Poll: Women In Front Line Combat Role

[Farther than stars]

You the other guy is just going to stand there and let stab him, if he has strength advantage, even if you react first he grabs your rifle and kills you. If strength and weight are not advantages in a fight, why are so many women being beaten by men?

But she'd have passed the same tests that male soldiers would have, meaning she was just as capably strong.

And think about it like this, this would be a military woman going up against whatever forces the military fights today. Terrorists, drug dealers, etc. I'd bet her fitness regimen for a front line soldier would put her above the enemy.

Not to mention most wars today are done with guns, not bayonets or knives...

I know, that irked me as well. I've been thinking about it, and I can't recall reading a single news article about a modern war which mentioned being stabbed by a bayonet as the cause of death. It's all gunshots, IEDs and artillery: causes of death which don't take gender into account.

 

[Farther than stars]

And it doesn't take a genius to understand why. (Cultural, social, religious)

Agreed. But then why would we enforce such a culture of misogyny by not letting the women who actually want to join the military just join? After all, if the reasons are simply culturally based, then this is no different from denying black people or gay people ranks in the military.

 

[Farther than stars]

Besides, though I cannot personally find historical references of such, saying that it cannot happen simply because it hasn't happened... well, yeah. Look at that. It's stupid. It's like saying you don't need a gun in the woods cus you never needed it before, but fact is the woods you always went to didn't have bears at every step ready to kill you. Bad analogy. Point being, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't.

Yep, that's the induction problem in a nutshell. So I take it your on the fence about God as well then?

 

[JudgeGame]

-snip-

What draft are we talking about? The one that ended in 1963?

 

[JudgeGame]

-snip-

What draft are we talking about? The one that ended in 1963?

Troll alert? No way you can be that ignorant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States


Conscription in the United States has been employed several times, usually during war but also during the nominal peace of the Cold War. The United States discontinued the draft in 1973, moving to an all-volunteer military force, thus there is currently no mandatory conscription in effect.

However, the Selective Service System remains in place as a contingency plan; men between the ages of 18 and 25 are required to register so that a draft can be readily resumed if needed.[1] In current conditions conscription is considered unlikely by most political and military experts.[2]

I was obviously asking about the UK draft since this thread is about the UK military, but thanks for the insult.

Anyhow, don't you think it's circular logic to say "we're not allowing women into the military because women aren't obliged to be in the military"?

It's catch-22. If you don't let women fight, the culture that assumes women are useless as soldiers will never go away and thus women will never be conscripted. So what you are saying is basically that you are against female conscription, yes?

 

[Farther than stars]

--snip--

Conscription, huh? Well, that's a pretty antiquated idea already, since these days it's been possible to be a conscious objector for quite a while now. Although some people might argue that the tendency to conflict is a natural one, since earlier in our evolution violence was necessary to remain high up in the food chain. Then later we needed armies for lands and nations to grow into stable social societies, where surviving is relatively easier than compared to the lives of our predecessors.
And that's nature for you. Fair doesn't really come into it, especially not war, where you need every able-bodied person you can muster. And to that end, there are women out there who can match and surpass their male counterparts.
But I'm fascinated to hear that you're agnostic. There's not a lot of people out there who would follow their philosophical ideas to the point that they forsake all predefined beliefs about God, especially such an opinionated person like yourself.

 

[Farther than stars]

It's catch-22. If you don't let women fight, the culture that assumes women are useless as soldiers will never go away and thus women will never be conscripted. So what you are saying is basically that you are against female conscription, yes?

A catch-22 preventing someone from getting into the military. I'm loving the irony. :-D

 

[Jedi-Hunter4]

It hasn't happened because no country can sustain the amount of casualties to make it necessary. You get conquered long before you lose enough of your population in front-line combat to make that sort of demographic problem.

The US has more military personnel than most, and it's still little more than 1.5 million out of 315 odd million people. If all of those were women, and all of those were front-line soldiers and all of them died, that's less than 1% of the women in the US.

It's because the US hasn't fought a total war since World War II, and even that wasn't particularly harsh on them compared to the other belligerents.

Army sizes have actually shrunk dramatically over the course of the 20th century. They spiked upwards when conscription was introduced during the French Revolutionary Wars, and continued to increase until WWII, after which point they began to climb downwards. For comparison, the US has 1.5 million soldiers today. In WWI, they mobilised nearly five million men, Britain eight million, Russia twelve million and Germany thirteen million. And this was when the populations for all four countries were much smaller than they are today.

If you want an example of how total war can impact population levels, look at Russia. They lost thirteen percent [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Total_deaths] of their population in WWII. So yes; you can in fact fight a war for long enough that population loss becomes a serious problem without either nation being conquered. It's just never happened to America; the closest they got was the civil war, when they lost about two percent of the population.

