If you don't have enough eligible men, take steps to attract them. Revamp your recruiting media. Don't aggressively integrate women who are in 99% of cases also not eligible (in a sane world.)
When a platoon gets back from 3 weeks on patrol in the back of beyond Afghanistan, instead of stripping in a courtyard and getting hosed off, they have to figure out how to handle the one or two girls in the group. When facilities consist of a piss pipe and a hole in the ground in the corner of a foxhole (per a friend who spent 6 weeks straight in said foxhole with 3 other guys on the edge of a valley in Afghanistan, with insurgent snipers taking potshots all the while) they have to figure out how to take a shit with a girl sitting 2 feet away. When a 210 pound guy gets his leg shot off, better hope 110lb GI Jane doesn't have to carry 3 miles because that's the closest a medivac can land. When you've been getting shot for weeks and all you want to do is talk about those hot girls you saw in the Green Zone, better hope GI Jane isn't there to ruin the fun.
It needlessly complicates simple things and irreversibly damages the masculine warrior culture of combat arms.
...and that just scratches the surface. Men are men and women are women. Biology, testosterone and hormones wreak havoc on the level of discipline it takes to function as a team in combat.
Your #19: Spot on comments.
“The Israelis tried this experiment and it failed”
I didn’t know that. I just heard once upon a time that they started using women.
You say interesting things. I don’t think women are a good idea out on the frontline unless they are doing something like preparing food.
You always see people posting that “The Israelis do it” and “Women make the best snipers” and so on. They never drill down to the bedrock of fact that says that the Israelis tried and discarded women in combat roles, or that a female sniper may have individually been an outlier, or anything else specific about it.
Point is, to plan and execute, the military works off of average or median supply and performance expectations over a population, not how well one individual or a small group might do within the larger one.
Sensible people like you and I have fought a losing battle on this, and we are going to pay dearly for that lost battle as a military, and a country.
We have (apparently) as a society done the calculus (or just accepted the risk without actually doing the calculus) decided that the risk of having a female firefighter or a female police officer outweighs the possibility that a civilian in peril may lose their life or suffer greater injury due to the inability of a firefighter or police officer to perform a given physical task.
If that is what it is, that is what it is. If my house is on fire and I am incapacitated, either I am not getting carried down a ladder by a female firefighter, or the firefighting team is going to send a man up to get me instead of a woman.
But in combat, I am not, as a US citizen, willing to make that trade-off of capability in battle to open up advancement opportunities for someone simply because they are female. And as a soldier, I would not willingly make that trade-off unless it was forced on me...which it apparently is.
I think it is a crime. And when the piper comes looking for payment in actual future combat, the people who have pushed this most aggressively are going to either be screaming the loudest to hang someone for the military casualties or failure, or they are going to be long gone and never called to account.
Spending six weeks in a foxhole tells me our leaders are not aggressively pursuing the damn enemy. Let me tell you how an Infantry unit is supposed to run combat OPS/patrols. Now, this may be their basecamp, but; the location sounds more like an outpost. I was Infantry. I was an 11B then 11F before Infantry OCS, airborne and SF officer’s course. I had a company of mostly Rhade Montagnards in Vietnam with three great SF NCO’s as platoon leaders. We rarely operated with any arty support. Only some local security OPS were we within 15K’s of 105 howitzers. Most OPS were 50-70 plus K’s from our basecamp/HQ. We operated on the Cambodian border and mostly with 32 men total. We used a lot of cover and concealment to move and if we had to cross open ground I’d send a six man unit across with one carrying a radio so they looked like a six man recon team. Once they scouted the other side they’d radio back it was OK. We’d set up a perimeter at night with four eight man squads. Each squad had an M60 gunner and asst., an M79 man and 5 riflemen. Every rifleman had a LAW plus an M60 mortar round he carried in his ruck. One squad had my M60 mortar man who was good. We all put our M60 round in a stack near him. We had 50% awake in two shifts all night. We did not take a crap on OPS as we were given a handful of lomotil pills prior to any OP. When we came back we were given a brown bomber. That pill would send you running to the latrine. If a man needed to pee- he did not go more then a few feet off. We had TAC air on call 24/7 and helicopter gunships from 0900- 1600 hours.