Newsgroups: alt.romance,soc.women
Subject: Re: [SOC] A social issue (Re: Equality between men and women)
From: peregrin@husc13.harvard.edu
Date: 5 Jan 93 10:31:07 EST
Followup-To: soc.women
Organization: Harvard Business School
Keywords: death, killing
Summary: Long

Hmm, the arguement of women in the armed forces...

>>1--women don't have the same strength as men....a 110 lb. woman can not carry
>>    her partner 25 miles back to a pick up point, and arrive on time

	It has been my experience that under extreme pressure and duress,
women perform better than men.  I agree that under equivalent training and
equivalent weight, a woman has less muscle mass, but I do not agree that
she can not do what needs to be done.  The ability to carry someone under
war conditions is not simply a mathematical calculation of energy.  It
involves your emotional ability to see something through to the end.

>>2-I don't care WHAT kind of training a woman has, she still cannot hit as hard
>>    as a man.

	Perhaps she cannot use the same motion of hitting that a man is
trained to use... Has anyone bothered to find out?

>>3-  Men have an inate behavior towards violance.....a woman would have to be
>>    trained, and the training would be too time consuming.

	Arguements of "innateness" and "nature" always make me skeptical.
However, it is interesting that men would find it too difficult to train a 
woman to be violent.  Gee, ain't that a shame.  If only everyone could be
born naturally violent, then the world would be so much easier.  :-)

>>4- A woman could not do what my partner and I did, in NAM.....I don't care how
>>   much training she had, a woman would not have survived.
> 

	Sure, given the way the armed forces were set up then, and the way
people were trained, a woman *may* not have survived under the experiences
you went under.  However I don't doubt that women will have to be trained
in a different manner.  However, I guessing that when you say "a woman", you
have your own personal idea of what a woman is and what she is capable of.
This idea carries all the prejudices (I'm using the word formally) that
you learned about woman through out your life.  I'm not flaming you here,
because it is very difficulty the think outside the boundaries in which you
view society.

> 
> In the following reply, I may seem to be somewhat self-contradictory, but 
> personally I think women should not be allowed in a combat zone for several 
> good reasons which I do not wish to elaborate here because it may be very 
> lenghthy and controversial.

	Hopefully, this will get out of alt.romance.  It is probably and
FAQ in soc.women.  I don't know.  This header says take your followups
elsewhere.

>  One major reason that has been cited in the 
> press that many U.S. top military experts and generals advocated is the 
> cohesiveness of a conbating unit.  This has nothing to do with EQUALITY 
> between men and women in the military at all, rather it simply points out 
> that cohesiveness in a combating situation as one of the most critical and 
> important key factors in deciding victory or defeat in the battlefield.  

	Okay I agree with this.

> Imagine that you are a woman, with different needs and ways of "doing things", 
> stuck in a foxhole with 4 or 5 male soldiers for a month, what would  happen 
> to the cohesiveness of that fighting unit???  Or, imagine that you are 
> one of a few women sailors out at sea in a submarine with hundreds of highly 
> disciplined men for 3 or 4 months at a time, what would happen to the ways 
> these men look at you after several months being away from home??? 
>
	So the problem appears to be that do to different ways of "doing
things", cohesiveness would break down.  It seems odd to me that their
cannot be some sort of common traing that both sexes can live with.
	Military training is the task of taking basically non-violent people
who think for themselves, and turning them into violent people who follow 
orders and give them skills needed to carry out violence in a measured way.
And this requires sophisticated and concentrated efforts of mental training.
And yet people seem to argue that you cannot train women to do these things
or that such training would be too difficult.
	In war time, the armed forces did not find it too difficult to train
newly drafted people and turn them into soldiers who can kill on command.
Boot camp is precisely the method of changing the way people think and
behave.  I would assume that there are sargents who pride themselves in
being able to create a soldier out of anyone.
	Yes, you are right that training women would present big problems.
The whole training system would have to be changed.  The traditional way
of taking an average male and turning him into a combat soldier would not
work with women.  So what do you do? - you adapt it, you throught it out the
window and start over.  I'm sure someone can figure out a way of doing it.
Just give them enough money. :-)
 
> Now, there are some contrary facts (contrary to what I have written above) 
> about Vietnam war that I would like to point out to interested readers in this 
> group and to our friend in above article who fought in Vietnam against 
> an army that was made up of many females (one estimate put the number 
> at about 10% of all Vietnam combatant units.)  In fact, the South Vietnam 
> Liberation Army that our friend fought against was headed by a 
> woman - General Nguyen Thi Dinh.

	Excellent!  Thanks for the info.

>  Vietnam has many divisions of female 
> paratroops and anti-aircraft gunners.  These are true facts that you may 
> dig up for yourselves from your local or university libraries.         
> 
> Have fun!
> 
> T. Ng

	Here's something else that has been on my mind.  We have a system
of carrying out controlled violence called The Armed Forces.  This system
is mostly comprised of men and it is men how do the actually face-to-face
killing.  And they are very good at it.
	Now, something seems to happen when we start introducing women into
the system.  The original Armed Forces System starts changing.  In some
aspects it starts to break down.  Men start finding it very difficult to
be as violent.  They start feeling "protective" or inordinately concerned
with certain well-beings of women, and hence they are impeded from performing
the same kind of violence as before.
	In short it becomes difficult for them to continue killing.

	So we are faced with some tough questions.  If *internationally*,
over the span of decades, more women enter into the armed forces, and
men find it more difficult to continue their systems of killing, will
at some point people begin to question the value of maintaining armies?
	Essentially there are two positions:  Either you see the world as
basically peaceful people trying to live together peacefully, or you see
the world as a battle of weak and strong and you need to protect yourself.
	The latter is currently the prevailing view, and that is why we
have armies and wars.  And yet the prevailing view is maintained by the
prevailing people in power : Men.  Once we start allowing women to have
power in this world, the prevailing view might change.

-James
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