“You and I, playing the game for a big part of our lives, understand the thinking going into this...If they toss combat career fields into the works, and government loves to play the diversity game, the same thing will happen...”
I can’t say I understand the thinking, if it is indeed any more detailed or complete than panicked reactions to the latest crisis, or diktats from political leadership.
While I do deem fitness important, I have for long suspected that the emphasis on fitness has more to do with the service depts desiring to minimize costs associated with poor fitness and chronic disease resulting from it. Applies to long-term costs associated with aging and eventual retired populations.
I’ve read the unclassified literature for years and confess to steadily mounting concerns over the burdens laced on foot troops, chiefly over the increasing weight of gear and weapons they’re expected to carry. Certainly, average females are not capable of packing the loads carried by average males, but males aren’t doing so well either, PEO Soldier is best by problems involving stress and repetitive motion injuries.
Not amount of moral parenting, “good upbringing,” “right living,” or training/conditioning is going to solve these problems. Indeed, no solution will be possible until some changes occur. Combat and preparation for it are exceeding the upper limits of the human body.
“...I have for long suspected that the emphasis on fitness has more to do with the service depts desiring to minimize costs associated with poor fitness and chronic disease resulting from it.”
That’s in the outside world. The military spits out disablement faster than any business in the world for its size. You can expect 30% or you hid in a bunker for your career. Many branches of the our military complex not only expect you as a member but demand you carry a gun, and be expected to be sent downrange to use it.
But the most compelling fact is when a 115 pound woman is expected to pick up and carry a 200+ pound man or woman retreating under fire for a couple of hundred yards. Even with proper lifting techniques, that’s at best a stretch.
But there are other issues to look at. There is also one very interesting point that is not normally brought up and that one was that a good many women were returned back to the lower 48 pregnant. In a study by the Oxford Academy through Military Medicine when there was a comparison for gynecology appointments at Camp Doha, Kuwait, from August 2003 through April 2004, of the 1,737 visits, 77 demonstrated a positive pregnancy test (4.4%). And that’s at only one location. That may not seem like a large number but it has a direct effect on force readiness. If that is a consistent number there were 41,000 women assigned to desert storm and that would encompass over a thousand, closer to two thousand, just pregnancies alone that would bring a troop home. So financially and slot filling capacity is compromised possibly in very special and required career fields. And that would compromise redeployment at a later date causing the member to opt out of the military for family reasons. So the capacity of available troops to deploy gets smaller based solely on women’s health issues and pregnancies causing deployment of their men counterparts to increase the deployment need.
At Doha, Ninety-two percent had an ultrasound. Fifty-four percent of visits were active duty, followed by Reserve, National Guard, and civilian government employees. Seventy-seven percent of the soldiers became pregnant in country. Tack that on to the pressure of being downrange with less than directed health support and cleanliness issues there are health issues solely a woman’s situation besides menstruation and menstrual irregularities. There’s issues like urinary tract health, including urinary incontinence and pelvic floor disorders; and such disorders as bacterial vaginosis, vaginitis, uterine fibroids, and vulvodynia. Other disorders and conditions that affect only women include Turner syndrome, Rett syndrome, and ovarian and cervical cancers. And they are not near prepared to handle these situations in the field.
So besides the public appearance outlook of trying to satisfy the women’s wishes, many probably wrong, of joining and expecting deployment into a bad scenario, it has every appearance of failing and getting other people killed. All for the vote because congress doesn’t deploy anything as much as they do voters.
wy69