Women in military combat roles?
 

Obviously it works in movies like GI Jane and TV shows like Ultimate Force, putting a pretty little lady or two on an elite unit that would otherwise be a testosterone-filled sausage-fest. It also works in video games like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six. Reason being that it's good entertainment. But real life hardly ever works out like movies, TV, and video games.

There also exist a lot of myths and legends like Delta's infamous "funny platoon", a unit supposedly composed entirely of female shooters.

What do you guys think of the idea of women being allowed in combat roles and Special Operations in reality? The Israelis have recently started opening combat roles to women, but obviously the level of military readiness in Israel is quite different to the United States. I've read on MP.net that Canadian JTF2 allows women to enter Selection and that Polish GROM has female operators.

So... opinions?

For spec ops its a no go. Theres the higher chance of capture and things going to shit, and captors will try to get information out of the men by using the woman as leverage. Its mens natural instinct to protect women. This is one reason the military doesn't do it.

For standard combat, like patrols around Iraq and such, why not? I know people who were deployed and saw women in combat, one who took 8 gunshot wounds on convoy escort and kept on firing away at terrorists. I will say however, women should be required to do what a man can do. The whole "since tehre women they can do less pushups and a longer timed run" is shit. But if they can do the same requirements as a man, they can do the same job.

In SpecOps no idea, that works for Hollywood (maybe in some years). But women are great for peacekeeping, like the MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti).

I'm serving in combat with women right now, and frankly it's a non-issue. A soldier is a soldier, man or woman. There are no occupations left in the CF that are gender segregated.

As for the old argument about women getting raped if captured, well, I've got news for you. If you are a man and get captured in Afghanistan, chances are you're going to get raped. This is not bashing Islam (which I have no patience for), or gay panic, or demonizing the enemy, it is a simple fact of life. In fact over here, because of Pashtunwali, women stand LESS chance of getting raped than men.

Its more that if several soldiers are captured, a terrorist will threaten to kill or torture the women to make male prisoners talk, this is actually quite effective, as men crack to protect a woman way easier than to protect other men.

Personally I'm against women in combat for a variety of reasons. I'm not going into it because it can get political. I will put one point out though. I've read that Islamic fighters do not surrender when it is a women as oppose to a man because they consider it shameful to surrender to a women.

From what I've read the Israelis stopped using women in combat units because of the negative effect it had on male soldiers morale when women were wounded/killed.

I can say as a fact that the British had women in undercover roles in Northern Ireland and those women had the same chance of combat as their male counterparts and as such recived the same level of training. The only real differance between the two was that the women tended not to have the leverage to fully control a G3KA4 and that they prefered the Walther PPK to the Browning High Power.

It really sounds to me like a case-by-case basis is what's necessary to determine it. I know plenty of women who would probably perform better in combat than I would. I don't let that bruise my ego; I think that if they can fulfill the demands of the job, they should be allowed to do it.

But statistically, we do have to face facts: In general, women tend to be less physically and mentally capable than men. So women will inevitably be under-represented in combat roles no matter what. If the forces of political correctness start demanding that we scale down the requirements so that women can meet them, then I would be strongly opposed.

Yeah, I've heard the same thing. The Pashtun are so afraid of women that they actually like little boys better. It's a running joke about them.

Then how do you explain the Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War surrendering to newscrews, many of which had female reporters? :D

Yeah, but that's something you can train them to deal with because it's based mostly on culture. It doesn't strike me as a compelling enough reason.

As I've said, I think that even if SF were open to women, there would still be almost no women (if any) who qualified. So it strikes me as a moot point.

How do you explain Saddam's Iraqi army being considered an army to begin with? :D

Good point. :D

But seriously, they were mostly Muslims, I'm sure. Some of them probably had Islamist tendencies. And anyway, the jihadists are mostly cowards (aside from a select few Islamist groups who are decently tough).