Posted on 02/18/2012 7:20:22 AM PST by BarnacleCenturion
The Pentagon made big news last week when it announced it was opening up more combat positions to women in the U.S. military. These 14,000 positions include tank mechanics and front line intelligence officers. However, about one-fifth of active-duty military positions, including the infantry, combat tank units and special operations commando units, will remain off-limits.
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Last week’s rule change in the United States was largely a reflection of the fact that women are, to a large extent, already participating in combat. Despite the restrictions in place, 144 American women have been killed and 865 wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001, according to the Defense Department.
The number of countries that have opened front line combat positions is also larger than you might think (or than media reports sometimes suggest). A 2010 survey by the British Ministry of Defense listed Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania and Sweden as countries that allow women in “close combat roles,” defined as “engaging an enemy on the ground with individual or crew served weapons, while being exposed to hostile fire and to a high probability of direct physical contact with the hostile forces personnel.” Australia joined that list in September 2011 when it opened its front-line units — including one of the largest contingents in Afghanistan — to women.
A handful of other countries could probably also be added. South Korea has begun opening up more front line positions to women, including in artillery and armored divisions. Women have fought in Eritrea’s military since its war of independence from Ethiopia in 1991 — at one point they made up 30 percent of the country’s combat forces — and are required, along with men, to serve a year and a half of military service. Women have flown combat missions as fighter pilots for Britain, Pakistan, Serbia, South Africa, the United States and others.
In Israel, which is well known as one of the few countries where women are drafted, the policy is evolving. Santorum cited Israel as a country that doesn’t allow women on the front lines because of the psychological effect it has on men. But in fact, the Israeli military does allow women in the vast majority of combat positions.
The cry actually will be more along the lines of “sexual trauma” and it will be to the VA. It’s good for a lifelong disability check and no, I am no joking. Check out this shyster: http://www.2keller.com/library/disability-compensation-for-veterans-who-suffer-sexual-trauma.cfm
I don't have any combat experience. And I never served in any brigade.
You’re paranoid about a war that is never going to happen...so relax.
Even if we never face another major conventional ground war.....I will reiterate women have no place on today's battlefield unless it is rear echelon serving as nurses or clerks....at most, absolute MOST, they could be at a secure checkpoint to search female civilians - Free a man to fight.
And so we are clear, I am refering to military operations other than war (MOOTW), Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO), Counter-insurgency operations (COIN), as well as conventional warfare. If an SF unit, Battalion Landing Team, or Stryker Bgde, or any other combat arms unit, is being deployed....women should be anywhere out of the secure area.
I don't need to theorize about it, research it, consult a think tank for it, poll the audience, or phone a friend........I speak from multiple first hand experiences. I speak from my own first hand observations of women deployed to combat zones. I speak from four combat deployments with three different Marine infantry battalions. During the course of this, we were assigned to two different Army dvisions.
The best support I ever received from females outside of a secure area.....was when we met one of the female Marines from the Air Combat Element (ACE) during OIF I. The bases were still largely unsecured. We were at a major airport and assigned to secure the far side of the airport.
This female Marine, and two other guys saw us out setting up machinegun positions, so they came over to hang out for a bit. The guys in my platoon were out of cigarettes. She took off her blouse and pulled her t-shirt tighter and walked over to talk to the infantry guys in the 101st...........she came back 30-45 minutes later with two cartons of Marlboros for us. We were appreciative, but certainly didn't want her around if the shooting started.
MSF - to answer an earlier post, I was asking a rhetorical question. The last I had heard the Army unit stationed in Al-Anbar with us had 21 females get pregnant. That was when I was leaving.....in all probability, there were more after I left.
Further, I've also been to Korea and seen much of the defenses there. Yes, they fear a ground war. Another poster (might've been you MSF) mentioned ROK military women. We met two ROK Marines that were married to each other. We asked if this was allowed....one of the male ROK officers (in front of their females) shrugged and answered "what else are they good for." I've also been to places in Europe (will not divulge where) where we have defenses prepared for ground warfare.....so no, this is not delusional fantasy.
