Women in Combat? Why?

Oh sure, nothing is more honorable than sending women into battle so men who would otherwise take their places can stay home.

 

Armies tend to have 3 elements: Infantry, Shock, and Fire Support.
They're required to keep and hold ground and do most of the actual fighting.

That's been true for centuries, even with technological advancements, and it's true today.

Since the crux of the argument concerns the inclusion of women in these
3 elements, primarily infantry. The real question is whether women can do the job,
not the importance of infantry itself. The importance of infantry is an established fact.

Historically, we can look at examples...like the Soviet Union in WWII, wherein women
did indeed serve in the 3 elements of infantry, shock and fire support and did so competently.
Out of manpower necessity, women were included in direct ground combat.

The United States has never been in a position requiring both men and women
in direct ground combat. Whether it's conscripting able bodied males or the current all-voluntary military,
the services have been able to meet manpower needs which fill the ranks of infantry, shock and fire support.
Regardless of this lack of historical precedent specific to the U.S.,
it's still not a bad idea to have females as an inclusionary part of infantry training.
For no other reason than a safeguard should they be required.

All scenarios should be evaluated and planned for, and given an all-voluntary military...
all resources should be utilized to their full capacities.

Make the most of what you have, and cross-train personnel.

Everyone in the ground forces should have basic combat skills, regardless of their primary occupation;
and commanders shouldn't be hesitant to use this resource should the need arise. Congress needs to repeal
the ban on women serving in direct ground combat to accomplish this.

 

OH, by the way, BEFORE the push to Baghdad, a LRS unit, or an SOF unit was there first gathering intel...

 

Even in WW2 very few Soviet women actually served as front line infantry. The majority of them were used a marksmen (very different from modern snipers), anti aircraft gunners, medics, and in 2nd line defensive positions. They certainly contributed A LOT, but there weren't thousands of female Infantry doing movement to contacts against front line German troops.

I definitely agree about basic infantry skills being taught to females. As I said in an earlier post I know the Marine Corps does a decent job at it. I believe that the Army also does as well.

 

Yep, Marine Recon Units and Light Armored Recon units, all classified as Infantry, led Marine advances throughout Iraq. HBO made a series based on a Recon unit during the invasion. The Army used similar units.

 

Exactly, but for some reason why do I think that will be "debunked"?

 

As you can see, from all that info, Every armored units uses an infantry unit for support, even if sometimes those units are a hundred or thousand miles away, as our infantry support was, when I was in Nam.
Oh, and yes, the MAIN element, armor is supported by supporting/minor elements - infantry.

 

You may also want to add the portion about how the Soviets began to motivate their front line Soldiers in the end - by allowing them free access to conqured villages for rape - a process that culminated in the rape of Berlin.

What do you think Soviet troops would have done in those units with intergrated women?

 

You are the one with no idea of the possibilities of the main gun on even the tanks I used in Nam, with a simple 90mm. It had a direct fire range of 3600 meters and could hit by indirect fire over 12 miles away. The modern tank may or may not be limited to 4000 meters direct fire--which as you apparently do NOT know, means basically line of sight. At anything up to 4000 meters which is well over the mile I previously stated--2.5 miles to be a bit closer--a tank today get destroy a man-sized target in one shot, with even just a fair crew.
At 16 miles, a tank using indirect fire--which as you apparently do not know, is using it as if it were noting but an artillery piece it is every bit as accurate as any of the modern mobile artillery.

If you and your two man team are hiding in a ditch and spotted by aircraft and you are withing 16 miles of a tank you can be destroyed, PERIOD. In my day we could destroy you out to 12 miles, but then we had much smaller guns. Back in the day, with a spotter and you behind two hills from us, we (I was on a very good tank) could be dropping WP on you within 5rounds. With the wonderful unmanned flying cameras we have today with 12 different bandwidths of detection, besides visible light, unless you were deeply buried, with no ventilation, you would be dead withing a few moments of being spotted.

 

Even in the 60's there were tactical nukes that could be fired from the 105mm main gun on the M60 tanks, I doubt they have anything less today. And a limited yield nuke will take out a town, or even a small city, and several will take out a much larger city. So, yes, an armored unit is capable of taking out.

Most of my information on armored vehicles is over 40 years old, so I am quite sure that anything we could do then, can be doubled by modern arms. It is unbelievable that a tank today could do anything less than they could 40 years ago.

 

Armor is not necessarily the main element. In fact, there are certain types of terrain where tanks are horrible, like in cities, mountains, jungles, and heavily vegitated areas. In fact, in these areas, you lead with infantry and then use a combined arms approach to defeat the enemy when he reveals his defense. I.e. you pull forward armor, artillery, and air power once you make contact to overwhelm the enemy.

Additionally, tank and infantry formation are tactical units. Infantry and tanks often work together, but a tank unit in combat cannot be supported by an infantry unit thousands of miles away - that premise is simple absurd.

And finally, the issue is less about whether SOME females can do the actual job, it is about whether they should be allowed to do it.

All things are NOT equal between men and women. We are certainly equals as human beings, but there are obvious differences between the sexes. Men and women are equal, but we are also different. If we simply wall paper over the differences, or we wall paper over what happens when you mix boys and girls, then we will bear the consequences. We should not be risking the lives of our young ones for a social expirament without VERY deliberate assessment and mitigation processes.

