Women in combat (but not really) Vol. III

the guy is just desperately trying to win a debate that he cannot possibly win

 

My dad was in the Merchant Marines and Navy for over 20 years. He served with distinction during WW II in the Pacific (his brother was killed in the European theater), got a couple of medals, and only weighed 125 lbs.

Many of my female athletes who were 5'8" and taller, and weighed over 170 lbs can do the same.

It's the 21st century pal. Times have changed. Get over it.

 

Merchant Mariners and Sailors don't do anything remotely similar to Infantrymen. Telling us your father's military career, which is commendable, has zero bearing on this discussion. I spent 4 years as a Marine Corps infantryman and deployed twice to Iraq. Your dad's war record and your coaching days don't hold a candle to my first hand experience as an Infantryman in a combat zone. It's not about physical size, it's a combination of physical size, strength, endurance, anaerobic capability, and injury avoidance. Are there a tiny tiny minority of women (a lot fewer than you think) that have all these attributes? Sure, but they're so few and far between it makes no economic sense whatsoever to try and find them.

 

Why can't you guys provide evidence of your assertion that there are an unsually high number of gays in the Marine Corps?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvtjYne9his

 

Hilarious video, but it has to be a joke.

Marines were more opposed to repealing DADT than any other branch of the service.

 

There's no question the Marine Corps has both open and closet homosexuals. I don't buy into the silly little snide comments by the previous posters about the Marine Corps having "alot" of gays though. For some reason a certain part of our society loves to try and tear down more "macho" professions by accusing them of fostering a lot of homosexuals. This same portion tends to also claim to be "pro-gay" but the way they brandish homosexuality as some sort of weapon clearly goes against the notion that being gay is just another part of being a human.

 

There was a fighter pilot booted out of the service for being openly gay prior to DADT's repeal.

The government invests millions in pilot training, and at some point it's more cost effective just to keep them in. Now that DADT is repealed, doesn't really matter what anyone's
orientation is. The joke when I was in the service was the Navy attracted the gays, because a boat full of men out at sea for 6 months is a gay man's dream.

The reality is, it's probably spread pretty evenly throughout the military.

 

It is a joke, but I posted it as a sarcastic reply to what's his face in this thread.

Plus a little good nature ribbing

 

You overlooked the fact that my dad's brother was an infantryman though he was killed in the European theater. My other uncle (my mom's brother) was also 125 lbs and served with distinction in Korea. We're rather small in my family but we served our time. I would have done the same if my medical history hadn't prohibited it.

If one cannot do time on the battle field, I suppose it also means in your mind that they shouldn't go up in ranks and command those in positions that they could not accomplish on that battle field.

 

Once again, where does it say 90% of women cannot meet minimal standards of the army's minimal requirements for entry and where is your proof politics has manipulated the standards. All you have shown is stats of female abilities compared to men - nothing about army standards, their minimum and the manipulation of such standards by politicians.

And they should be allowed to join if they so choose.

"Finding" them? Dont they sign up themselves?

What do you mean "dealing with it"?

So women should not have a right to be free of sexual harassment? \

What new program?

Seems your problem is with army structure and its institutions - not women joining. You attribute all these problem to women, but the reality is they are in the army not accepting women, which, if they can meet the standards, which have as yet to show they do not, should be welcomed.

Yep. Until you give evidence otherwise, since it was your claim as to otherwise, I need not change this assumption.

Why will it cost millions of extra dollars? Could you elaborate, since your points earlier were either extremely vague or just straight up absurd.

 

Implying nothing. A lot was not intended or designed to imply there were more - you just over reacted. A slight problem with homosexuals seems to be underpinning your entire line of inquiry. Quite interesting.

Compared to my subjective notion of a lot, meaning many or more than people want to acknowledge, as you seem to evidence. What would it matter if there were only 1 gay or 1000? You can imply anything you want form what I said, but all I meant was that gays are in the marines.

 

Have you read this whole thread?

Look at my post, #113

 

If you are saying the minimum standard for men should be the same for women, that's fine, but it wouldnt change anything I have said, namely that if a women can meet such standards she should enter the infantry.

 

are you saying that naval infantry isn't part of the navy but is part of the department of the navy?

thanks for ruining a mud puppy's life long dream of calling the navy and marines gay at the same time.

 

1)Now your dancing around the issue because you've been proved wrong. I showed statistics where 1 in 130 of women are deemed equal to the AVERAGE male. I also showed information on West Point's physical fitness standards (which are less than Infantry) wth an extremely high number failing. If your going to try and play lawyer games a demand an exact source for 90%, you may as well get out of here now because that's just unreasonable desperation. All the statistics I showed indicated an extremely high failure rate for women. To my knowledge, the much higher Infantry physical fitness standards haven't ever been fully tested with women.....only the lower general fitness tests which women failed miserably on.

2) If you have a process that enables only the fully qualified and capable females to show up at training day 1, I suggest you patent it and then sell it to every military and corporation on planet earth and make a fortune. Incredibly fit, combat experienced men with stellar records routinely show up and fail out of Special Forces training. There's no way you can just pick the "good ones" without weeks and weeks of a selection process. This is why Ranger school, BUDs etc. etc. have high failure rates. Pushing people through these schools costs a lot of money and when a high number of them fail, it's a lost investment, especially for women.

