Again, great minds think alike.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

I’ll take the 100 best people, regardless of gender.

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

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2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

I assume that for the few outliers, you aren't going to make any other accommodations right? Same uniforms, same boots, same housing, same bathrooms, etc?

One: you point out the very rare woman who can hang with or even beat some guys. At some ninja stuff, I guess. Good for her. That doesn't validate that Jane Six-pack, which is the population group we draw from -- not world-class athletes -- can do so.

Two: I always love when those of us on the "women don't belong in the infantry world" side of the debate get these triathlete and other sportswomen or men thrown at us. The infantry and specops/specwar worlds aren't the same. It might give her a leg up, sure. But that's all.

Maybe if she has a drill instructor and a Ranger training cadre up her ass 24/7, cycling her non-stop, or flat-out, no-shit bad guys and combat operations hitting her head-on we might see different results.

She also has to sling full battle rattle and a full combat load and then live in godawful conditions, as does every woman, and then be able to close with and destroy the enemy, as most men of no great athletic abilities can do, and then you might have a point.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

I agree.

Keeping with the ANW discussion (I'm a big fan of the show)...if you've watched it, you know that they've changed the requirements over time for men and women to advance to the next rounds because the women who were meeting the basic standard to be on the show were just not making it against even the average guys.

The issue now becomes defining the standard. What are the minimum requirements and are the minimum requirements enough?

If you have 500 people who meet a minimum standard and the top 100 are men, do you put the woman who was 101 in just because she's a women? I say no because I, too, want the best 100.

If you knew your doctor graduated last in a class of 500 would you look for a new doctor?

Maybe said another way, I don't want to exclude people just because they are a woman, but we also shouldn't include them on that basis.

Women in these units cause the men to make some seriously stupid ass decisions. We know this for a fact, because we've seen this occur. Also, the hallelujah chorus that wants women in these units completely disregards the 2015 Marine Corps study that shows women-only and mixed units do very poorly when compared to the all-male units. Overall injury rates are higher, overall performance rates are lower for those units. It doesn't matter the metric, they do worse than all-male units.

I don't even know why we have this discussion when it comes to screwing over the finest military the United States has ever had when it comes to infantry, special operations and special warfare.

Oh, that's right. It's all about making sure women feel better about themselves and that they are given the mostly false impression that they can hang with the guys when it comes to this stuff.

I remember when I used to do IMH, and the female pros used to bitch up a storm about the mass swim start and how the male age groupers would run them over. We see how they resolved that.

There are many things that women do better than men, and vice versa. This irrational mania about forcing women into infantry and other ground combat units makes no sense to me, at least.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

You and efernand have a special gift.
Congrats.

Good to know we agree, even on ANW. It was disappointing to see them change the standards to get more women into the finals, but I also see why they did it (mainly $s, but I suspect it has also done much to inspire some young women, which I'm ok with). For the military, there should be no accommodations made.

Whenever the topic of women in combat comes up, I think of the women that fought in WWII. The Red Army used women as snipers and they were highly effective and feared. Obviously it was a different time and place and they were thrust into service by necessity and the defense of the Motherland. I think the woman with the 91/30 sniper rifle is kind of cute:

To be accurate, it was one SecDef that doesn’t give a fuck what BK thinks. He certainly didn’t give a fuck about what the Marine Corps thought, which was why they requested an exception to having women serve in the infantry.

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Taco cat spelled backwards is....taco cat.

Not to hijack the thread, but, it is nearly inconceivable that nearly 80% of the males born in Russia in 1923 did not survive WW2.

There was an article on Yahoo over the weekend that clarified that number just a bit. The 80% figure took into consideration fetal mortality, famine, disease, and other factors other than dying in combat. So, no, that 80% does not count only those killed in WW2. That said, the number is still incredible and hard to comprehend.

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If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. - Will Rogers

Emery's Third Coast Triathlon | Tri Wisconsin Triathlon Team | Push Endurance | GLWR

Let's allow wall jumping, illegal alien, nudie selfie taking, gay, liberal, AOC look alikes women into ground combat units.

Well, I'm not afraid to hijack a BK thread. It's not like he's never done that :)

Wow, that is an amazing and horrible stat. But it is also believable. It's hard to guess how much of the 80% was not in combat, but certainly most of it was.

