Should Women Fight in Combat?

Your personal attack on me as an individual is irrelevant, and only means that you fear to address my argument. You had given my argument as being that men are unwilling to harm women. That was a severe misstatement of what I had said. I said that most normal men would find it immensely distasteful to kill women by shooting them or in another form of hand to hand combat.

Is that, or is it not, a constraint placed upon their liberty?

And your argument re: children is innane. The age requirement for military service is applied uniformly and without consideration of gender, race, or other factors. Further, it does not deny anyone the liberty to serve his or her nation, it merely requires that they wait until they reach a certain age to do so. This is no more and no less a reasonable requirement than are the physical or mental requirements individuals must meet.

That dog won't hunt.

Brandon you seem unable to concede a point to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It's what I like aboiut you the most. Makes me laugh.

People who have strength of their convictions and know why they believe what they believe usually don't concede the point.

Actually Brandon's comparison of women and kids vs men in military service was spot on. If the only rationale the pro-women-in-combat folks can come up with is that it is possible that a woman could qualify, it is far more likely that a 13, 14, 15, 16-year old boy would qualify than will a woman qualify. So why not?

If the issue is 'rights', then you immediately start down a slippery slope of comparitive criteria: ie, it becomes 'unfair' to have standards that disqualify most women. so standards to qualify should be lowered. It is 'unfair' to disqualify a person purely because of age, so the age barriers to enlistment should be lowered. After all, if the boys can qualify, there are no doubt more 60-year-old men who could meet the qualifications than will be possible for the vast majority of women.

Or returning to my point in my post to Scrat on the previous page, his son is too valuable to be compromised by lowered standards or distractions for personnel in combat. The number one and only important factor is that the guys have the best possible training and equipment to do their job and the best chance of staying alive while doing it.

A combat unit is no place for social experimentation, political correctness, or fuzzy notions of fairness that in any way puts the soldier at higher risk.

That's also true of unthinking ideologues.

In my opinion, if they are 'unthinking', they don't know why they believe what they believe or sometimes even what they believe. Thus they believe only by rote with no strength of conviction behind it. Conviction, delusion, and fanaticism are separate things.

Fine. My point is that someone's unwillingness ever to change their mind does not automatically mean that person is a rational person of conviction. (Frankly, that's the least likely thing for it to prove.)

It's discrimination based on age. The rule about women in combat is applied uniformly too except for the factor of gender. The rule about children is applied uniformly except for the factor of age. Duh.


Why should those kids who are absolutely qualified now wait? On what basis do you deny them this career choice? Your entire argument for putting women in combat is that despite the fact most are not suited physically or mentally, that should not constrain the ones who are. Okay, why deny children the right to fight in combat, if they are physically and mentally capable, based purely on your own prejudices? The only thing you don't like about this question is that it puts a hole in your argument.

Scrat writes


You'll get no argument from me here so long as the criteria for what constitutes rational conviction applies equally to all sides of the issue.

This discussion looks to be a moot point for the present. It looks like women are already in combat.


Car Blast, Gunfire Kill 4 Marines in Iraq

By FRANK GRIFFITHS
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The lethal ambush of a convoy carrying female U.S. troops in Fallujah underscored the difficulties of keeping women away from the front lines in a war where such boundaries are far from clear-cut.

The suicide car bomb and ensuing small-arms fire killed at least four Marines, and a Marine and a sailor were missing and presumed dead, the military said Saturday. At least one woman was killed, and 11 of the 13 wounded troops were female.

The ambush late Thursday also suggested Iraqi insurgents may have regained a foothold in Fallujah, which has been occupied by U.S. and Iraqi forces since they regained control of the city from insurgents seven months ago.

The women were part of a team of Marines assigned to various checkpoints around Fallujah. The Marines use females at the checkpoints to search Muslim women ``in order to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities,'' a military statement said.

The group al-Qaida in Iraq claimed it carried out the ambush, one of the single deadliest attacks against the Marines - and against women - in this country.
Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette, 21, from Cranston, R.I., died in Thursday's attack, the Defense Department said Friday. Three male Marines also were killed, the military said. One was identified by his family as Cpl. Chad Powell, 22, from northern Louisiana.
The high number of female casualties spoke to the lack of real front lines in Iraq, where U.S. troops are battling a raging insurgency and American women soldiers have participated in more close-quarters combat than in any previous conflict.

Link

Yes-- because, IMO, it's not as much about whether they are being hurt too much or whatever, it's about restricting someone from doing something. Once you compromise a detail, there's no drawing the line.

