widowson:I doubt you'll ever see women in combat roles for the same reason you'll never see them in the NFL or see the NBA/Olympics co-ed.
If anything, combat leaders are *more* opposed to women in combat for the above reasons; the obvious, genetic differences between men and women in regards to physical strength and endurance to someone not willfully blinded by their ideology or political correctness.
That's why a male soldier has to do:
42 pushups in 2 min
52 situps in 2 min
2 miles in 15:54
But a woman has to do
19 pushups
same situps
2 miles in 18:54
You can't have equality with unequal standards, which is what the Army has right now. In a fistfight 95% of the men beat 95% of the women because of raw strength and agression. That's why most don't belong in combat since our potential foes arn't PC.
The only way would be to hold women to the same physical standard, true equality, which would drive most women out of the military since they can't make the male standard.
Or you just drop the standard so low that male weaklings can get into combat which while it may make certain PC groups happy is fantastically stupid since weak soldiers die.
Soldiers won't die for political correctness and feminist politics.
You know, I've considered that viewpoint in the past, and I think it's pretty much nonsense. It's just macho posturing and whining about political correctness run amok.
I seriously doubt that anyone has correlated the difference between running 2 miles in 15:54 versus 2 miles in 18:54 with combat effectiveness of different units. With perhaps a few exceptions, most of these standards were put in place to A) narrow down the pool of applicants, and B) give soldiers some standard by which to challenge themselves, pursue excellence, and maintain a decent level of fitness.
Please tell me how these physical standards relate to the combat effectiveness of heavy armor or artillery units -- say, serving as a tank commander or MRLS operator. The standards are more relevant to the infantry or special forces, but even then, prove to me the difference in combat effectiveness. I'll also point out that most infantry engagements do not result in fistfights these days.
It's one thing to change standards that are intimately related to combat effectiveness for "political correctness" reasons as you say (although surely you realize that there is a tradeoff between having highly-qualified soldiers and having many soldiers). If the Army required different marksmanship standards for male versus female infantry soldiers, or different IQ scores for intelligence officers, then that would be bad news. But it's another thing to change standards that have little bearing on combat effectiveness. The physical standards, although different for men and women, serve their purpose in narrowing down the list of recruits, selecting the most motivated soldiers, and keeping them healthy and fit. So, what's the problem? There's no sense in judging people by meaningless, arbitrary metrics (would the ability to do only 40 pushups get you killed on the battlefield?).
In the case of Lieutenant General Dunwoody, she has been promoted into a position that has typically required service in combat units. Now, that type of service may have a bearing on leadership effectiveness in a logistics command, or it may not. If service with combat units truly should be a requirement for the position, then I don't believe that changing the rules just to promote a female into the position serves a good purpose. In that case the standard is not meaningless, and women should have to serve in combat units in order to serve in that position. If, however, service in combat units is largely irrelevant to the effectiveness of the commander of the Army Materiel Command, then the (official or unofficial) requirement for the commander to have experience in combat units should have been removed long ago, before this all happened.
