{"id":6160,"date":"2014-07-14T02:34:40","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T02:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/2014\/07\/14\/women-are-ready-for-combat-more-or-less\/"},"modified":"2014-07-14T02:34:40","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T02:34:40","slug":"women-are-ready-for-combat-more-or-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=6160","title":{"rendered":"Women are ready for combat, more or less"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This blog post is going to get me in trouble with some of my female friends.<\/p>\n

Here goes anyway: I have trouble accepting that women are capable of performing as infantry personnel in combat.<\/p>\n

There I said it. Now I’ll explain why.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/checkpoint\/wp\/2014\/07\/10\/marine-corps-dilemma-with-women-prompts-change-at-infantry-school\/<\/p>\n

The Washington Post reports on an experiment under way in the Marine Corps, where women will be taking the same Physical Fitness Test as men. As the Post reports: “The PFT requirement is the likely sticking point for many female Marines: To score a first-class PFT, men must do at least five pull-ups, assuming they rack up maximum points by running three miles in 18 minutes or less and complete 100 sit-ups. Under current rules for female Marines, women are not required to complete pull-ups.”<\/p>\n

I’ll stipulate that I am well aware that women are performing well in some dangerous and deadly assignments in all branches of the military. They’re flying high-performance combat aircraft, as well as helicopters in close-air support roles on the battlefield.<\/p>\n

Indeed, a young cousin of mine is now an Army master sergeant who has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her earliest assignments in Iraq were with a civil affairs unit, which meant she would venture into villages to set up infrastructure for Iraqis — not knowing if the village was occupied by enemy combatants. In Vietnam we called the effort “pacification.”<\/p>\n

I do not doubt that women can perform in two of the three combat arms: artillery and armor; the third one being infantry. They can drive tanks or armored personnel carriers and they can fire big artillery pieces.<\/p>\n

I long ago disabused myself of the concern about women being emotionally capable of performing combat duty. I hold up my cousin as the prime example of a female soldier’s emotional stamina.<\/p>\n

But does a typical 120-pound woman have the same upper-body strength as a typical 200-pound man, enabling her to lug around an 80- or 100-pound rucksack while slogging across some rough terrain?<\/p>\n

I tend to think not.<\/p>\n

Therein lies what I consider to be the problem with allowing women to serve as infantry personnel.<\/p>\n

I fear this experiment is not going to work for either the Army or the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n\n

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This blog post is going to get me in trouble with some of my female friends. Here goes anyway: I have trouble accepting that women are capable of performing as infantry personnel in combat. There I said it. Now I’ll explain why. http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/checkpoint\/wp\/2014\/07\/10\/marine-corps-dilemma-with-women-prompts-change-at-infantry-school\/ The Washington Post reports on an experiment under way in the Marine … Continue reading Women are ready for combat, more or less<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1071,5041,5057,5285],"class_list":["post-6160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-combat-arms","tag-us-army","tag-usmc","tag-women-in-combat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}