Because the military isn't about fairness to the individual, it's about getting a very tough job done. I was chaptered for being overweight. I could still do my job, I scored 280 on the APFT, but my body fat was above limits and because of that I had to go regardless of my performance. It's not about what's fair to the individual but what's fair to the army as a whole, and the army doesn't have the time or resources to take each and every individual into consideration. So, blanket policies and standards are issued that may allow some to fall through the cracks (in both directions) but which are best for the army as an institution.

She was expected to evolve on day 1? That's some seriously hardcore physical testing!

Cheers

You got a good point. Guys still have to sign up for Selective Service or face many punitive penalties, girls don't.
Why isn't Gloria Allred and her ilk addressing this?

I saw another headline today, about it not being right to have gender differences when awarding Oscars.

So...best actor, male or female...not both.

That's not going to go well with the egomaniacs in Hollywood.

But, ah...seems right, right?

No difference, just like Hillary said...'what difference does it make?'

Cut down on the number of bathrooms you have to have on the old aircraft carrier.

The problem might be that with offices, shops, factories - all these men and women go home at end of day and have a life outside. They don't need to hump their workmates if their wife is waiting at home.

The better counterargument might be to look at how it works on an Aircraft Carrier, for example. That's a closed environment for six months, lots of women there.

If they can meet the requirements of the job, and can do the job, whats the argument here? If there are some woman who can and want to serve their country then let them. Just make sure the rules are the same.

They will just write the rules and requirements down until it matches the new lower situation. Been done before. The Army PT test when I went in had buddy lift and carry, and hand grenade toss in it. Women could not meet the standards. So the solution ? Eliminate those events.

Served with women in combat. Problems. But things that would have gotten a male soldier disciplined were ignored. Predetermined success.

Social engineering.


Bad thing.

Even then, we had a female CWO who fell out every single run and yet they refused to give her a counseling statement, but we had guys dropped quick after falling out of 2 runs and being counseled both times.

I think OG has really hit the crux of the issue. The problem isn't women serving with men in combat. The problem is when standards and expectations are modified to accomodate the new reality.

Stars and Stripes has an article, that mentions creating a gender-neutral physical standard for certain units or military occupational specialties, separate from the service�s physical fitness test. I guess, if you are a tanker, you will have one set of physical standards to meet and if you are a cook, you will have another. As an 11Echo (M48A1-A3.. back when dinosaur's still roamed the earth), I'm not sure I would want to share a turret with a woman who could qualify as a tanker. Especially. when they tried to use a empty 7.62 ammo can in the confines of a turret to take a wiz in.

Just counseled? They were recycling people for falling out twice when I went through. As for the pre-chow pullups, the women would just hang for 10 seconds and drop but were permitted into chow.

Couldn't they design packs that would hang on the front of the women? Women are engineered to carry a good deal of weight in the area of the belly.

The visual cue of women with bulging bellies would also keep the men's libido in check.

Win-win.

+1

I'm all for equal opportunity in the military and I was even when I was in, equal standards equal opportunity is always my belief even now, and I don't buy into the psychological gender stuff, I've seen some very tough women under duress and if some aren't they can be counseled and handled the same way the problem males are using the same standards.

The problem I experienced was that the standards were lowered for females and there were promotion quotas implemented to ensure a certain number of females made it into the NCO leadership positions. And if you consider that the physical and skill standards are originally based on combat readiness purposes, then lowering the standards for some lowers combat readiness overall, and promoting people based on gender instead of experience and qualifications lowers the effectiveness of the unit. Simple.

All credit to you Cat, you aren't part of the problem I saw, I would have been proud to be on the same squad as you.

Even now I still support this DOD decision and equal opportunity for females in the military, but the military itself just needs to not reduce the standards for the combat MOSes (it's too late for the non-combat MOSes).

I don't make the case that females are not psychologically more or less capable than males- if anything, in the general population, males are usually the ones that are more likely to have some emotional breakdown and harm themselves or others, commit suicide, go on a homicidal or fratricidal rampage. Females either have more coping mechanisms or just have some other benefit which tips the balance in their favor. However, psychologically, it's more the mundane stuff:

I just wasn't aware that females were so anxious to button up with males and live with them in a tank for days on end- to poop next to them, smell each other's body odor or other unfortunate wafting presence, have no qualms about the balance of privacy trumped by close physical contact, erase any gender distinction. While I knew some females who would fit in there (and the Army has some masculine women, I'll grant that), even in basic training the segregation of the sexes would be setting up the scenario where suddenly you go from one to the other.

I disagree with people who just say the word 'progressive' as if that is supposed to mean anything- any problem will fix itself. And I don't believe that a female's life is inherently more valuable than a male's- or vice versa. But if we're going to treat the sexes as equals, then we take it seriously rather than merely saying it and still behaving as though that's not the case. Women should be subjected to the same standards, should have to register for Selective Service. Culturally as a society however we have set up double standards that are artificial, in some societies, the genders aren't so nearly divided- women and and men both do dirty work for the benefit of the whole village, bathe in the same streams, use the same toilets, but they tend to be much simpler in their outlook- they aren't ashamed, or turned on when they're naked around each other, for example. To the extent that people are anxious to get women in there, well, in practice we'll see if droves of females actually want to sign up for a particular MOS after all's said and done. If they do, they'll have to meet the standards, simple as that. I say to any question: "Let's try it." They'll see what they're in for and figure out if it sounded better in the commercials than in practice.

Two counseling statements were a recycle. Each fall out resulted in a counseling statement.

The pullups really have nothing to do with pulling risers, but yea we were expected to do that, except it was after chow when we were returning to the cables.

