I do not hear a drumbeat of demand from the female enlisted ranks for combat slots. In fact, I see a lot of wangling to get out of long combat deployments by exercising the “female option” — pregnancy. Under current rules, you cannot remain deployed or in a combat zone when you are pregnant. When you start showing, you're transferred out to another unit until the child is born. [Once the child is born, the “parent” remains in the military and gets special administrative consideration for their family situation.] But, no one replaces the missing pregnant member and those left behind have to do the work that person used to do.
Let's get back to the crucial point of actually putting women into the combat arms (not combat support) — and that traditionally in the Army and Marines means armor, infantry, and artillery. If there are any organizations were toughness and literal physical strength are paramount, it would be these. Sorry, but 2/3 of women do not have the sheer upper body strength to compete. This is a fact of biology and gender, not because I am a male chauvinist bigot.
But, there's another set of reasons why we shouldn't put women into direct combat roles and that comes from examining the historical fact.
Fact: Only two countries on the planet have ever fielded all-women or mixed men-women units in direct combat — Russia (1941-1945) and Israel (1948-1949). Neither do it today (although they do give women combat training, no women are assigned direct combat roles). Why?
This is why.
1. The all-female or mixed male-female units took disproportionately MORE casualties than all-male units.
2. Males instinctively tried to protect females and suffered more casualties.
3. Females felt they had to take more risks to be considered equals and suffered more casualties.
4. Female casualties were devastating to morale of both female AND male combatants.
5. All-female and mixed male-female units were forced to work harder due to physical strength differences between the sexes.
Let's look at item 5 because that's where the cheating becomes paramount. In order for women to compete with men, the PRT (Physical Readiness Tests — or whatever the name is) have to be pro-rated DOWN to allow the women to pass. [The Canadian Forces are one of the few militaries that allow women to compete for infantry slots and only three women have either passed or keep trying. Why? Because the Canadian Forces do NOT pro-rate the PRT by gender. You either pass the Standard PRT for all, or you don't. The PRT is neutral and it fails both sexes equally that cannot measure up.]
So how does the cheating on the PRT affect the service members? The PRT is used to discharge those males who do not live up to its arbitrary numbers and also as a way to fast-track promotions for minorities based on sex and race. That is only one of the dirty little secrets no one talks about when increasing roles and missions for females in the Armed Forces raises its ugly head.
A great point that's simply too obvious to ignore.
If it's all about equality, then why is it that women are held to a different physical standard then men? When I went through USNA, there were different physical and academic standards for men. The disparity in the physical standards was the most obvious: a lower wall on the O-course for women, for example, or the passing times for the Halsey Hack - a time that would give a man a "D" would be an "A" for a woman, etc. Even the academic standards were different, though these weren't as apparent . . . but they'd struggle to keep a woman whose academic performance was sub-par a lot harder than they would for a man whose performance was sub-par. Saw it happen.
That said, there were women there who could abide by the male standards in terms of physicality: these were the, um, manly women who threw shot on the track team, say.
That said (2), even if a woman was capable of the same performance as a man, you take normal, red-blooded young men and women and put them together in tight quarters and intimate settings, and nature will take its course. You have to be prepared for the consequences of that.