Come on - remember racially segregated units?
The problem is the transition to an attitude of "us" vs. "the enemy" from one of "US men," "US women" and "the enemy." It will come.
I do agree that women should meet the same physical strength and other requirements that are required of the men.
Those nurses at the battlefield hospitals have always been in danger - they should have been trained and armed earlier than they were.
That's the old standard argument when defending the "women in combat" notion. It is also specious. Are only the top 5% of black men comparable in strength to the bottom 5% of white men? No? Then there is no basis to keep them from combat; they do not degrade the overall effectiveness and unit-cohesion of fighting units. Emotional relationships between men and women are also ignored by this poor argument.
This is an apples-oranges comparison. The physiological differences between men of different races are negligible, and relevant-to-combat differences nonexistent. The differences between men and women, however, are considerable; moreover those differences have relevance in combat situations. The current system acknowleges those differences in differing physical fitness standards for men and women.
I do agree that women should meet the same physical strength and other requirements that are required of the men.
This is a contradition with your apples-oranges comparison. If in fact women were held to the same standard, far fewer women would qualify, because there's at least one standard deviation of difference -- which is why there are different standards.