The [Marine] Corps approached the question of integration differently from other branches. It commissioned the nine-month ground combat study that put 300 men and 100 women in teams that performed combat skills ranging from shooting to hiking and climbing walls.
“Instead of seeing if women could meet standards, they essentially set up a race to see who was better,” [said Ellen Haring, a senior fellow at the advocacy group and a reserve Army colonel]. The study found all-male units overwhelmingly outperformed integrated units in physical tasks — particularly tasks requiring upper body strength, such as evacuating an injured Marine from a turret or throwing a backpack onto a wall. But, the report said, integrated groups excelled at complex decision-making. It also concluded that adding women to all-male groups would probably improve the behavior of the groups as a whole.
October 16, 2015
"There has been this band of brothers idea that there is something special about having only men, and adding women will ruin it."
"The study doesn’t bear that out.”
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129 comments:
Then put women in headquarters, but not out in the field.
When commissioned to do a "study," the first thing you do is feel out the client as to what results are desired to be found.
How the hell did we manage to win WWII?
So the study found what they wanted and they concluded they could ignore the negative results.
Remind me again why breaking up the United States is a bad idea? Then the Times can publish this stuff and no one will get harmed by it.
Women are good at tasks with no goal.
The trouble is that the men don't listen.
What happens when the men prefer simple rather than "complex" decision-making?
Curious George said...
How the hell did we manage to win WWII?
It was pre-bullshit.
Your NY Times article for the day.
> excelled at complex decision-making
Such as what?
>Integration of females is likely to lower the instance of disciplinary action,
Is that good?
“Instead of seeing if women could meet standards, they essentially set up a race to see who was better”
Yes, kind of like a war would do.
JSM
There is no "complex decision making" on the battlefield. That is done before you go out and back at the TOC.
“Instead of seeing if women could meet standards, they essentially set up a race to see who was better,” [said Ellen Haring, a senior fellow at the advocacy group and a reserve Army colonel]
No fucking shit. We care who does better because there are two sides on a combat field, and the side that does better wins, and the side that does worse dies. There aren't any standards on a battlefield. There are winners and losers.
This also reinforces how worthless the reserves are.
"It also concluded that adding women to all-male groups would probably improve the behavior of the groups as a whole."
People whose job is to go defeat and kill other people generally behave badly. "Improving" their behavior is nice, but if your #1 goal isn't to win when in armed conflict things go badly. The result is markets for female sex slaves and the Taliban hanging all of the female teachers.
I'd be richer than Trump if I could tap into just 1% of the money for studies paid for by Uncle Sam where the outcome is (surprise!) what is desired.
At least in this case there were areas where the non-diverse groups was given some credit. Now how to solve that pesky problem of substituting men for the women into the play when that hauling from a turret issue arises.
There are physiological differences between men and women. Not the least of which are centered around biological roles. We have taken women out of the home and office, and placed them into combat... to prove a point and political leverage.
That said, the abortionists are prime candidates to confront terrorists on equal footing. Send the women and men who do not repent for premeditated abortion and planned cannibalism to the front line.
Complex decision making: https://youtu.be/cZv-StH-YBA?t=20s
"... adding women to all-male groups would PROBABLY improve the behavior of the groups as a whole." This quote from the report says it all.
Achilles:
"There is no 'complex decision making' on the battlefield. That is done before you go out and back at the TOC."
Great point.
"This also reinforces how worthless the reserves are."
No, we're not - but on active duty I started to wonder, and since then I've worked with people who seemed absolutely determined to further the worst stereotypes. I've also worked with people who might make you reconsider that statement, and I work hard to be one of them.
"People whose job is to go defeat and kill other people generally behave badly." Yes. Or as one Ranger phrased it to an appalled civilian: "We're the good guys, ma'am, not the nice guys."
The other reports of the test that came out about a month ago were not nearly so positive. Very suspicious that the NYT is putting the correct PC-spin on this.
"It also concluded that adding women to all-male groups would probably improve the behavior of the groups as a whole."
What behavior? Are Marines misbehaving during combat operations? Their job is to outmaneuver and outkill their opponents. They are supposed to behave badly towards the enemy. Just what behaviors do they think will be improved? And who defines improvement?
Wait until a few female troops are captured by the Taliban, or the Russians, or Iranians or whatever. Everyone will go nuts. And the combat decisions will be skewed by attempts to rescue, or avoid capture situations in the first place.
Women are approaching men in infantry combat capacity in one area--the movies. There are plenty of things women can do in combat as well as men. Infantry is not one of them.
Complex decision making is one of those nice, easily manipulable metrics. Sort of like "sexual assault."
Using your women to fight in combat is like using your gold bullion to make bullets.
The study found all-male units overwhelmingly outperformed integrated units in physical tasks — particularly tasks requiring upper body strength, such as evacuating an injured Marine from a turret or throwing a backpack onto a wall.
Or fighting.
It also concluded that adding women to all-male groups would probably improve the behavior of the groups as a whole.
That's nice. Our enemies will appreciate having well-behaved prisoners of war.
"This also reinforces how worthless the reserves are"
The last half of my career was spent in the active duty component of the Reserves, and I couldn't disagree more about their quality. At least in squadrons, they tended to be significantly more experienced, although less willing to put up with the BS.
Achilles asserted w/o evidence:
"People whose job is to go defeat and kill other people generally behave badly."
Yeah, that's why prior military service has always been considered a disqualification for holding public office, whole avoiding service is a badge of honor and "good behavior".
That's why SEALS, Special Forces and veterans in general are treated with scorn. derision and suspicion by the general public.
That's why during the entire history of the United States, military veterans have always made up the great majority of the prison population .
SNORK!
"There is no 'complex decision making' on the battlefield."
Are you fucking kidding me? Of course there is. But it has to be done very quickly, with imperfect information, decisively and without time for consensus building. The group dynamic implied in the statement about improved decision making is not applicable to decisions under fire.
"How the hell did we manage to win WWII?"
The enemy was misusing their women too.
There is no complex decision making in the bathroom. Nevertheless women take longer.
It's all a moot point no matter the results.