3) When a war starts and a unit has to go overseas to fight, a certain portion of the personel end up staying behind for any number of reasons, including injury, legal hold, administrative issues etc. Women stay behind at a rate 3 times higher than men. This means with women, you're more likely to have huge gaps in your unit than with men. You may not be aware of this, but the military is probably the most team oriented proffesion on earth, when your missing teammembers your less effective, and when your less effective in war, people die.

4) Any time the military implements a new weapon, uniform, regulation etc. it get extensively tested. The same would happen (and is happening) for women right now. This extensive testing and implementation costs a lot of money.

5) I'm not saying sexual harrassement is "fair" to women. I'm saying it's an inevitable reality in something like the Infantry. You may pretend that boys and girls are the same and don't like each other, but those of us who accept reality realize that problems will exist. Sexual harrassement also goes both ways.

6) The military isn't hurting for Infantrymen, at all. There's actually more volunteers than slots. Implementing women will cost A LOT MORE MONEY as I've shown over and over and over and over again in this thread and previous ones. Adding women does nothing to improve the capability of our Infantry but costs A LOT of money. This means it fails a cost benefit analysis.

7) Google "General Mathis/Petraeus etc. etc." and "Congress/Senate" and see dozens and dozens of videos and pictures of them testifying to Congress. The military are held to task by Congress and the President. When these people want something implemented for political gain, they can assert a lot of pressure on Generals, regardless of whether it's a good decision or not. This is common sense stuff that requires only a small amount of critical thinking.

I've already highlighted the costs over and over and over and over and over again. Perhapes you need to take a basic accounting class or operations management class.

 

This is exactly what I'm saying. You can lay into the bell bottomed fairies all you want, but don't lump us in with them. The Marine Corps is the Men's department of the Department of Navy.

 

What if these standards are artifically lowered so as to meet the political agendas of certain politicians?

 

different units have different standards dependent on the degree of proficiency required, male candidates are also rejected when they fail to meet standards...if a woman can meet the required standards then she should be allowed to join, but standards shouldn't be lowered in any unit just to make it politically correct...just my opinion...

 

If you've been in any Infantry unit you more than understand that the "minimums" are nowhere near acceptable once in the unit. The problem is that a much higher number of women could meet these "minimums" than could meet the unofficial minimums. This leads to a serious degredation of military capability. The standards are already quite low, largely to keep injured people from getting booted out after recovering from serious injury. The types of soldiers/Marines that just slip by and meet the bare physical minimums get dumped in an office job somewhere. This is what would happen to most of the women who squeaked by the minimums while not coming anywhere close to the unofficial standards.

 

They might meet the official standards for women, but they would never meet the actual, real-life standards for infantry service. They would suffer far too many training and deployment-related injuries and this would HURT our operational efficiency and our combat effectiveness.

 

Nobody else in the U.S. military is entrusted with as much responsibility, in terms of sheer dollars, as B-2 bomber pilots.
B-2s cost as much as a fast attack nuclear submarine, a submarine crewed by 130 while the B-2 only has a pilot and a mission commander.

There are female B-2 bomber pilots...and even some of the males doing this job are lucky to tip the scales over 130 lbs.

Women have already proven themselves worthy of taking on enormous responsibilities within the military...I think seeking infantry ground combat roles would be a regression. Leave that to the males.

 

Capt. Jennifer Wilson, who hails from Miami, FL., commissioned out of AFROTC at Georgia Tech.

Sure, she would fall behind in a timed run with the average male infantryman. She probably couldn't carry an injured soldier or Marine off of the battlefield. In terms of the physical nature of ground combat, she would be ill suited.

She does however, possess the cool under pressure...mature attitude... necessary to be handed the "keys" to the World's most advanced stealth bomber in history..a bomber
capable of taking out any large metropolitan area with a nuclear ordnance load out.

She didn't earn her slot as a B-2 pilot merely because she's "a girl" and a quota needed to be filled to fulfill a political agenda...she earned the job because she's fully qualified to handle the responsibilities.

She is the most dangerous woman on Earth...by virtue of her job and the nature of her job...controlling an aerial weapons platform capable of delivering mass casualties with extreme prejudice...should the need ever arise.

She is a professional warrior in every sense of the word.

I believe females in the service don't have to prove anything...or their value. They've already done so.

There are limits to their skill set based on the God given physical aspects granted to men and women...upper body strength etc....
men as a general rule, are physically stronger...and thusly make better infantryman...wherein physicality is an imperative.

Strength matters, in other words....to the boots on the ground carrying the rifles.

but physical strength, in and of itself, does not define a warrior, does not define courage under fire, does not define military service...does not define value.

 

That's swell for them, but the only question that matters to anyone with a lick of sense is how it is for battle readiness. That's not a question that can be answered on an empirical basis, since by WW2 standards the US military has fought nothing but stiffs at least since Viet Nam - unless of course we count as an opponent its own civilian leadership, to which it cedes the advantage by law.

 

Gulf War I...U.S. led coalition forces took on the 4th largest standing Army in the World...Iraq.

They were crushed in less than 30 days.

Women have been flying combat missions...for over a decade now...in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Where's the statistical evidence they are not equal to a man at that task....

They are literally...battle tested.

Broken down, aging equipment has a far more negative impact on battle readiness than allowing women into previously male dominated combat roles...

We have aircraft built when Eisenhower was President..the B-52 bomber for example...still in the active force inventory....
All folks seem to care about is making sure no one with a vagina gets near combat....(pardon my French)...
that's really the least of the issue.