Abolish the Selective Service Act. Now.

You cannot have my daughter unless we've been invaded and that's only after I've gone in her place and was killed in action.

The progressives want your daughter!

Unless you're a friend of Barack or some other politician.

The whole political controversy about women in combat is in reality just a sham. We had women in our MP unit guarding warheads way back in the Jimmy Carter days. They were just as combat ready as any of the guys and every one of us would have been engaged in combat operations immediately after the first few seconds of any war in Europe that might have started. Later when we had our run-ins with the terrorists in 85 & 86 they managed to blow up my equipment and kill our men and women regardless of their combat arms status.

Yeah well... without progressives we'd still be sitting in a tree flinging real crap instead of verbal to others.

I think that what would motivate some servicewomen to do this is the fact that the job of a soldier, ultimately, is to kill and it is those who are on the tip of the spear that get the opportunities to move up in the profession. Support services always suck hind tit in all branches of the military. Certainly, being part of the king or queen or prince of battle (artillery, infantry, and armor, in that order) isn't for all servicewomen. It isn't for all servicemen, either. But the reality is that we have been doing exactly this for decades.

Case in point. When I was in Panama in 1988, right after getting out of the BC's doghouse for breaking that E-9's nose I pissed off the management...again. It was stupid but hilarious in retrospect, not enough to lose me my stripes or even get a counseling statement, but it annoyed those in charge tremendously and as a result I was just too hot to trot at that particular time in my military career so they decided to put me out of sight for awhile, for my own good and theirs too. Chalk it up to a headstrong 24 year old with a major attitude, trying to prove herself in a man's world and by the mens' rules. And no, I wasn't a lesbian and I like anime, hearts AND flowers, lacy dresses, and "Hello Kitty" just as much as the next gal. But I also thought...and still think...that law enforcement and Army stuff is cool too.

We had an issue in the former Canal Zone with the Panamanian Defense Force's "Dignity Battalions," which were this rag-tag local militia that was more of a tripwire force than anything else. And so, the military leadership got worried...justifiably so...that the DBs were going to try and infiltrate U.S. installations and cause whatever mayhem they wanted. This tit-for-tat game eventually led to a shootout at the POL point in Arraijan between the DBs and a bunch of U.S. Marines that I wasn't there for but I got the play-by-play description from the Army MPs that *were* there, and it never made the media, interestingly. The solution was to institute a series of infantry patrols on the military reservations, courtesy of the Dollar-93d, the local 193d Infantry Brigade. But we weren't...technically...at war with Panama just yet and thus, if we found an infiltrator on the premises the brass wanted MPs with the grunts to do the actual arresting and processing.

They called this duty "Bushmaster." I found out about it when the Top called me into his makeshift office and informed me that I was more trouble than I was worth right then, and they needed a place to stash me for the time being. So I was handed an M-16A1/M-203 combo, and detailed to a platoon in the 193d as their law enforcement advisor. For a month. In the field, every day. With the infantry. Marching with the infantry. Wading rivers with the infantry. Sleeping in the rain, without even a shelter half (I had my poncho, though! Hah!), with the infantry. Eating Meals-Ready-to Eat (3 lies for the price of one) with the infantry. And yes, taking a dump in the jungle. We'd go out for a couple days and come back, get a hot meal and uninterrupted sleep, and go back out.

It was pretty fun!

I'd dated a grunt in the 82nd and got to know some of his friends, they were maniacs (loved them for it, too), and the 193d guys were no different. I got along great with them. I shared their hardships and never complained, you see-they weren't expecting that. Infantry guys know how to march. MPs for some reason want to forced-march every single place they go. God knows why, I've never understood it. The infantry guys spread out loose, on both sides of the road, and just walk at a sensible pace. We walked for miles like that. Their officer was a nice (and cute) ROTC butter-bar who'd just got out of infantry-officer school at Ft. Benning, who was sensible enough to let the platoon daddy tell him how to stay out of trouble. I did well enough that they declared me an honorary infantryman, and I was greatly flattered by that.

Most women who voluntarily put on the uniform know the risks, and are ready, willing, and able to take the bad with the good; at least, in my day and in my unit, we were. We understand that discomfort and sweat, et al., goes with the territory. Serving the nation entails sacrifice on many levels. It doesn't make you less a woman to make those sacrifices. I was in Panama in the first place because we demanded to be treated like our male counterparts. When the battalion mobilized to deploy, the brass wanted to leave us behind while the guys went in harm's way. The NCOs among us went to see the brigade CSM for a nice little chat, and got him to change his mind about that, and he changed the brigade commander's mind, and we deployed with the men like we should.

On the subject of gender segregation in training, we used to do it right in one-station unit training in MP School at Ft. McClellan. What we did was put all the women in one platoon in a company. The other three platoons were all guys. And we trained together as a company, but internally we were segregated. I think it's insane to do platoon-level integration in boot camp. They need to be acclimated to the military lifestyle first, and without distractions. They could integrate platoons during the AIT phase if they wanted to do that, but the way we did it worked great. Why change what worked? It doesn't make sense to me.

When I went to permanent party, we were split up in similar fashion in barracks, but integrated among the fire-teams. We were organized in nine-man squads, three-man fire teams, three to a squad, three squads to a platoon. I was a fire-team leader with two enlisted men working for me when we were deployed as a team, and as I recall our TO&E was one M-1025 vehicle, one M-16/M-203, two M-16A1 rifles, one M-60 machine gun, three M-72 LAAWs, a couple cases of 5.56 and 7.62, a case of grenades for the M-203 and one of hand grenades, and a couple cases of MREs.