Female soldiers are pre-equipped with gear that will not only get them out of any deployment they don't want to go on, but can get them home from a deployment that they deem shitty once they get there. That will wreck unit morale. And it's not a hypothetical, it's already happening and, to my knowledge, has been happening since the early 90's. And that was in-the-rear-with-the-gear units. x10 the problems when that starts to include combat units.
Anybody think the Russians and Chinese are agonizing over this?
If women would make the their armed forces more effective you'd think they would jump on this to intimidate the US.
Interesting that no one seems to care what the actual Infantrymen want or think. They are the ones with the knowledge and are putting their lives on the line.
The Marines recruiting pitch used to be join and be John Wayne, now it will be what? Join, and be like "Seinfeld"?
“Instead of seeing if women could meet standards, they essentially set up a race to see who was better”
No sh*t sherlock. In war runner-up means dead or at least defeated. There is no ribbon for participation.
Or to put it another way - if the minimum performance "standard" for a platoon sized assault on a dug in enemy squad is maximum 2 KIA and 5 WIA, and the mixed platoon does it with 2 KIA and 4 WIA, but the all-male unit does it with just 2 WIA, isn't that kinda relevant? I know who I would want to go to war with. Or now, I know who I would want to send my sons to war with, which latter question is way more frightening and heavy than the former.
"And it's not a hypothetical, it's already happening and, to my knowledge, has been happening since the early 90's."
That's been an issue at times with the female sailors on ships.
The issue is that the Marines are- allegedly- the only Service seeking to exempt certain career fields from integrating women. According to SECNAV Mabus even the Navy SEALs are not going to seek an exemption [rather, they will only open it to those women who pass the rigorous standards established by BUDS, which is going to effectively keep the field gender segregated]. All of this is speculation, however, as the official positions have not been approved by the Services.
The article seems to indicate that Gen. Dunford supported the exemption decision, but he's now JCS Chairman, dealing with Title XXII issues and will likely play no role whatsoever in a Title X issue like this. That's now going to be our new CMC, Gen. Neller, and no one at Quantico seems to know where he's going to come out on this one [Gen Neller was most recently commander of Marine Forces Command, MARFORCOM]. SECNAV can and does trump CMC (civilian control of the military and all of that), and Mabus has made it pretty clear that he doesn't want to see the USMC seeking any exemptions (although this has not seemed to stop the USMC from seeking it anyway). So if Gen Neller believes strongly in this, he is going to have to fight really hard on this one. Don't know if he will be successful- he's going to have support from certain segments of Congress, but that may not be enough. But the uniformed military have a time-honored tradition of "waiting out" the political appointees for a change of administration where a more favorable official might be making the decisions -- that could very well be the case here. We'll have to see.
The study found all-male units overwhelmingly outperformed integrated units in physical tasks — particularly tasks requiring upper body strength, such as evacuating an injured Marine from a turret or throwing a backpack onto a wall.
All-male units are better at those tasks. No shit.
But, the report said, integrated groups excelled at complex decision-making.
Are the integrated units as good or better at complex decision-making than the all-male units, or do they merely "excel" at it? How do they compare?
It also concluded that adding women to all-male groups would probably improve the behavior of the groups as a whole.
Sounds like bullshit.
Conclusions
(FOUO) The female Marines integrated into the closed MOS units demonstrated that they are capable of performing the physically demanding tasks, but not necessarily at the same level as their male counterparts in terms of performance, fatigue, workload, or cohesion.
(FOUO) Integrated units, compared with all-male units, showed degradations in the time to complete tasks, move under load, and achieve timely effects on target. The size of the differences observed between units and tasks varied widely. The more telling aspect of the comparisons is the cumulative impacts. The pace, timing, and accuracy of any singular task is not necessarily important, but taken together, and in the context of actual combat operations, the cumulative differences can lead to substantial effects on the unit, and the unit’s ability to accomplish the mission.
(FOUO) Gender and MOS type are the best predictors of occupational injuries. In particular, we found that females are more likely to incur occupational injuries, resulting in reduced readiness compared to their male counterparts. Males, on the other hand,
are more likely to incur non-occupational injuries. Additionally, Marines in vehicle MOSs tended to have lower injury rates than those in MOSs that march (i.e., foot mobile) or Artillery MOSs.
(FOUO) No clear conclusions can be drawn from the Proficiency and Conduct ratings of the GCEITF volunteers.
+
The word "complex" doesn't appear.
Were I a woman I would be deeply embarrassed by these studies which so obviously illuminate the weakness of women. It is axiomatic that lowering physical standards to accommodate women lower the standards for all and result in a less fit military. It cannot be spun otherwise. To add in all these ephemeral side "benefits" is insulting to women and not helpful to the cause of developing a military that can kill and defeat the enemy.
Sounds like bullshit
What was your first clue? Mine was that they were comparing male to female performance in some area.
Soviet women made good snipers and good fighter pilots during World War II. They don't seem to have been in the infantry except as snipers, but according to Wikipedia nearly 25% were decorated and 89 were named as "Heroes of the Soviet Union."
In modern times Israel has not merely allowed women to serve in the IDF, they've actively conscripted women into the IDF. Again, according to Wiki "a study of women in the IDF from 2002 to 2005 found that women are often superior in discipline, motivation and marksmanship. (Which reinforces the success found by the World War II Soviets when using female snipers.) Apparently Israel makes it a little easier for conscripted women to opt out of service "for religious reasons," than for men to opt out, and women are more likely to be put in non-combat roles. OTOH the IDF has an all-female recon unit, and recon is about the toughest military assignment there is.
And of course there's Leigh Ann Hester, who won a silver star in Iraq. (BTW Achilles, she was serving in the Kentucky National Guard when she won that award.)
To my way of thinking women clearly can fight in combat, and fight well.
How the hell did we manage to win WWII?