I have no great love for fighting or all that ballsy stuff the military does, but most women I've seen who are in the military are really manly and usually join the military to get down and dirty.
As for which is better, a big body or a small body: well, no one is stopping men from joining the army, so it doesn't take anything away (i.e, you are still going to have as many men/ big bodies are you had before). I always thought that women joining the army would add to the troops.

Perspective from my very own Congress'man', whom I adore, to your ear (okay eyes but that doesn't sound as good):

The Woman Warrior
By Ruth Marcus

Tuesday, May 24, 2005; Page A17
Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican, is the only female military veteran in Congress, and on meeting her you might well guess at that background without being told. Third-generation Air Force and a member of the third class of female cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Wilson has the erect posture of a member of the armed services. She speaks briskly, her voice low and, on the day last week that I saw her, full of controlled fury.

It was Friday morning, a time when Wilson would ordinarily have been on her way home to her family in Albuquerque. She'd stayed behind to fight a provision, inserted in a defense authorization bill that will hit the House floor this week, to keep female service members out of combat. Seated behind a desk decorated with a bumper sticker proclaiming "We Love Jet Noise," with pictures of her children flashing on a computer screen-saver behind her, the 44-year-old Wilson took unusually direct aim at her colleagues.

"The people who are pushing this policy change intend to close positions, not open them," she said. "I think it's offensive. We've got women thousands of miles from home doing dangerous work and for the first time in history the Congress is going to pass a law restricting how the Army can assign its soldiers? But not all of its soldiers -- just women. What are they thinking?"

Under current policy, women aren't assigned to ground combat units. Proponents of the change Wilson opposes argue that it would simply codify those rules. Wilson isn't pressing to lift the restriction on women in combat, but she contends that enshrining the current limits in law would send the wrong signal (women aren't equally valued) at the wrong time (in the midst of a recruiting shortage and when commanders in the field need more flexibility, not less).

If there is an issue that evokes even more passion than gays in the military, it is women in combat. The arguments are couched in the dry language of upper-body strength and unit cohesion, but at its core the debate is over whether women belong at war. Do Americans feel differently about female soldiers being killed and wounded and held captive in Iraq than men? If so -- and the focus on Jessica Lynch suggests that for many Americans the answer is yes -- then what roles are permissible for women in a conflict with no front? After all, as Wilson says, "A woman driving a water truck or flipping burgers in the mess tent can come under attack."

Perhaps no two members of Congress -- certainly no two Republicans -- better embody the nation's unresolved and conflicting attitudes toward women in the military than Wilson and Rep. Duncan Hunter, the San Diego Republican who chairs the House Armed Services Committee. Like Wilson, Hunter has the military in his blood: His father was an artillery officer in the South Pacific during World War II; Hunter himself was an Army Ranger who flew helicopter combat missions in Vietnam; his son enlisted in the Marines after Sept. 11 and later served in Iraq.

When it comes to women in the armed forces, Hunter, 56, is from the old school. Five years ago, for example, he backed a provision to bar the Navy from opening submarines to women. "The morale of Navy wives already has suffered from allowing women to serve on Navy ships," he warned.

In the current debate, he argues that the fact that female service members can be killed flipping burgers doesn't justify putting them deliberately closer to combat. In an interview yesterday, he cited the "egregious wounds suffered by personnel in combat, the ability of the soldiers or Marines to deal with those wounds and continue to work and continue to fight, the total lack of privacy you have on the front lines where there are not separate locker rooms. "

Wilson, a relative moderate, is removed from Hunter by dint of her generation, gender and branch of service. She spent her military years not in the heat of battle but as a Rhodes scholar, earning a doctorate in international relations, writing a book on international law, and working on arms control issues in Europe.

In Congress, she served on Armed Services until this year, when she was forced to quit because the chairman of the Commerce Committee refused to let her continue to serve on two top-tier panels. (The chairman had wanted Wilson off his committee altogether after she sided with Democratic demands for cost estimates on the Medicare prescription drug bill.) Wilson tangled with Hunter, too; last year she criticized him for closing a hearing on abuse of prisoners in Iraq. She can be "a little obstinate," Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said this year.

In the latest manifestation of that trait, Wilson read to the group of reporters assembled in her office from the language of the provision she has in her sights. The amendment defines direct combat in part as being "well forward on the battlefield." In this war, Wilson asked, "Which way is forward?" That question, with its layers of potential meaning, is at the essence of what the House is being called on to decide.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/23/AR2005052301344.html