There's localized population loss to be concerned about though as well. I don't know if you heard about in WW1 they had friends and family company's where you could sign up, well with what it says on the tin. Good idea that they would fight harder for each other, terrible terrible idea when it went badly. People who not only had to see people blown up, but each one they saw blown up was a close friend of blood relative, I grew up in a group of villages in the UK an there were a few with big war memorials in them because not a single man came back because they were in F&F company's and got wiped out.

Also admittadly there has been allot of de-militirsation but modernization has also played a big factor as well, ie you no longer need like 6 guys for an artillery piece. Guns are so powerful now you can control an entire country with 10's of thousands of men rather than 100's of thousands. Cavalry regiments are now either tanks or choppers etc.

Got to admit the idea of our island raising 8 million fighting men makes me proud. Although not really surprising pretty all of my great & great great grandparents fought in it, same for allot of the people in my area as well. It was much more with the empire troops though wasn't it? know the australians and new zealanders sent allot of men.

 

[JudgeGame]

-Snip-

So you are against female conscription. Thanks for clarifying that.

 

[Voulan]

Absolutely should they be given the same opportunities. We don't live in the 50's anymore, where all we do is stay in the kitchen. Many arguments against the idea can be easily ovveruled by simply saying that we've never really tried it, so theories about women being weaker and the such-like are redundant. There's no way of knowing until we try.

One country did try though. Ever heard of the Marias in the Nicaraguan war against the American Contras? They were so short of soldiers that in the end they were forced to place women in the front lines after the women strongly argued for their desire to fight. They ended up making a total 30% of their forces. Though they initially were treated poorly by their military officials, by the end of the war they were held in phenomenal respect. Documents and letters from commanders said they found the women more willing to dive into battle than their male soldiers, more tactical, and more willing to protect each other, while also being fiercer. Their tunes completely changed from the documents at the beginning of the war where they though the Marias were a total joke, and said they would be more than willing to have women at the front - in fact, many suggested it was a good idea.

So it's been tried, and found a success. Any idea that women can't fight is a pathetic and archaic concept.

 

[Farther than stars]

You're post was condescending as shit though, so whatever.

Well, glass houses and all that, right Mickey? ;P
You gotta give him credit for the circular logic catch. I missed that too. A culture which won't let women serve in the military is never going to make women serve in the military. It's basic computational mathematics. Don't get hung up on it though. Even respected researchers in academic circles get tripped up from time to time when language and mathematics get mixed together (especially prevalent in sociology papers). Hey, and at the end of the day, this still makes for a fun story.

 

[m19]

so theories about women being weaker and the such-like are redundant. There's no way of knowing until we try.

Those are not theories. If physical standards matter (which military still thinks they do) then men have an advantage.

 

[Fuzzed]

Why does this pole not have a simple "yes" choice without any qualifications?

 

[Voulan]

so theories about women being weaker and the such-like are redundant. There's no way of knowing until we try.

Those are not theories. If physical standards matter (which military still thinks they do) then men have an advantage.

An advantage doesn't mean anything until it is put into practice. I can turn your argument around by saying that because an Asian man is smaller and theoretically weaker than a Caucasian man, then we shouldn't have Asians in the front line either. I mean, really? You see how stupid it sounds?

Physical statistics are so ranged across the population that it's not even worth considering.

 

[Farther than stars]

Also admittadly there has been allot of de-militirsation but modernization has also played a big factor as well, ie you no longer need like 6 guys for an artillery piece. Guns are so powerful now you can control an entire country with 10's of thousands of men rather than 100's of thousands. Cavalry regiments are now either tanks or choppers etc.

I think that's the crux of the problem. The nature of war is the same as it has even been, it's just that the scale's different. These days, a single man with a suitcase of plutonium can blow up a city the size of New York. And non-proliferation countries have never really been tested in a full-scale conflict. All we can do is hope that we get this world peace thing under way as quickly as we can. In the mean time, I don't see any reason why able-bodied women shouldn't be fighting these minor conflicts abroad.

 

[Heaven's Guardian]

Look, the research has been done, and thus far it's shown that male combatants get killed or injured at a much higher rate when women are in the squad, as the OP briefly mentioned. They start ignoring orders and using unsound battle tactics to protect female soldiers, and I don't see this changing; it's biologically innate. So there's no way I'd risk the lives of soldiers for "equality" reasons; the role of the army is to be the best fighting force possible with the lowest number of casualties, not a politically correct representation of societal standards. If the research changes, then opinions can change, but there's a reason this proposal usually gets little traction.

 

[101flyboy]

I'll leave it to the professionals, they know what should be done. That's my opinion.