I don't know about WWII, but in WWI the British chewed up their volunteers so fast they dropped their height requirements several times:
At the beginning of the war the army had strict specifications about who could become soldiers. Men joining the army had to be at least 5ft 6in tall and a chest measurement of 35 inches. By May 1915 soldiers only had to be 5ft 3in and the age limit was raised to 40. In July the army agreed to the formation of 'Bantam' battalions, composed of men between 5ft and 5ft 3in in height. (http://spartacus-educational.com/FWWrecruit.htm)
The story of the Bantam battalions is pretty interesting.
Bullshit.
When you add females to the mix, the males stop acting in unison as a wolfpack and start competing for the female's attention. Saw it happen over and over again in the Marine Corps. Any study that claims otherwise is full of shit.
But, the report said, integrated groups excelled at complex decision-making.
No, the report doesn't say that.
Same link as above:
+
Positive Implications of Integration
Further integration of females into the combat arms brings with it many of the general benefits of diversity that we experience across the spectrum of the workforce, both within the military as well as the private sector. This was perhaps best illustrated in a decision-making study that we ran in which all-male and integrated groups attempted to solve challenging field problems. Each of the problems involved varying levels of both physical and cognitive difficulty. For those more cognitively challenging problems, the female integrated teams (with one female, and three to four males), performed as well or better than the all-male teams.
+
"or" = weaselly way of saying "the same".
To be clear, the question of women in "combat" has already been decided long ago. What we're talking about here is women in the Infantry.
Combat, loosely defined, is getting shot at and shooting back, with a chance of getting dead. American women have been doing this for decades - in small numbers in Gulf War !, and in much larger numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for the main part, they've done quite well. When fighting from fixed defenses or from the back of a gun truck, many of the physical advantages or men over women disappear or become much less relevant. There are still some issues with unit cohesion, discipline and pregnancy, but those should not detract from the service of US women in combat.
Infantry service is a whole different ball of wax. That's loading yourself up with an obscene amount of gear, and then wandering around in the boonies (in Afghanistan, up and down mountains), looking for the enemy and then engaging him on the enemy's home ground, or at best neutral territory. That requires a huge amount of physical strength and stamina, and it’s where the "standard" is only a baseline metric, a starting point if you will, and everyone should strive to exceed it at all times. Good quality infantry training (never mind combat) beats the hell out of fit young bodies. Women who start the training in tip-top shape rapidly end up physically wrecked, and that's not good for the institution. Moreover, to compensate for the physically weaker females, the male members of the unit end up working even harder and hauling more gear. That's bad for them physically, and it's VERY bad for unit morale.
Capt. Katie Petronio wrote a great piece discussing this, but it seems to have been hidden behind a pay wall now, but the first link has a good summary:
http://archive.armytimes.com/article/20120722/NEWS/207220312/Female-officer-Infantry-no-place-women
https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/video/marine-officer-women-shouldnt-be-infantry
integrated groups excelled at complex decision-making and any other thing that can only be measured subjectively.
Integrated groups also excelled at empathy and intuition.
BTW, before I give the order to take that hill, lets run it by the group's complex decision makers.... not.
I clicked over to read the article, but the study that the NYT linked to, does not say anything about moral. Apparently there are newly released pages by the WIS group, but its certainly not linked on their page.
I'm always suspicious of studies that talk about evidence of "complex decision making" skills... it sounds so subjective.
For all we know the complex decision making skills involved the group deciding that the woman should stay behind because she wasn't able to do the obstacle.
But, the report said, integrated groups excelled at complex decision-making.
Yeah, because there's a lot of that at the squad/platoon level. Frontal assault or flank attack is about as complex as it gets, and even we dumb males can figure that out.
chuck said...
> excelled at complex decision-making
Such as what?
They didn't excel.
Call me silly, but I'm still surprised that people believe statements from the NYT - or the rest of the standard MSM - regarding any of their pet causes.
Oh, and this band of brothers "idea" the author believes sprang up in recent years has been document through the aeons. See Homer, The Iliad.
We have suffered the creation of a world in which bullshit of the most obvious variety has educated people nodding their heads and wrinkling their brows in faux concern.
And the reason women are equal to men is the WNBA.
Henry,
That was interesting! I'd never learned that story- thanks for sharing!
Sun Tzu warned about mixing politics and the military and with good reason.
Nations that do not take national defense seriously are doomed, unless all their enemies are worse. Then they are still doomed, but it will be delayed until someone semi-competent shows up.
The New York Times does not take national defense seriously, but they really do not take anything seriously. They are outrageously unserious even by partisan standards. They are one step up from internet trolls.
The E-8 only cares that his folks can take care of eachother.
In the NFL, women because of their complex decision making skills excel at positions like quarterback and linebacker, but you rarely see them playing on the line,
The answers here seem so obvious to me. I don't know why so much discussion is needed.
One weird thing about infantry is that higher tech winds up increasing the amount of weight the individual soldier has to carry.
GPS with spare batteries.
Individual radios with batteries.
Night vision devices with batteries.
Tablet computer or smartphone with batteries.
Satellite radios or phones with batteries.
Laser target designator with batteries.
Infrared marking devices with batteries.
Improved body armor.
Higher-firepower weapons, meaning that you carry hundreds of bullets instead of dozens of musket balls.
Food - modern Western infantry warfare often consists of long self-sustained patrols - multiply the number of days you'll be out, by 3 meals/day, by at least a pound per meal.
Water - notice that we've been fighting in deserts and arid mountain areas a lot?
Most men don't do well under this load. Hardly any women do.
JSM
I'm always suspicious of studies that talk about evidence of "complex decision making" skills... it sounds so subjective.
Or label things as "excel". What does that mean- "excellent"? Or they werent as horrible as at everything else.
From the actual report it clear that only 36% of women graduated the school and then they got injured at a rate 6x higher than the men.
Look at p50 to see that in every task nearly no men are as poor as the 95% women.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/15/us/entry-level-training.html
Scott M said...
Female soldiers are pre-equipped with gear that will not only get them out of any deployment they don't want to go on, but can get them home from a deployment that they deem shitty once they get there
I assume you are referring to pregnancy?
And that was in-the-rear-with-the-gear units.
It's been a while since I took sex ed, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it happens.
