Women in Combat Arms (2)

Elite females should not be integrated into combat arms because (as I've hopefully alluded to already) admitting women into our fighting units is not a good idea.We are not about to sacrifice unit cohesion, safety, standards, and combat effectiveness for a militarily useless statement about political equality.Equal standards - Pro's principle argument appears to be if an elite female can pass the same fitness standards set for a man, then they should be allowed in. Pro has made a very strong moral argument for why this is so, but has yet to demonstrate to us why this makes solid good military sense. These standards and tests again, only represent a minimum "admissions standard" for most infantry units. Simply passing the bar does not mean you've actually excelled, and female candidates who do attempt to join the infantry or special forces will predictably score lower and wash out in much greater numbers than their male counterparts ever will. The best warriors and most capable soldiers will always be men; and elite units –if anything else- should stay permanently closed to women.Bottom line, there is no reason to believe -given scientific evidence- that elite females have more fighting potential then elite men. The average male soldier is also significantly stronger than your average female soldier. Anybody and everybody would be really silly to argue against that, and yet, -according to studies- your elite female athlete is still only barely stronger than your non-athletic male (http://tinyurl.com...); whereas female integration into ground combat has also only proven to make infantry men perform worse (http://tinyurl.com...).Why then should we give up an infantry MOS along with a male spot to Special Forces Assessment and Selection (SFAS) for a less qualified solider who has the potential to become pregnant as well harm unit cohesion and weaken combat effectiveness?When I go to war, I go to win, and I only take the best and most qualified soldiers with me.Women already have proved competence in combat – Unfortunately, women (as a gender) have NOT proven competence in combat comparable to men. “Courage and valor” is not the same thing as combat proficientcy, which relates more to talents, skills, and actual battlefield predicting abilities – such as physical fitness, biology, marksmanship, technical proficiently, and the ability to pass or exceed a training standard. Again, only three (3!) outlier women thus far have proven able to pass ranger school, whereas it is an established fact that most women will have trouble meeting standards originally set for men. American women for instance, are admitted on much weaker raw admission standards then men.Women have also never served in direct action infantry units in any country, and have no outstanding combat records to speak of.But as an intellectual challenge to Pro and to the reader, I’d like to know just how integrating women (or even elite women) into combat arms over men actually adds to (or maintains) combat effectiveness. Because as far as we can tell, adding mixed units into the ground combat equation will not constitute as an effective force multiplier.Women in other countries: (Canada, Israel, Germany, Australia, and Norway). - I won’t spend too much time here unless pressed again by Pro. But it is an established fact that women have never served as part of the primary infantry force for any country. There is no grand combat record to speak of. In Israel for instance, where military service is compulsory for both men and women- women are admitted on weaker standards than men, and serve mostly as part of the border guard, police, and K9 units: (http://www.washingtontimes.com...)The United States Arms Forces (so long as I’m an armchair general) is also going to have significantly higher standards and better infantry units than the Australian, Norwegian, Hun, and Canadian armies. "mixed units cause distractions" argument is extremely weak. - The cohesion & distraction argument is not a weak argument. It’s my best argument. The most appalling and disgusting statistic in the history of the United States military is the fact that 1 out of every 3 women has undergone at least some kind of harassment or sexual assault while serving in the military (http://tinyurl.com...). This statistic is significantly higher than the civilian ratio, which is 1 out of 6. Sexual harassment/assault is an enduring problem that originated with women integration, and is something that the military has never been able to solve. The Dempsey Rule & “why would standards need to lower if women are already meeting the current ones?” - Because most women don’t. Pro has alluded this himself, stating “zero female marines have passed the Marine Infantry Officer Course,” and that there are currently “zero female infantry officers” in the Army. Gen Dempsey has mentioned that if women can’t meet a standard, then the military will question "whether it should be that high." We can only conjecture therefore (without an argument from the DoD or Pro for increased military effectiveness) that integration was mostly politically motivated, and that the military will be pressured down the road to lower its standards to accommodate more women. Take women integration into West Point for instance; when Congress made the decision to admit women to West Point, they instructed the Military Academy, in effect, to "change whatever standards needed to be changed in order to accommodate physiological differences between men and women." They identified more than 120 physiological differences (http://tinyurl.com...).On quotas- Quotas and special tests are in fact already being done to integrate women and have been the Pentagon’s “go-to policy" for integrating minorities since the 70s. The opportunity cost of which is obviously less qualified soldiers. And contrary to Pro’s statements about the use of quotas, they have in fact been assigned for specific MOS specialties before. African Americans, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and social experiments. - Sexual orientation and skin color has never proved to be a determining factor for combat effectiveness or for lowering admission standards. Gender has. And integrating women, when combined with problems of distraction, pregnancy, cohesion, and lack of a proven combat record, is a much riskier social proposition. It would be much better then to integrate women into professional sports and other all-male venues first, then risk national security.The military obeys civilian authority according to the Constitution. - Here, Pro is right. But wouldn't’t it be nice if civilian authority actually listened to military advice for a change?Society is OVERWHELMINGLY advocating for gender equality - American society has never experienced a woman tackled by an NFL player or men and women sharing a restroom, ever. Society has also never experienced the anxiety of women draftees, women POWs, or women body bags lined up in mass rows at Arlington from Afghanistan or Iraqi Freedom. In fact the only one instance where society was forced to react to a real POW incident was Prvt Sarah Jessica Lynch, and what a media firestorm & backlash that was. They even made a TV drama afterwards.But if society can’t stomach the capture or anxiety of a single female soldier, how does public opinion stomach a long-term conflict –like Vietnam & Iraq- if women are suddenly being killed, raped, drafted, and captured in unequal numbers to men? Women are proven to be physiologically weaker soldiers, and my speculation is that society will declare that the military has a “war on women.” **For lack of character space I was not able to address all of Pro's counters this round (pregnancy, higher standards), but please note that I have not dropped any of these issues. Please appropriately weigh his arguments against mine.Back again to Pro.