I was in the Navy from 1983-1989 and served 4 years on a submarine. I know that they are now putting women on subs, and I can not in a million years see that making the boat more effective or battle ready. The other thing that plays into this is how the wives/girlfriends of the men react to their men going to sea with women, especially if they are anywhere close to being decent looking.
However, being decent looking isn’t even required for some sailors. I spent a few months attached to our sub tender and they had women on it and that caused problems. For example, in E division, the women either couldn’t carry the heavy things like shore power cables or took too long so they were given cushy jobs like filling paperwork for the Div-O or someone else had to always shadow them and do their job. It effectively left their division short people who could actually do the jobs. It also created disunity because cushy jobs like being the Div-O’s secretary used to be rewards to the hard chargers but now it was given to the weakest. Cute women got out of jobs just by flirting. When the tender went “to sea” for it’s 3 week qual, even the ugly women got big bucks by horny guys wanting pleasure.
Overall, even though the amount of women on the tender was small, the disruption they caused was huge. Those problems were ignored in the late 1980’s so I can only imagine what is being ignored today to push a visual of a well oiled working machine of both men and women on isolated vessels at sea. The social experimentation in our military is killing it’s real effectiveness and it is quickly becoming a paper tiger.
All of what you say makes perfect sense to me. I have heard other vets state similar cases. It doesn’t take a degree in anthropology to understand the dynamics of this situation and why it would be especially bad news in combat.
The sub tender your talking about wouldn’t be the USS CapeCod would it?
When I was in the ship was known as the love boat. The sailors on that
ship had some crazy stories of love triangles and jealous fights over
women. Not to mention the pregnancies. What a mess that ship
was.
I’ve always thought a very easy way a conservative president could undermine the drive by the PC Navy to put women into combat would be to insist on ships with all female crews. At least the pregnancy rate would be lower.