothing. No preparations for the kind of war we saw coming were made–They didn’t even want to test the South African route clearance gear, but were forced into it by Congress.

We essentially offered up a flank to the enemy. They could not take us on in open battle, and were unable to effectively engage our combat elements. So, they observed, and saw that we were “offering a flank”, in terms of our rear area operations and lack of real route clearance capability.

Thus, they engaged us where we were weak and vulnerable. Had we not offered that flank, and gone into the Iraq war with the right set of vehicles and gear, what then? Would the insurgency have even taken off the way it did? What other vulnerability would they have been forced to address? Would the lack of initial success have discouraged them, and kept them from recruiting as many to their cause as they did?

You offer the enemy up a vulnerability, and make no mistake, creating Infantry forces that have to move at the pace of the slowest woman on the team will be one, and they’ll take advantage of it. Instead of saying “Well, they’re just as good as some of the weaker male Infantrymen…”, we ought, instead, to be tightening up the standards on those weaker males, eliminating them from the Infantry and other ground-pounding units, and enabling superior performance by those units.

War is not a game where you set out from the start to handicap yourself. If you turn it into something like that, the question you ought to ask first is, why?

You are possibly right that we are still building armies designed to repel the Reds. (That is necessary, because little guarantees the coming of the Barbarians more than their belief that you are unprepared.) the point being that we get the argument that women can serve in combat mostly based on the vision of mechanised warfare that permits troops to be ferried into battle and have their equipment and consumables delivered by mechanised means. Chris talks about a woman not habit an issue with carrying her basic combat load of 80pounds. But not about insertion on foot over rough terrain carrying 180pounds (and more).

You talk about “spider holes”, but we are currently fighting people who have looked at “our” mechanised style of warfare and determined that they can avoid defeat by utilising the terrain to defeat machines. If our standard infantry cannot operate in the same conditions as the enemy, then we see offensive operations becoming increasingly the burden place upon our SF. ….. Because they can do this.

You CAN make a doctrine in which your basic infantry are less capable and less flexible, but that means less effectiveness and lost opportunities.

The example that I cite of 180lb loads was a case in point. A high-value opportunity was identified by an infantry unit, but a mechanised insertion was ruled out by conditions and the fact that the enemy intelligence was alert to mechanised movement. Keeping the risk profile of the mission within limits required man-carrying enough supplies and ammunition to fight until relief arrived if they encountered a superior force. The mission was an outstanding success.
Waiting until SF was available would have missed the opportunity.
Troops requiring mechanised insertion could not have done this. Troops that could not cover ther terrain carrying in excess of their own body weight and arrive in condition to fight, could not have done this.

Failure to take advantage of opportunities through diminished capacity means that conflict will be prolonged , more battles lost and potentially the war. That means more of our people dead.

I do t know about you, but I consider that an unacceptable result.

There is nothing more “bankrupting” than losing a major war. Not only do you have to pay your own bills, but you have to deal with dictated conditions under which you are most likely going to have to pay your enemy “reparations” as well.

I’ve got a question for you, Chris: Have you ever served in a unit with significant numbers of women who were not carefully selected or who volunteered for service in specific deployments? In other words, where you’ve had to deal with the good and the bad, not just the exemplary few?

I hear a lot of myself, pre-practical experience with this issue, in your words, ideas, and attitudes. Intellectually, the idea of women in the military has a certain appeal, and you really want the idea to work, as I did. After exposure to reality, in terms of how the institution copes with the varying issues involving women, I have changed my mind. I suspect that if you spent a couple of years dealing with these things where the rubber meets the road out in the line units of the Regular Army, you might change your mind. I know I sure as hell did.

The institution hasn’t quite finished adapting to having to deal with multi-racial servicemembers, and that’s been what? Damn near sixty years? It hasn’t even begun to come to terms with the idea of women in the ranks out in the support branches, where the issues don’t really affect whether or not we can win on the battlefield. I would say that this entire concept is pushing too far, too fast, and that the institution won’t be ready for this crap for another couple of generations, if it ever really is.

If I saw some sign of a grasp on reality in terms of just administrative regulatory practice, I’d probably take a different position on this. The fact that things like motherhood (which, last I looked, was a basic feature of a human woman) aren’t taken into account and dealt with rationally? Yeah, that’s a sign that the entire system isn’t ready for it. Get back to me when someone finally says “Hey… This pregnancy thing? We need to cope with it, and adapt to the fact that it happens, instead of denying it…”.

