panetta to lift ban on women in combat.

[Hairy Chest]

Weight will keep a lot of American women out of uniform.  Too many French fries.  Oh, excuse me, I forgot, it's Freedom Fries.   

[Dee]

Nazi Germany's women stayed at home throughout the war while the men fought at the front against Communism. 

 

My, my, how history has been distorted.

[BUGEYE]

Nazi Germany's women stayed at home throughout the war while the men fought at the front against Communism. 

 

My, my, how history has been distorted.

As for the OP,  women are too soft and warm and comforting to be sent out to be captured and then tortured, raped, and beheaded.
other folks can send their daughters to have that done to them but not me....

[dwalk]

Very interesting analysis Anna..it makes sense..just as a female sniper makes sense..  A well trained woman can shoot as well as a well trained man...and most snipers are not bogged down with the huge packs etc..which infantrymen must carry.
   No doubt, there are numerous jobs women can generally do better than a man.  Often times this includes jobs which require great manual dexterity.
   If top leaders..civilian & military both woud quit worrying about quotas & set asides or Political Correctness and just place people where they work best, we would all be much better off.

i agree with your statement as a whole, but would like to add, that due to the 'mother' instinct, would it affect most women to look into the face of a kill and then pull the trigger? most men i knew in that vocation did not hesitate.

[billy_56081]

I did not serve since I graduated from high school in 1973 and the draft had been discontinued. I have no problem with women serving in combat roles if the so wish AND MEET THE SAME REQUIREMENTS AS MALE SOLDIERS HAVE TOO. If those requirements are lowed then I do have a problem with it.
GuzziJohn

Finally a true statement from you, as it stands the requirements for women verses men are much much lower. If the requirements for women were brought up to the current standards for men, very few women could pass with a minimum PT score. As for the elite forces, I would be willing to bet that one in one million women could not complete the current requirement for BUDs. The cold water swim would eliminate every one of them. Also a combat unit is an Alpha male club, competition between the team members is what makes them fight so hard.

[kennyd]

I always got the impression that the female grunts enlisted for the pay (over what Applachia gives), and education opportunities.  I think more young men buy into the video game commercials.  Not discounting the ones who have a family tradition.

[Anna]

Very interesting analysis Anna..it makes sense..just as a female sniper makes sense..  A well trained woman can shoot as well as a well trained man...and most snipers are not bogged down with the huge packs etc..which infantrymen must carry.
   No doubt, there are numerous jobs women can generally do better than a man.  Often times this includes jobs which require great manual dexterity.
   If top leaders..civilian & military both woud quit worrying about quotas & set asides or Political Correctness and just place people where they work best, we would all be much better off.



IG I know this because during the late 1990s a lot of professional women recived invitational letters
from NASA recruiters to join a program that was studying this. A great deal of it was focused on our
size where the maximum height was 5.6 inches and a weight of no more than 125 lbs.
Preferably even lower than that ! Of course that is everyone's dream at that age to become an astronaut so I went to a few of the seminars in Atlanta . But the criteria was very strict and a lot of
the milllitary girls of course were highly consitered first . No kidding , hysterectomy was at the top of the list. If you didn't have one yet then your application would still be on file or you would only be
consitered for a ground support role. I know it sounds crazy but when you look at it it does make
sense .

They didn't say but the girls in their twenties and thirties were in their child bearing years and the
agency really preferred not to have pregnant or mothers with small children involved in such a dangerous job. This is why you see where the top female astronauts WERE usually in their 40s.   
Back to the subject of this thread. I can't see how the top milllitary brass can not be looking at this
same situation when consitering women in a ground combat role. NASA learned a lot from the Challanger disaster and its impact to the family's and the children of mothers going into space.
Christy McAuliffe should have never been consitered for that mission. Sure the PR for NASA would
have been great, but it backfired on them in the long run with NASA pushing the Challanger launch
schedule like they did.

Take a female solder in the same situation with the media. Only later to be killed or captured for the
world to see her crying babys watching as our enemy's use that to show how stupid this PC
decision really was. Of course we can't ask NASA much about this any longer and they probably wouldn't say anyway. But I can only see how announcing our stupidity in doing this will only help our
enemy's to devise another way to humiliate us as a nation.