Well, that is statistics for you. As my statistics teacher said, with stats you can be honest or you can lie, cheat etc and still appear honest

What's that? Making you stop making irrational arguments? And just resort to personal attacks?

That's for sure. I mean, who really gives a fuck what the actual lead slingers and trigger pullers think when you've got a larger imperative to fulfill (i.e. getting women into the infantry)?

The below is a photo of the Army's 173 Airborne Brigade on a recent exercise with the Italian army's Alpine Brigade Julia, which specializes in mountain combat. This was in Passo di Tonale, Italy. The 173rd is a light infantry brigade, so they're not even going "heavy," as a standard Army infantry brigade would. Yet, the soldiers in the photos are still carrying a lot of shit and moving and maneuvering over significant distances and at significant altitudes, only to pack up and move out again. And again. And again. Shooting, moving and communicating all the way. Really; sometimes light infantry doesn't feel light -- even if you're the light infantryman.

Bottom line; there are very few women who could do this on a routine basis, mostly due to biological and physiological reasons. And if there aren't even that many women (maybe 1 out of 100) that could, why are we wasting our time and resources "normalizing" standards to get these females into such units, at the possible detriment of combat effectiveness and unit readiness? Because that's what we're doing.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Death toll of each country during WWII represented by stacks of coffins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmNO2f2gnZY

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
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http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

2 questions:

There are about 30m women in the US between the age of 20-35. If you say 1% could "do this" on a routine basis (and personally I think that's too high), that means you believe there are about 300,000 women in the US in that age group who could. Why would you want to eliminate them from the pool of potential armed services?

What percent of US men do you think could "do this" on a routine basis?

It’s not about “wanting” to eliminate 300,000 people from the pool. For one thing, just because there might be 300k eligible women, that doesn’t mean there are 300k women who are interested in serving. And of whatever percentage of those women are interested in serving, not all of them want to serve in combat arms roles. And of those who do want to serve in combat arms roles, not all of them want to serve in infantry roles like was being described earlier.

The issue isn’t about wanting to exclude a big group. It’s about that group not actually being that big, and asking whether or not it’s worth changing existing standards to accommodate that small group, at the risk of losing the effectiveness the standards were designed to maintain.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

I agree with most of what you say here. I was just picking up on BK's 1% statistic to show how many theoretically eligible women could be in that pool. And as I said earlier, I don't think standards should be changed.

It’s a photo op, basically you don’t go into the mountains without skis.

Ultimately higher altitude or “mountain” combat requires a certain skill set that they would be looking for, not training for. Although not in the military that would be my guess.

I worked in the ski industry for the better part of 20 years and patrol was about 50/50 men/women, ever seen someone ski a toboggan with a 200-300 person in it down to base? It’s a skill, which requires a basic level of strength but the barriers are low.

Maurice

Actually, I meant to say one in 1,000, which is probably more realistic. Which leads me to my point about throwing out combat effectiveness solely to support the one or two women out of a thousand that might want to do this and maybe could.

Here's where the key physiological and biological differences between men and women becomes particularly glaring. Because a lot of guys could do it, even while being shot at and hustling their 200 pound or 300 pound wounded battle buddy out of the way. The same can't be said, however, about women.

It's worth keeping in mind what the article's author, Heather McDonald, correctly noted. Given every opportunity to succeed, only two Women Marines have ever been able to make it through the Marine Corps infantry officer course.

Word from the Ranger folks, meaning the training cadre and staff, is that the women that have made it through the course benefited from normalized or lowered standards and a hell of a lot of assistance from the cadre itself, which may have been under orders from higher authority to make sure some female soldiers made it through., regardless. I don't even want to think what we would have to do to normalize Marine Corps Reconnaissance training or Navy SEAL training. And for what? A vanishingly small number of women that maybe can get through while meeting the same standards that the males currently have to meet? If anything, we should be raising the standards, not lowering them, to take into account the changing nature of the battlefield and the stresses it puts on Infantry warfighters.

Then, the matter becomes what do you do with these very rare exceptions to the rule and how do you accommodate their needs? Because they will certainly have different or special needs that we will then insist be accommodated.

Bottom line, there's a hell of a lot more to infantry warfare than just being able to exert 15 pounds of trigger pull. Just let the men handle that part and women are more than welcome to be warfighters in any of a dozen other military occupational specialties and Air Force and Navy billet codes.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."