The trouble is that there are no rules in war. At least not for those in the middle of the shitstorm. So, all of your 'studies' are probably short a few doses of reality. We actually have a very in depth lab study of wars. It's called the history of humankind. They are consistently not nice places to be. If you can find women who can handle it, great. Most men cannot, but have had to do it throughout history anyway. Me personally, I'd want the meanest, strongest sonafabitch fighting with me, next to me. I doubt that his name will be Shirley, but one never knows these days.
The purpose of an army is to kill people and break things. Don't forget that.
Imagine you're John McCain in Vietnam. You and a bunch of other guys are captured. You all know the drill. You're going to be tortured. Maybe even killed. But you don't talk. You don't break. You keep your training. Even if they are going to torture your buddy you were having beers with the night before. Doesn't matter. He signed up for the job. He knew what he was getting into. You don't talk to save your buddy.
Now imagine it's you and a woman who were captured. Are you going to let them torture her? What kind of a beast are you? It's not like the information you have to give them is all that bad. The US knows you've been captured. Surely they'll change the battle plans, the passwords, the information. You can be forgiven for saving her, right? I mean, you can handle all the torture in the world. But when they start torturing her? Do you really want to be responsible for that?
Are we going to train our men in the military to not care about the honor of women, so that when they are captured and tortured, the men won't break when the women are tortured?
It's a joke, but a dangerous one. The left has a different objective than having a strong Marine Corps and winning wars. They're objective is to have "diverse" fighting force, as if it is a college classroom, where stupidity has no real consequences.
One thing I would do is consult with the Israelis -- by necessity, they need all hands (women, gays) to fight Arab Islamic terrorism. I'd see what policies they feel have, in fact, worked with respect to female units or integration. If women in combat made us stronger, I'd be for it. Alas, I don't think this is the case.
On the whole, the all-male infantry fought and defeated Hitler in Europe -- I don't really think you can improve upon that, so I wouldn't tinker with it.
One of the arguments for women in combat arms is that pretty much only combat-arms officers become generals, so keeping women out of the combat arms is a de-facto glass ceiling.
No one seems to explore the other possible solution: making generals out of more non-combat-arms officers.
A signals officer, a logistician, a military-intelligence officer, etc, would make a fine warfighting general. In these specialties, officers get the 'big picture' early, because even though they command small units, these small units support big units. They have to get a sense of the rhythm and scope of the wider battlefield as young lieutenants, or they fail. This is in contrast to infantry officers (like I was once), who are so caught up in the minutiae of keeping 40 joes' helmet bands straight that they never learn the big picture. Military-intelligence officers especially are enemy-focused and result-focused, as opposed to the much more inward, processed-focused attitude that too many combat arms officers are forced into ("Where's Schmedlap again?" etc). I would have no problem with a military-intelligence officer as a division, corps, or theater commander. And lots of military-intelligence officers are women.
Also, combat-support and combat-service-support officers engage more with the non-military world at earlier stages in their career. They interact with phone companies, contractors, commercial supply sources, local governments, and other USG agencies, in war and peace. Again, this is in contrast to young combat-arms officers, who live inside the cocoon provided by these other specialties and then are shocked, shocked to find civilians on the battlefield.
So one way to address the 'fairness' issue for female officers (I put it in scare quotes because career fairness should be pretty far down the priority list for a warfighting organization) would be to take advantage of non-combat-arms officers' skillsets and put them in more general-officer slots. Then by the law of averages, a lot more generals would be women.
And then we could have had, instead of a bunch of male generals running around scared of being labeled sexist, some women generals speaking truth to power: "Senator/Mme Secretary/Mr President, with all due respect, you are stuck on stupid. The infantry is a boys' game. Let them keep it; it's the only thing they have left for their fragile egos. Now, I have an offensive to plan. Have a good day."
JSM
Achilles said...
There is no "complex decision making" on the battlefield. That is done before you go out and back at the TOC.
von Moltke; "War is very simple, but in combat even simple things are very hard"
Wouldn't it perhaps be easier if we just took the usual route of describing all differences between men and women as instances of female superiority? "Women are less prone than men to killing people well". There, doesn't that feel better?
No one seems to be very upset about the fact that almost all garbage truck-drivers are men.
The whole study was focused around a series of "events". Go out and do a platoon assault drill. Do a defense drill, etc.
They were silent about the velocity of staging these events, but made it very clear that the stresses did not approach those found in a 1 or 2 day FTX.
I'm not going to find it again, but the loads carried in these tests were light. In 2003-4 the Army did an equipment study and the average stripped down loads were around 65lb, the normal patrol mode loads were 100lb, and the "we're going to be out all week and bring the batteries mode was in excess of 140 lbs for some heavy weapons grunts. 140+ lbs.
In my day, they didn't call the M60 machine Gun "The Pig" for nothing...
I'm sure it will comfort the wounded Marines whose mixed-gender units can't evacuate them in a firefight to know that even though they might bleed out their group as a whole would excel at complex decision-making in the abstract.
holdfast said...
But, the report said, integrated groups excelled at complex decision-making.
Yeah, because there's a lot of that at the squad/platoon level. Frontal assault or flank attack is about as complex as it gets, and even we dumb males can figure that out.
You a Marine?
Cuz when I went through Armor Officer Basic with a few Marine Tankers, even they joked about their Basic School.
"Gentlemens, there are two types of attack. The Frontal Attack, and the Envelopment. Enough said about the Envelopment. It's too difficult to control, and normally there's not enough time. Now on to the Frontal Attack"...
Thus ended the class on Marine Tactics :)
Big Mike said...And of course there's Leigh Ann Hester, who won a silver star in Iraq. (BTW Achilles, she was serving in the Kentucky National Guard when she won that award.)
To my way of thinking women clearly can fight in combat, and fight well.
Your facts are right, your conclusions are wrong.
SGT Hester rode to war in a Hummer, dismounted with a load of maybe 30 pounds and moved 100 yards. She was brave, shot straight and did good...
The issue issue is, could you load her up with 120 lbs, round her around at 10,000 feet for 3-5 days (and nights) and expect her to perform?
being in Combat is not the same as serving in a combat arms job in combat...
