“Rick only spoke the truth. Men can’t help having different feelings for women than they do for men. Guys don’t deal well with seeing women killed or maimed,”
That’s exactly how I interpreted his statement. A decent man’s instincts are to defer to, and protect, women. If those instincts cause a man in battle to react too slowly to danger, even for a split second, God help him/us. For women to get their little panties in a wad over the statement is another case of political correctness run amok. It’s exactly what blacks do when their fragile little antennae pick up something they can twist to make them victims.
He didn’t say women are weaker or inferior.
Anyhow, having women in more intensive combat situations was a dismal failure in Israel. Maybe we should learn.
I'm also not going to try to tell the Israelis how to run their army. There is no other Western country in the modern world (and in most ways the Israelis are a Western country) that has experienced anything close to their situation in Israel with a need for combat readiness. The closest parallel would be South Korea, but that's a cold war, not a shooting war like Israel has faced repeatedly in the last six decades. If drafting women but not putting them in combat units works for Israel, well, as far as I'm concerned, we might as well let the generals decide what works best in their context.
Now having said all that, let's get real. There no longer are defined “front lines” in the types of wars we now fight, so no matter what kind of jobs we allow women to perform in the military, we must train them for combat. The first woman to receive the Silver Star since World War II did so as a military policewoman guarding a convoy that got attacked. She successfully used her training to defend the convoy during 45 minutes of intensive combat, literally in the trenches with grenades and bullets.
Read this NPR story about Hester: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/22/133847765/silver-star-recipient-a-reluctant-hero
That's what women in the military have to face today. Even in World War II, several Army nurses received the Silver Star for evacuating a hospital under fire.
Most women don't want to do that kind of thing. Some women do. My read of the situation is that the type of women who want to serve in that type of role are generally tomboy women with a long history of aggressiveness and often were successful female athletes in high school. I don't have a problem with the very few women who want that kind of life doing jobs that most men don't want to do — but only if they're good enough to do the jobs as well as their male colleagues.
BTW, I know very well that women are quite capable of being excellent shots, and a well-trained tiny woman with a gun is quite capable of taking out a big guy no matter how physically strong he is.
My own mother, a girly-girl sorority sister type, had a father who was a football coach and loved to hunt and fish. My mother, back in her journalism school days, routinely embarrassed men and even police officers by outshooting them — and that was back in the 1950s when women simply did **NOT** do things like hunt and shoot. She was recruited to join the military as a public affairs officer but never did so; I think she probably would have enjoyed the military life, especially being able to outshoot most of the men around her. I think we underestimate women if we think some of them are not capable of doing as well if not better than the guys — and sometimes it's the littlest women who make the best soldiers. As the old saying goes, dynamite comes in small packages.