It doesn’t even need to be that draconian, either–Just tell the young ladies that time served while pregnant and under a limiting profile doesn’t count towards either time in service or promotion. Same-same for some idiot male who goes out and breaks his body doing something stupid off-duty–They’ll get paid, but as long as they’re unfit for duty in their assigned position, the time doesn’t count. And, if some little knucklehead gets herself into a single-parent trap on her first enlistment, and can’t finish her term? She needs to pay back Uncle Sam for every dime spent on her training, period. Just like the male dipshits who desert or “fail to adapt” should.

If you’ve never been in a unit with a fair number of “average women”, you have no idea how disruptive accommodating all these “petty issues” becomes. It’s really fun when you’re trying to conduct support operations that rely on low-density MOS skills, and find out that half your key low-density types are female, and half of those aren’t worth the time or powder to blow them up with.

The problem is, as we both see it, is that it has not done so in the past, and will be highly unlikely to do so in the future. As such, granting these Social Justice types even a toehold in this regard is a huge mistake.

The track record is clear: The institutions here in the US are completely incapable of thinking clearly and rationally about women in the services, and thus are also unable to set common-sense policies about the intrinsic differences between the sexes. Just the issue of pregnancy alone, and how it is handled shows that. Why is it that we allow women in the military the “out” of pregnancy and maternity leaves, while ignoring the very real costs those factors present to unit commanders? Would it not make sense to have policies that would enable the institution to fairly deal with these requirements of nature that are inherent to the female sex?

Why, for example, does time spent on restricted duty for deployment and daily operations still count towards contract time? Pregnancy is not precisely the same thing as someone who is injured on the job, and then unable to deploy; why should the individuals who become pregnant whether by poor foresight, accident, or intent be allowed to count that time that they are militarily useless towards their retirements and/or contract completion?

The system still hasn’t adapted to the idea of women being on active duty like men, and still treats them indulgently, as though they were small children without any responsibility. If males were able to do the things women can do with a pregnancy, we’d have rules in place putting a stop to it. There is no equitable treatment before the law with regards to this–If I were to willfully render myself unfit for a deployment, I’d be charged under the UCMJ. Women? Room is made for them on the rear detachment, and they go on with their careers without a blemish. There aren’t even limits on how often they can pull this shit, over the course of their careers.

We had a real POS of a senior NCO in my unit before OIF I. He’d used the “Sole Surviving Son” regulations to get himself out of a deployment to Korea. When he found that that pretty much stopped his chances of promotion, he got himself removed from that status, only to reach out and grab for it again when we were alerted to go to Iraq in 2003. His career ended right there, as it damn well should have, when the CSM about lost his mind over that BS, and the Colonel backed him up. What was funny as hell about that crap? We had something like four or five females come up pregnant, some in key positions, and not a damn thing was done to them over the same sort of malfeasance. One of them was in a low-density MOS, and was heard discussing the fact that she’d gone off her birth control with the intent of getting pregnant to avoid the deployment. Nothing done, at all–She came down on the SFC promotion list a year or two later, still undeployed. And, with her third kid… Think about that for a second–She does her 20, and retires the same as you or I, and yet was allowed to strategically select three separate occasions where she was unfit for duty or deployment for around a year, with all the pregnancy/maternity BS factored in. So, in effect, she’s getting the same damn deal you worked 20 years for, only at a cost of 17 years of service where she was fit for deployment. Mmmmhmmm… Tell me how that’s either sensible, or fair?

Issues surrounding pregnancy are only one area where they’ve completely dropped the ball when it comes to women in the service. And, I guarantee you that the moment someone moved to address it, they’ll be ending their careers–Because not one person in Congress, or the bureaucracy has the balls to admit that there’s a problem. And, of course, we can’t be seen to be interfering in the little darling’s reproductive rights, now can we?

If we treated women like adults, and not feckless, irresponsible children, you could probably make a lot of things work. We won’t, we can’t, and we’ll never change this side of a truly existential crisis or major defeat. You can bank on that, too…

Yeah. Get back to me about this “girls in the Infantry” about the time they fix everything else with regards to integrating women into the military. Because, until they do, I’m going to continue to hold that they will not, and can not make this work–Not for the men, and not for the women they’re going to try this idiocy out on.