John Mosby,
"would be to take advantage of non-combat-arms officers' skillsets and put them in more general-officer slots."
That screws over the males who are in those specialties.
John Mosby is right about one thing.
Beyond the SJW social engineering aspect, the Women in the Infantry argument is really positioned by Female Service Academy types, looking to ticket punch to be CSA or CMC...
Funny that the NYT saved these two paras for last:
Brig. Gen. George W. Smith Jr., director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office, sounded a note of caution in the memorandum he submitted with the study findings, saying diluting strength in pursuit of inclusion was “a prescription for failure.”
“Our future enemies will be the ultimate arbiter of such decisions — when lives of our Marines are in the balance. Those who choose to turn a blind eye to those immutable realities do so at the expense of our Corps’ war-fighting capability.”
Sounds like he's okay with women as infantry as long as they meet the physical strength, speed, and endurance standards.
I wonder how many NYT readers read that far.
"More PT, Drill Sergeant, ..."
Oops. Glad that's 45 years in the rear view mirror.
And I agree with your observation. However there are some women who could do it (even if Hester, who appears to weigh less than 120 pounds counting combat boots, wouldn't be among them) and IMHO they should not be denied the opportunity.
It's all fun and games until your PC bullshit gets people killed.
Oh, and unit effectiveness degraded in the meantime (with more injuries, more position vacancies due to "family" matters).
But the INTENTIONS are so damn good, it must be the smart thing to do.
"How did we manage to win WW2?" Did you know there were nurses in Bataan? In Italy, Africa, everywhere the shells and bombs were falling? Women died in combat zones in WW2 and since then.
More simply put: The question is NOT about morale/sexual-tensions; But, about life-and-death.
How much do "Feminine Products" and a urination cup (For peeing without taking pants down) add to the load carried by those Amazons?
And I agree with your observation. However there are some women who could do it (even if Hester, who appears to weigh less than 120 pounds counting combat boots, wouldn't be among them) and IMHO they should not be denied the opportunity.
Let me see? 45 years ago I was in country 5 months in I Corps.
Force Effectiveness versus Individual Freedom to do stupid stuff
There are several women who could do it. Could they do it for 20 years? Would any of them be better than the worst guy in the squad today? Cuz being the squad punching bag (figuratively) is a bad place to be.
My calculation was maybe 100 women out of the 75000 active Army females might be willing and able to be infantry. After subtracting out the training, admin assignments, pregnancies etc. you might have 40 deployable women at any one time. Do you make an all female platoon with 5 officers? or put 1 infantrywoman in each 5,000 man Brigade?
do you think either solution makes a more effective Army to go whoop our foes?
I see a number of ways to integrate women into front-line team environments while dealing with the realities of the strengths and weaknesses, but let me break it down differently: building a team isn't about gender or ethnicity. It's about identifying the true traits of each invididual and using their strengths and weakenesses to compliment each other. The moment you take away the individual and put them into a "group" based upon their outward appearance, your team will perform to an inferior level.
A 5' tall guy weighing 110 pounds is going to struggle hauling 50 pounds of gear 10 miles far more than a 6'3' guy weighing 220 pounds, even with fairly disparate levels of training/conditioning. If you make the first a woman and second a guy, it's still true - perhaps moreso.
But as you remove SOME physical imbalances, what becomes more important is mental capacity. Some people have the mental capacity to lay behind a sniper rifle for 14 hours, piss themselves, and barely eat or move in order to ensure they stay alert. Similarly, quite frankly, I've known alot of women who are alot better at noticing things and cataloguing them mentally than many guys (i.e. scouting).
Put aside all the gender B.S. - you figure out what the job and team needs, and you do that. If a woman can do it, great. If a guy CANT do it, you cut him out. Gender is not a substitute for capability to excel.
Vivianne said...
"How did we manage to win WW2?" Did you know there were nurses in Bataan? In Italy, Africa, everywhere the shells and bombs were falling? Women died in combat zones in WW2 and since then.
58,000 men died in Vietnam. I was there. 8 military women, all nurses died. 1 from the enemy shelling. The rest of natural causes or plane/helo crashes.
being an infantrywoman is a different thing than getting shelled in a MASH.
Vivianne: ""How did we manage to win WW2?" Did you know there were nurses in Bataan? In Italy, Africa, everywhere the shells and bombs were falling? Women died in combat zones in WW2 and since then."
We "nursed" our way to victory?
wholelottasplainin': "Achilles asserted w/o evidence:
"People whose job is to go defeat and kill other people generally behave badly."
Yeah, that's why prior military service has always been considered a disqualification for holding public office, whole avoiding service is a badge of honor and "good behavior"."
Behaving badly on the battlefield and killing other people is exactly like running for public office.
Or something.
The science is settled you misogynists.
Perhaps a bit more respect toward those women who died serving their country is in order. My mother was WW2 nurse who served in a combat zone. She spoke of the respect and gratitude the nurses received from the troops.
Dying takes no great skill - most folks can do it with no training at all.
Killing effectively is a whole different thing.
@DrillSgt
Nope not a Marine - Just a combat engineer sergeant in the Canadian Army, though I did my CLC (the course that qualifies you to become a Sgt and a squad leader) at an infantry school with mostly infantry classmates. That was a steep learning curve - nobody cared how could my bridging math was or how nice my explosive placement was - just that my patrolling and platoon attack drills were rusty.
FWIW, our instructors really did try to stress the flanking attack, though of course most candidates try to default to a frontal because it's easier to plan and coordinate.
exhelodvr: "That screws over the males who are in those specialties."
That's why I put 'fairness' in scare quotes. Fairness to anyone - male, female, race, faith, MOS - should not be the main goal of a military personnel system.
A goal, sure, but way down the priority list. The most important goal is winning wars by finding the best people for jobs.
And at the general-officer level, what's fairness? I haven't calculated the promotion pyramid recently, but even for infantry, I would guess a single-digit percentage of any commissioning year ever gets to pin on a star.
If that gets cut in half, how many guys are getting "screwed?" Four or five?
Plus, think of all the guys at lower ranks not getting screwed by poor generalship...