Lastly for this post, I've also done joint training with the Canadians; we were training them to do Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT). They have females in their infantry. They have difficulty carrying the gear and equipment and advancing it with any speed. Watching them carry M240G machineguns (which they call a G6) was pretty comical. Further, they (one Master Corporal in particular) couldn't handle criticism without getting emotional and crying.
Finally, one of the Marines asked her if their service had dress uniforms. When she responded "yes," the Marine told her "Good, because if you ever see combat you are going to get you and your soldiers f###ing killed and they'll need them to bury you in; and you can use that faggoty beret to dry your tears."
>>>>>>>>>>>>>So the Russians don’t allow female sailors? Well perhaps they have given them real world damage control ability tests and discovered (as the New York Fire Department has) that the vast majority of females cannot perform rigorous damage control and firefighting tasks. Then again, perhaps the Russians simply don’t want a shameful incident like this: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/apr/05/news/war-nofrat5 ?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well, I think so. Crowded locked spaces like navy ships, submarines are perfect place for psychotic attention whores to set fights over their genitals by the rest of the crew.
It is not acceptable in peacetime, let alone combat environment.
You're correct regarding the preparations for ground war that our allies have taken as well. The Swiss preparations are the most obvious, but anybody driving through Germany or Italy can notice the way many areas are prepared as alternate airfields, bridges are contructed to be blown, tank revetments with fields of fire in many areas are obvious to anybody who knows what to look for.
“This simply isn’t true.”
How do you explain the fact that warring countries opt for munitions that mainly injure but do not kill, thereby taking 2 combatants out of combat?
So in your world being injured is "more brutal" than being killed. Got it.
As a former Cold War “front line Intelligence” Airman, one of my assigned duties was to destroy all classified files while the rest of the base redeployed, or as we referred to it “bugged out”. I was to rejoin my squadron, as soon as possible, by commandeering any available military vehicle.
When I asked when and where I would be issued my weapon, I was told I was not authorized one, since my position was not designated as “combat”.
hmmmmm, improvise.. adapt.. overcome, all IAW the UCMJ.
Several years and a few assignments later, when PCSing to a new position outside of CONUS, my new title was “NCOIC of Combat Intelligence Operations” .
My personal weapons were listed on my official orders.
All 15 of them.
No, I was not involved in infantry, tank or commando operations, nor did I seek any of those positions.
OTOH, I was also not a CONUS based, base support staff, and non-combat ops, REMF.
As a former enlisted member of the USAF, I was never really all that enthusiastic about sending in Marines or Army infantry ground forces, when a single A-10 or B-52 would get the job done.
Actually it was me who wrote that comment.
Before I say anything else I want to make crystal clear that I am not advocating deliberately putting women in combat positions.
The question was about South Korea; baileybat is absolutely right that China has a long-term plan to deal with the United States and that concerns South Korea greatly, considering that a mass invasion by Chinese troops is within the memory of most Koreans’ grandparents or parents, if not something they experienced themselves.
South Korean military planners are preparing for a situation where their entire population may be faced with invasion, and where within living memory virtually their entire country north of the Pusan Perimeter was overrun by Communist hordes. That changes things considerably when issues of women's role in combat come up — the women are going to be there no matter what, and the question is whether to allow women who want military training to get military training.
That changes the question a great deal.
Repeat Offender, you are absolutely right that the South Korean military trains to fight a land war on their own soil. They've decided that having women in the military can be helpful. However, based on what I've seen, it appears the South Korean decision to allow women in military roles beyond nursing is based on a realistic evaluation of their ability to do the job, not driven by American-style ideas of women's equality.
My information on military training of South Korean women is both firsthand from Korean female officers and secondhand from male Korean officers and upper-level NCOs who have worked with women. You are absolutely correct that there is a lot of bias against women in the South Korean military, but that's typical for society in general in South Korea. Any Korean woman who wants to succeed in business, academics, or really any role outside the home other than the two traditional roles of nursing and teaching is going to have to put up with men publicly telling them they have no value in the workforce and ought to go home and be a wife and mother. We don't tolerate those comments in public in America anymore, but they're standard views for a large majority of older Korean men and a significant percentage of younger men as well. A woman can expect to be berated — and berated in public — if she steps outside traditional feminine roles.