There are combat jobs that women can do, and do well. Tactical infantry jobs are not one of them. That being said, seinor officer ranks probably need to be changed a bit. Women who do serve in combat position (such as ADA, Engineers, etc.) are often, due to the way that the ranks are structures as is the rise through them, denied top command billets when they become General Officers. By the time any human reaches those levels, age and the simple reality of the job makes physical attributes FAR less important that intellectual ones. To not have females competitive at these tops ranks means we are not competing with our best and brightest. That too means we are risking the lives of our young ones.

 

There were thousands of women soldiers present in Berlin. I actually just read an article about a few women's account of the rape. They said it didn't bother them really because they viewed the Germans as sub-human.

 

I said NOTHING of the contractors fighting staged battles, I said they are doing infantry work, like protecting convoys and defending bases, hmm, or did the infantry give up those things because it is not sexy enough?

Oh, and it is kinda funny, but I just did a Google search for "list of major infantry battles in the invasion of Iraq" and for some reason, I got nothing?

Maybe you could furnish some links to sites about the major infantry battles in Iraq with some kind of time-line? I did find one place at wiki that mentioned a lot of battles and called them Insurgency Operations, could those be what you were speaking of?

 

There aren't many battlefields where you can consistently get 2+ miles of unobstructed visibility. I'm not doubting the accuracy of tanks, I'm doubting their ability to detect Infantry that are dug in and obscured.

You're overestimating the abilities of drones and aircraft. They CAN detect people, but they cannot always distinguish civilains from combatants. It's also possible to hide from night vision and thermal imaging. Also, you're assuming that your armor has air superiority. Drones are pretty easily shot down.

 

There may always be a need, however minor for the infantry. But as valuable as the "recon' and intel gathering was, I am sure that there were other sources (than the infantry) that were equally as important, things like Air recon and satellite images. Oh and I hear that even then they used the pilot-less cameras a lot. But of course, we HAD to have the infantry (riding around in armored vehicles) to do it all.

 

I'd like to see the article, because that doesn't make any sense.

 

Base and convoy protection isn't generally the Infantry's job. It's kind of a whoever's there type of job. Today in the military Motor-T, supply, and often engineers go out for convoy protection. Base protection can really depend. The large bases are usually protected by a whole mix of specialties. Each unit is often expected to send X amount of bodies for protection. The small battle positions and OPs on the other hand are usually guarded by infantry. Why use a fully trained and equipped Infantry unit to do something that really only requires basic competencey with crew served weapons and defensive tactics?

I just gave you an entire list of units in the order of battle for the invasion of Iraq that were Infantry units. Look up any of the battles they were involved in and you'll find battles that involved infantry. The specific battles I listed earlier are ones in which it was mostly infantry. They were urban battles, bottlenecks, or bridges that had to be assault with Infantry. Basra is also a great example, the old section of the unit was inaccessible by vehicles and had to be taken by British Infantry.

Also, don't forget that today many infantry units operate with vehicles.

 

How on earth would it not make sense? The Eastern front was incredibly brutal. For the majority of that campaign there were NO prisoners.

From a female soviet telephone operator:

.

Svetlana Aleksievich, War’s Unwomanly Face, Moscow : Vremja publishers, 2008, ISBN 978-5-9691-0331-3

 

They were not in the front lines.

Had they been, when the policy of rape started ... they too would have been raped.

War is a nasty business, but the short term effects of allowing rape spurred the front line Soldiers for a time, as such actions always do, and as they did in Berlin, it was not long before good order and discipline broke down systemically.

I wonder how those Soviet women feel about it now? KNowing that most of the men who returned from the War were now rapists? Their husbands, their sons, their brothers.

This is not to say that women will cause or prevent rape (that is clearly a leadership issue), but war is nasty business, and it would be good to think it through BEFORE we simply toss women into the middle of it.

For example, if we allow women to serve in combat units - do we need to amend selective service to include women as well? There is now no reason to exclude them, correct?

 

You'll never get better intelligence than by what's provided by boots on the ground. My unit used to get called out constantly to investigate things because some Air Force guy in Arizona thought he saw something from 2000 feet with his drone. At least half the time they were completely wrong. Of course it was great to have them around, but they were not substitute for human eyes.

 

Great. Now think Vietnam and Afghanistan - were tanks are few and far between. They are there, but they are definitely not the main thrust.

 

There were definitely women in 2nd line units that were within Berlin during the battle/immediately following its aftermath. I just provided a quote from one such woman.

I generally agree with your statements about women in the Infantry though.

 

That's what I've been trying to get across to this guy. He says he was a tanker in Vietnam.....so he should REALLY understand this. For some reason he doesn't though. He claims that the Infantry supported HIM and not the other way around.

 

Sometimes these things are not about facts or even what is best. I am sure he was surrounded by infantrymen in Vietnam, because, quite simply given the terrain, if they were not there, he would be dead.

Whether that means he was 'supported' by the infantry, or simply waiting to bring the main gun to bear when the infantry needed it is obviously not something he was a level high enough to determine. That said, he served honorably and deserves our thanks for it.

Tanks have a place on the modern battlefield, and, in places like Marja, when the Stryker Mobile Gun System (think wheeled tank) and started blasting away, the Taliban want nothing to do with it anymore.

As an interesting aside, a friend of mine was a tank company commander in Norway, and his best gunner was a butch lesbian. They have not been to combat though ....

 

You do know that immediately before the invasion of falujah, there were Force Recon teams and Seal teams shaping the battlefield to knock down resistance for foot soldiers on their way in....right? Yes, they had tanks, but a tank can only do so much. Once they got in, boots on the ground started going house to house, building to building and doin their thing....