JSM
I'll give you all a hint.
The military is hard pressed to find volunteers anymore. What volunteers arrive are high school dropouts, or overweight.
Extrapolate on that.
Mary and Vivianne are never going to make sharpshooter with those kind of aiming skills.
Clausewitz said, "In war everything is simple, but the simplest thing is very difficult."
So true, and so applicable to the issue of complex decision-making. Could be amended to read: "In war all decisions are simple, but even the simplest decision is very difficult to make."
In this formulation, does difficulty equate to complexity? I don't think so. But: discuss?
Oh, and: that article is horseshit. The study is horseshit. Women in combat units is horseshit. Why? How much time and space do I have to answer that question? I'll need lots.
john mosby,
If you want to retain the best officers, then they need to think that their efforts will be rewarded. If you cut their chance for promotion in half, then yes, that will make a HUGE difference in how many opt to stay in. And significantly increasing the likelihood of promotion for women will increase the number of less qualified women who are promoted. It's affirmative action. How has that worked out?
Or even easy. Ever killed? Ever died?
Lawyers tend to underrate skills and experiences they don't have.
The Marine Corps' primary responsibility has been and, I assume still is, making amphibious assaults against defended positions. In those assaults speed, strength and aggressiveness are the prime requisites. In the Marine Corps tests these appear to be the qualities demonstrated by males.
I think it is foolishness - plain and simple - to assign women to infantry units. There were a lot of men in the Marine Corps that I did not want in an infantry unit. They could not hack it and would have been a danger to their fellow Marines.
I agree with those who say that we are thinking about burning our seed corn. It sounds archaic, but men don't bear children. There is, perhaps, a reason for that.
Helo:
General officers. O-7's. 30-something years in service. Started out in a year group of about 2000 infantry LT's. Did any of those guys make a life decision in 1985 based on whether they had a 2% vs 5% chance of making general? C'mon.
JSM
Vivianne is absolutely correct that women have played a critical role in warfare for ages. There are heroic tales of nurses as far back as our Civil War and I assume that they go back further than that. We are well beyond arguing the need/place of women in the service. The question is appropriateness of roles and effectiveness in combat. I will say again that women have a place in the military, but to assign them to the infantry is foolish.
@ Mary I saw nothing in the Drill SGT's remarks that deserved your insulting comments.
Big Mike said...
"More PT, Drill Sergeant, ..."
"Oops. Glad that's 45 years in the rear view mirror.
And I agree with your observation. However there are some women who could do it (even if Hester, who appears to weigh less than 120 pounds counting combat boots, wouldn't be among them) and IMHO they should not be denied the opportunity."
Opportunity? What is this an internship? A promotion? A chance to be a grad student?
Combat arms is not an opportunity. It is something that has to be done and it is critical to our way of life that we win.
So when will man caves be banned?
I do not want better behaved Marines. I want more competent Marines unleashing hell on America's enemies.
Further, I do not care if they are able to solve complex problems if the result is more dead Marines. I want them to kill others in great numbers until the will of the enemy is sapped.
wholelottasplainin' said...
Achilles asserted w/o evidence:
"People whose job is to go defeat and kill other people generally behave badly."
My only evidence is being in Ranger Battalion. There were 2 things we were good at: killing people and waking up our first sergeants at 3 in the morning.
Oh yeah, Revisionist History 101 certainly does teach we lost the war in Vietnam.
But actual history [Cliffs Notes as it were] shows we left in 1972 after a negotiated peace where the North was to (and did) stay north. We promised military equipment and funds to the South. Seemed to be working well. Then, in 1975 the Democrats in Congress decided to pull funding of defensive efforts of South Vietnam. Tanks flowed south shortly thereafter.
Ooops, the Peace accords may have been '73.... memory check engine light is blinking.
John Mosby,
You do realize that a 50% decrease in the opportunity to make general means that the likelihood of making full colonel, light colonel, major, etc. is also affected. Or did you have some way of magically women to generals without putting them through the lower ranks? Yes, if an O-3 is at the end of his initial obligation, and is deciding whether he should stay in or not, and is told that his likelihood of promotion to O-4 was just cut significantly so that there could be more women generals, there is a much higher likelihood that he will get out. How is that so hard to comprehend?
Achilles said...
don't feed the trolls, I just file them in a list of people that I never ever again respond to.
There is also a practice in the military that at a certain rank (and subject to whether the group is expanding or contracting) is "advance or leave". Cutting down the pathways to advance means a lot of good men will leave even if not their choice.
Helo, you don't have to reduce the pool of O-6's to reduce the number of O-7's. You just select fewer of the O-6s. That's why the selection percentage goes down.
Suppose the Army had just two branches: killers and supporters. And suppose it had 100 LT's per year group of each branch. And suppose the selection rate at each rank up to O-6 is 50%, for both branches.
So:
Rank Killers Supporters
LT 100 100
CPT 50 50
MAJ 25 25
LTC 12 12
COL 6 6
Now suppose the Army needs only 2 BG's and wants them both to be killers. So the COL to BG selection rate for killers is 33% and for supporters is 0%.
In the next year group, of the same size, the Army decides it wants one killer BG and one supporter BG. The selection rate for killers has gone down to 17%, and the selection rate for supporters has gone up to 17%. But the number of COL's in both branches remained the same. So did the number of LTC's, MAJ's, CPT's, and LT's.
Note that nowhere in this hypo did I say 'men' or 'women.' If the supporters have some women among their 100 LT's each year, then some of the COLs they have 20 years later will be women, which means some of the BG's selected from those COLs will be women.
The real world numbers are more complex, but the important point is that there are far, far more COLs than ever will be BG's. That is a very narrow career gate. The COL slots are not holding pens for future BG's - they are slots for currently-needed COLs. Changing the distribution of BG slots does nothing to the size of the lower-ranked population.
JSM
The Drill SGT said...
Achilles said...
"don't feed the trolls, I just file them in a list of people that I never ever again respond to."
To an extent I agree but I also differ. It is a 5 step process.
First step: I humiliate them.
Second step: I explain to them what I wish to happen to them.