In addition to information obtained from current Korean servicemembers themselves, I probably ought to add that my brother-in-law was in the South Korean Special Forces. My father-in-law was a combat medic. My niece is crosstrained as a civilian EMT and is in ROTC; her friends include a number of women in the South Korean officer corps and current cadets.
I can't call those women bad-ass dudes, but if I called them bad-ass dudettes I might get some bones broken. ;-)
Obviously they're not going to succeed in a hand-to-hand fight against a much larger man, apart from the element of surprise. However, the training for these women is considerably tougher than what Americans give men in comparable roles.
My niece did a good job of embarrassing American officers with her shooting skills, and there's a lot of truth to the point that if a woman knows how to use a rifle she won't need to worry about hand-to-hand combat. And yes, cunning_fish, you're right about Russian female snipers — I've sent my niece some videos of how deadly the Russian female snipers were to point out that there are precedents for her shooting abilities, and although she will never be able to use her skills to train as a sniper, she certainly could make herself useful if her unit gets pinned down somewhere.
The South Korean military seems to have accepted that if the daughter of a senior officer wants to serve in the military, she'll be allowed to do so, but she is going to get treated brutally by her trainers. Granted, men are also treated brutally in training, but the difference for female Korean soldiers is no matter how well they do their job, they'll have to put up with constant tormenting that they “aren't good enough to be a soldier and ought to go home and be a mom.” Women whose fathers are not from prestigious families will have a great deal more trouble getting into the service academies or officer training, but that would be true of their brothers as well.
Very few women choose to serve in the Korean military. I know a fair number of American soldiers who worked closely with Korean units and never saw a female Korean soldier (apart from nurses) in their entire time in South Korea; that seems to be the majority of Americans who were stationed there until a few years ago.
That's a far cry from the scenario Yorlik803 pointed out of American feminists potentially saying women should be forced into the military. A Korean woman who chooses a military life faces problems an American woman simply will not face, period, and in many cases the Korean woman knows she will never get married because most Korean men don't like tomboys.
A fair number of American men do like “tomboys,” however, and that's producing some interesting dynamics as Korean female soldiers sometimes marry American male soldiers, and then after a few years the Korean women try to join the American military. Some have been so vicious in their treatment of subordinates that it has caused problems in the United States military; their response has generally been some version of “What did I do wrong? I just yelled, I didn't break anything.” Let's just say a typical American male soldier doesn't know how to handle a 5'2” woman screaming threats of serious physical violence, knowing the reputation of Korean women for “kimchi temper” and wondering what will happen if she gets even angrier.
Those Korean women who do sign up for the South Korean military don't seem to generate anywhere close to the type of problems I hear about from American female soldiers. Some of that is simply cultural — despite what American soldiers who hang around “camptowns” might think, just about the **LAST** thing most Korean women want to do is get pregnant out of wedlock — but I think a lot of it is the recognition that a woman who signs up for the South Korean military is going to be trained to fight a horrible and brutal land war on her own soil.
The most enlightening comment I ever received about women in the South Korean military went basically like this: “Of course I don't mind women serving in the military. You American guys go over to foreign countries to fight, and you leave your women at home. Over here, I want my wife and daughter trained to kill anyone who invades our country and wants to rape them.”
Remember, that's a pretty “liberal” view in Korea about women in the military, and it would not be reflective of most Korean men, but it is reflective of the motivations of fathers who permit their daughters to join the military. Even so, it's a whole different mindset than what we have here in American debates on the issue. It reminds me of American colonists in the 1600s and 1700s who trained their wives and daughters to shoot because they had to know how to defend themselves in their homes.
Like it or not, we simply do not think about those issues that way in the modern United States since we have not faced a land war on our own soil in a century and a half. If we did, I suspect our views on women in the military would be framed very differently from how they are being framed at present.
“So in your world being injured is “more brutal” than being killed.”
It has nothing to do with “my world” or “brutality”. It refers to more effective winning strategy. When you injure a soldier, another must tend to him/her. When you kill a soldier nothing more can be done.
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