Replies

When I was in the Army, the issue was always raised by female commissioned officers. You see, the majority of the General Officer slots are combat arms, from which the females were barred. I doubt that very many enlisted women want to be in the Infantry or other combat arm, but the officers want their opportunity to wear stars on their hats.

The one possibility I can see is changing the Army Physical Fitness Test scoring from male/female with steps for age ranges to Combat Arms, Combat Support Arms and Combat Service Support Arms.

While I was still on active duty, we would occasionally have to suffer through visits/inspections by a group of middle-aged ladies from the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service (DACOWITS). We dreaded those visits because their only interest seemed to be in "exposing" some awful thing male leaders were doing (such as allowing the Staff NCOs to sponsor gogo dancers at a unit party) and they would look for any opportunity to insist that women could fill positions that males were currently occupying. None of these ladies had ever been in the service, so their perspective was uninfluenced by any known reality but they had a great deal of political power (many of them were the wives of our political betters) and they were quite pleased to use it.

A battalion commander buddy of mine was chosen to host their latest fun visit and was worried sick about what to do. I told him to just let the ladies spend a full day on an artillery gun section (we had M-198 155mm howitzers) and work in the gun crew's positions. He did exactly that: they wore the helmets and flak jackets in 29 Palms' sweltering heat, they helped emplace and displace the howitzer (all 7 1/2 tons of it), helped unload section gear and spread the camo nets,and helped load and fire about 80 rounds of 96 pound M107 HE. Big day for them but the charm wore off within minutes and towards the middle of of the day were asking, nay pleading, to be taken out of the fun to go home.

Needless to say, their report agreed whole-heartedly that artillery firing sections were too intense for women.

Guess we have to learn those lessons all over again, don't we?