Third Step: Ignore them
Fourth step: ...
Fifth step: profits!
I also didn't get around to saying how much I appreciated the comment you made above. Some things are very conceptually easy. The battle drills for example. They are easy to learn and to execute. What people don't understand is how hard they are to execute when there are lives on the line and you are getting shot at.
Ho-hum - another environmental catastrophe in California that just never occurred before anywhere in the entire world. Not even a return to the stone age will save them.
So where are all the knife-carrying ISIS killers when you need them? Or maybe we need more drug-crazed shooters at schools and movie theaters to reduce the number of nature-hating residents wasting water by living in a desert.
Your initial statement in this line of reasoning:
"One of the arguments for women in combat arms is that pretty much only combat-arms officers become generals, so keeping women out of the combat arms is a de-facto glass ceiling.
No one seems to explore the other possible solution: making generals out of more non-combat-arms officers"
So the intent of your plan is to make more generals out of non-combat women officers. Now if you are going to do that, you either have to increase the pool of non-combat women colonels, or else lower the quality of the selectees. Increasing the pool of female colonels decreases the pool of male colonels. Etc.
Better behaved? In a war zone?
Of course the blind law prof ignores the fact that women in the ranks creates a security risk due to the natural compulsion of the men to protect them. And of course there is the sex issue. Don't be stupid.
I understand why the responses in this post are being purged. I just want this link posted to fight the revisionism of our history:
https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/truth-about-vietnam-war
We won the Vietnam war. The Democrats chose to lose it. There was a signed ceasefire in 1972. The North had ceased aggression and surrendered after we bombed their industrial zones. The democrats stopped arms resupply and the North resumed their attacks. Without resupply the South lost. Millions of people were killed in the resulting purges.
We won the Vietnam war. The Democrats chose to lose it. There was a signed ceasefire in 1972.
while I agree and am not going to bother looking it up, I think the Reds walked away from the talks in the fall of 72. Linebacker II was in late Dec 72 and they came back to the peace talks in early Jan 73 and signed later that month.
Alright, goddam it, enough talking about. Make an all woman marine battalion. Give them all the material support and air support we give a battalion composed of men. Throw them into the next conflict and see how they do. Question settled.
PS: BG is not the big gate fr the combat support types.
Each Division needs two BG's one of which is typically a non-combat arms type. plus lots of odd staff jobs. the culling of non-combat types beings at 2 stars except those being groomed for select non-combat 3 star jobs. As far as I can recall, there is really only 1 non-combat 4 star job in the Army. The commander of the Army Material Cmd wears 4 stars. He was a Signal Corps officer, but is an honorary killer, having commanded the Signal Bn in the 82nd Airborne :)
This is really a moot issue. The anti-native immigration and reproduction policies in liberal societies are designed to dilute and cow populations. If liberals are successful, then there will only be intra-national, sectarian violence (a la Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Baltimore, etc.) in the future. This will have the appearance of reducing killing through diversity and privacy, with the occasional mass murder of eligible victims in low risk zones, mass killing by the abortion industry, and clinical cannibalism by the Planned Parenthood corporation.
Anyway, send women into combat armed with scalpels. They can be trained by the abortion industry in efficient planning methods. The feminist revolution has already reduced women to taxable commodities, assured a state of perpetual pregnancy, denied their role in evolutionary fitness, and undermined their dignity through transgender conflation. I guess some people still believe in an objective truth outside of the State-established pro-choice cult.
Helo and drill: The O-6 to O-7 cut is still pretty deep. Without looking up stats, I would bet my very old bars that it's under 10% for all branches. And it's a very small number on an absolute scale as well: Only 150 BGs in the whole army.
Which means you don't have to grow or shrink the COL pool of any branch to find generals. Especially when CS/CSS outnumber combat arms to begin with.
Having said all this, just as I claim that no young stud bases his career choices on the chances of getting a star, I really don't think any young studette does either. I still think it would be good for the nation to get more stars on non-combat arms types. I never needed my generals to provide me with yet another layer of rucksack packing lists; I did need them to figure out how to get me the information and materiel I needed.
JSM
Ellen Haring, a senior fellow at the advocacy group and a reserve Army colonel
Can you say "confirmation bias"?
Knew ya could.
Infantry is a really crappy branch to make rank in. That's true of all the combat arms. The pyramid heirarchy is brutal. You need a whole bunch of lieutenants, somewhat fewer captains, and then the hammer starts falling.
It's so brutal that the Army details officers OUT of infantry after a few years. Officers will assess MI with a branch detail of infantry, for example, meaning they do their first few years infantry and then do their advanced course and transition to MI.
You want to make O5 and O6 the infantry is the LAST branch you want to be in.
For that reason, the infantry O5s and O6s are superb. They'll be head and shoulders above their peers from other branches, because they've already survived the severe winnowing process.
The support branches are poles, not pyramids. You can be a middling officer but still get your O-4s and a lot of O-5s no problem. These guys would have their walking papers in the combat arms. The branch detail system relieves some of the pressure.
No woman who wants to get rank in her right mind will volunteer for the infantry.
Women in infantry is delusionally stupid. Full stop.
The Army's been culling out soldiers with the balls to point that out publicly for some time.
John S Mosby, you were a Confederate cavalry commander and have no credibility here.
Ha! I learned from failure. Our personnel policies in the CSA were crap.
JSM
john mosby said...
Helo:
General officers. O-7's. 30-something years in service. Started out in a year group of about 2000 infantry LT's. Did any of those guys make a life decision in 1985 based on whether they had a 2% vs 5% chance of making general? C'mon.
Must not have ever known any junior officers. Any career oriented officer bases ALL their decisions on how they will affect promotion. Including their future spouse. Had a navigator explain to his wife to be that he intended to make admiral, and that she would be making it along with him. She would host the parties, be active in the wives support groups, and do whatever else was needed so that someday she could be Mrs. Admiral. He was doing it openly; I'm sure lot's of others do it quietly behind the scenes.
