Women in Combat Units: It's Still a Bad Idea

Abstract

Among the easiest predictions to make in this first year of the new century is that various interest groups will continue to lobby to open all US combat units to women.At least five seemingly logical arguments can be anticipated: New post-Cold War missions require finesse, not brawn.Twenty-first-century technologies are gender-neutral.An equal opportunity to serve is every American citizen's right.Cohesion does not require that soldiers bond socially, only that they accomplish their tasks effectively.Our European allies are opening their combat units to women, therefore so should we.[1] Each of these arguments flies in the face of common sense, however, and together they beg the central question, which is how would the integration of women improve a combat unit's survivability and the defense of the United States.For instance, if war in the future will be push-button and relatively effortless, then why have combat units at all?Why not just disband them altogether or, at the very least, phase them out?Likewise, if our soldiers' primary duty will be to keep peace and thus avoid war, then why not train them in nothing but non-lethal techniques?Tellingly, not even those who envision a radically altered high-tech battlescape advocate the dissolution of combat units.None among them has called for an end to teaching hand-to-hand combat, movement-to-contact, or night patrolling skills.None is really arguing that we won't need some sort of close-in as well as sustained combat capability.Rather, the push now is to integrate capable women into such units.Why?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.