“Can she do the job? Can she pass all the tests, meet all the requirements? Then sure, why not?”
Because it isn’t about her. She is 100% guaranteed to destroy unit cohesion. She will find a senior NCO benefactor and avoid crappy duty. Someone will hit on her and she will report sexual harassment. Someone she likes WON’T hit on her and it’ll be harassment. Purely by chance she gets a bennie that every grunt eventually gets, but the males will believe it’s because she’s probably doing the CO.
Wives back home will get photos of her smiling beside their husbands. Morale suffers.
Anything she does, right or wrong, including doing nothing at all, will tear a unit apart. No level of can she climb over a wall and will she be professional can change the reality. Her unit is weaker just because she is in it.
Last, when she sees a deployment she doesn’t like and she doesn’t want to go, its “get pregnant as fast as she can” time. The dirty little secret is that units and ships with large female contingents deploy with many people they counted on not deploying with them due to sudden pregnancies. Her understrength unit will deploy that way, or with last minute replacements.
It isn’t just about “if she can do the job”.
Maybe she will be in a group of openly homosexual soldiers and avoid all that?
My daughter’s ship saw a rise in pregnancies right before WESPAC
You nailed it. Physical limitations are trivial compared to the impact on unit cohesiveness, which can be tolerated to a point in combat support units, but not at the tip of the spear.