My father is a survivor of the Battle for Outpost Harry in the Korean War. The notion of women in combat has always been laughable to him. I have come to think that the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s, as we used to call it, has done far more lasting damage to our society than the Cultural Revolution did to the Chinese. Of course, we haven't gotten around to parading false thinkers through the streets as yet, but it can't be far off.
False Grackle
"t also concluded that adding women to all-male groups would probably improve the behavior of the groups as a whole."
But the all male units were better.
Look, women don't have to be in combat roles. Lets have women get killed in combat roles and then determine if unit cohesion is better or worse. Don't want to hear about how women need to do more if we aren't willing to let them die in combat like the guys.
Drill Sgt wrote:
while I agree and am not going to bother looking it up, I think the Reds walked away from the talks in the fall of 72. Linebacker II was in late Dec 72 and they came back to the peace talks in early Jan 73 and signed later that month.
And if that was the case then we should have resumed the bombings, until they came back to the table agreed to a ceasefire and honored it.
The bombings got them to the table to agree to a ceasefire. We ceased the bombings they reneged. So continue with the bombings.
The dems have this idea that there is "nothing we can possibly do". you can do what was done to get the to agree to a cease fire. If that isn't sufficient, bomb them even harder. Yet, they take the opposite view. The only one holding any cards is our enemy even though we just beat them. But no, we can't possibly do something like bomb them or something. That would never work. IT JUST DID!
Vietnam is almost a mirror of Iraq. After expending much blood and treasure we actually achieve a victory. In that case we actually get a cease fire out of the deal. And then the dems almost literally piss on our victory and let the guys we just routed regroup and take over the country. I'm sure the people who were reliant on our backing were cursing the day they ever aligned themselves with such turncoats. If you're in heaven, don't blame all americans. Blame the democrats.
And then a few years later we get a movie about the killing fields in cambodia and how we are supposed to care deeply at the inherent banality of evil of human kind. Those guys killing all the people and committing genocide seemed kind of familiar. I wonder where I saw them before. Hmmm. let me think. Wait a second, wasn't that a direct outcome of our withdrawal from Vietnam?
Thanks democrats.
Democrats losing won wars is almost a truism at this point. And the holocaust follows:
"http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/08/09/vietnam-iraq-democrats-lose-won-wars-holocaust-to-follow/
Steps:
1) win the war or at least maintain stability and rout army
2)Dont maintain gains by keeping troops present or backing cease fires with resumed force
3) watch what happens when we withdraw and the most barbaric actors step into the vacuum we created and start killing people.
4) wave hands as if to say "what are you going to do?"
How about, don't do steps 2 and 3.
"The Vietnam War was won… until Democrats chose to intentionally lose it.
In November of 1974, three months after Nixon resigned in disgrace, Democrats won a landslide in the mid-term elections. The new Democrat majority in Congress de-funded our promised military aid to South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong made their move. Without American aid, the South Vietnamese were doomed.
Then-President Gerald Ford literally begged Congress to restore funding. By this time things had deteriorated to a point where the South would have also required American airstrikes to hold on.
Democrats adamantly refused funding, making the airstrikes futile.
Within a year, South Vietnam surrendered to the communist North.
America’s indifference also assured that the dominoes of Cambodia and Laos fell, and the holocaust known as the Killing Fields began. Before it was over, two to five million innocents were butchered — all because Democrats were determined to lose a war that had already been won and which could have stayed won with nothing more than a very small financial commitment and limited airstrikes.
There’s no reason South Vietnam could not have maintained its sovereignty just as South Korea has for over a half-century … except that Democrats wanted Vietnam lost because saying “I told you so” is far more important to Democrats than the lives of a few million brown people. "
For a group that decries war, they don't seem to mind millions having to pay the price for their cowardice.
@jr565
"Vietnam is almost a mirror of Iraq."
Vietnam was almost a mirror of the Korean War. There, we saved the South from the Communist North, and kept our promises and troops there to build, sustain and protect the South. Notwithstanding some friction between HST and MacArthur, it was a heroic effort by both our policy makers and the troops.
My experience and opinions:
For the most part, we're not talking about men and women in these situations, we're talking about kids who are trying to become men and women. Most of the new arrivals in any military unit, particularly combat arms, are less than one year out of high school and full of the same raging hormones (male and female) that the "yes means yes" delusionals are trying to outlaw on college campuses. Doesn't work on campus, won't work in the military. Where there are young people of mixed genders thrown together in intimate conditions over long periods of deployment, there is going to be fraternization and sexual misconduct, and that, not capability differences between the genders, is what destroys individual units. And, the fraternization and sexual misconduct is initiated by both genders and often ruins a lot of good peoples' careers who would otherwise have gone on to serve with honor and distinction, male and female. That is not to say that men and women can't serve together, only that the gender differences are not something that can be accommodated without the type of applied reasoning that does not fit well in a politically driven environmnet, and that's what we have in spades in today's military. Just take a look how difficult it has become to courts-martial a soldier who deserted from a guard post in a combat situation in Afghanistan. Yet, civilians expect officers or NCOs to take on the administration's political agenda while staying employed? The bottom line is we have never had better quality men and women in the military than we do today, but they are being poorly led and callously manipulated for political reasons. That is what this article is really about, and it is a tremendous disservice to them. Hopefully, it won't also end up bringing tragedy to the country.
Grackle said...
My father is a survivor of the Battle for Outpost Harry in the Korean War.
My Regt (w/o me of course) was there. 64th Tank. "We Pierce"
So, there were measurable results in one direction, but there's only a 'probably' in another direction.
Probably.
As in, "I'll probably win the lottery".
As already noted, the battlefield is won with simple solutions, which may include complex technology.
I once read the official report on integration of the Navy officer corps. As a trial, experienced Black Chief Petty Officer volunteers were sent through OCS and then assigned aboard ships. Because they had on average over a decade of experience running ships as CPOs, they did well running the ships as Lieutenants. Because they had years of experience dealing with officers and men, they had command ability, too. They excelled as officers.
And with them as the first examples, the Navy saw a lot of acceptance of Black officers.
It would be wise for the Marines to emulate this integration method, finding some experienced female Marines in non-combat roles who could be transitioned successfully to combat assignments.
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