Maybe I'm old fashioned, but the idea of being okay with sending my mother, or daughter onto the battle field is more unethical than treating the different sexes as if they have biological differences.
If women want to apply, then fine, but I do worry about a society whos men are willing to send their women to war.
And women serve in combat in multiple countries, and have for decades in some. The US is rather late to the party, many countries have allowed women in combat roles for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military_by_count...
But even in societies where women didn't themselves fight, women often provided logistical support, as well as working in factories, shipyards, an other places to produce materials for war.
You are describing maybe 10% of the tail in terms of physical performance being on par with their male counterparts. And you're also describing _total wars of exhaustion_, where literally everyone had to fight because otherwise it's extinction. These are not arguments in favor of women in combat roles as policy - they're merely observations that Total War forces everyone to fight. Should we also draft kids because soldiers as young as 12 were fighting at Stalingrad?
In the event of an existential threat to the US I don't think we'd stop at just women. Anyone who is able bodied and can carry a weapon might have to fight.
The determination for duties that would be performed based on physical fitness is to be had after conscription.
I'm not describing total wars. Canada, for example, has had women in combat roles for 36 years, and not because they were fighting for the country's survival in the early 1980s.
And even if your un-cited 10% figure was true, and most women couldn't fight as infantry because of a lack of upper body strength, there are combat roles such as being pilot where physical strength is of limited importance.
But it's not true, and it seems you are disparaging female veterans and their contributions.
Even if there weren't women combat roles( and a big part of this decision is because there are such roles now, since 2015) a draft could still bring in women as doctors, administrators, analysts, logistics officers and other roles, because the military isn't just about combat, it's a vast coordinated enterprise.
Ask yourself this: the ostensible “villain” (Russia) is doing the opposite of us with their Infantry units. Ask yourself why.
Those conventions predate modern technology. There are obvious reasons why the Roman Legion was entirely male. (In terms of upper body strength, the bell curve for men and women is almost completely disjoint, with the top 10% of women overlapping with the bottom 10% of men.)
Those rationales apply less and less as military technology evolves. There is no obvious reason why fighter pilots should only be men, or Navy gunners, or army helicopter pilots.
> If women want to apply, then fine, but I do worry about a society whos men are willing to send their women to war.
Israel seems fine.
so a war broke out and half of your fighter pilots got pregnant and can't fight anymore.
If you're worried about them getting pregnant, provide access to contraceptives. This is only a problem in the minds of people grasping at every possible straw to prove women can't do something they've successfully been doing at scale for decades.
I'm not a parent but if I had kids I can imagine not wanting any of them to go to war.
1. Women are on average physically weaker (I hope this is not controversial) and therefore are much more likely to die in hand-to-hand combat or just plain not be able to carry the gear soldiers have to carry today, let alone another soldier.
2. After a war of attrition women are crucial to population replacement, due to biological limits on procreation frequency, whereas men have much greater "fanout", and you don't need that many of them, even if you're concerned about inbreeding.
That said, I do think women should be draft-able, for two reasons:
1. Women too can be "strong enough" for combat
2. There are lots of non-combat roles
And to anyone who says there can't be another WW2-style war, I bet people said the same in the aftermath of WW1. And yet, here we are.
2. WTF? When has that ever been important? What sort of situation will we get into where scores of millions of women will die, where they wouldn't die if there wasn't conscription or volunteering, and where we don't have nuclear Armageddon?
WWII wasn't simply a do-over of WWI.
People who don't understand why this is important have a view of history that doesn't go back beyond the 20th century.
Most recently, after WW2. 20+ million Soviet people died in the war, mostly able bodied men. If it were mostly women, that'd permanently decimate their population. I imagine any kind of mass casualty-WW3 scenario would be only worse. Weapons are a lot more deadly now than they've ever been. For the time being the most devastating varieties are constrained by peace-time treaties and such, but if a war of attrition were to break out, it'd all be back on the table in no time at all.
And there's no such thing as "volunteering" when dealing with meat grinders like WW1 or WW2. Easily 90% of people who go to war do so very much against their will. A good number of soldiers are executed at the front lines for "cowardice". Imagine yourself having to get out of the trench during a Verdun or Stalingrad style slaughter. You (and I) would need some _serious_ motivation to do so, and definitely wouldn't "volunteer" for any such thing.
1) We know that Russian women volunteered for the military, and fought, and died fighting. ("There were 800,000 women who served in the Soviet Armed Forces during the war,[1] which is roughly 3 percent of total military personnel." says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II )
If women can't be drafted, because it's better to preserve their wombs for population replenishment, then why should women be allowed to volunteer?
2) Since Soviet women did volunteer to fight on the front lines, and even as partisans in German held territory, your statement "there's no such thing as "volunteering" ..." is wrong.
3) People can be conscripted without being ordered to the front for direct combat.
1) By using the phrase "there's no such thing as "volunteering" when dealing with meat grinders like WW1 or WW2", m0zg denies that any Soviet women volunteered to fight on the front lines, or as partisans in German held territory. Quoting from Wikipdia:
> Manshuk Mametova was a machine gunner from Kazakhstan ... Mariya Oktyabrskaya and Alexandra Samusenko were tank drivers. Tatyana Kostyrina had over 120 kills and commanded an infantry battalion in 1943 following the death of her commander and a majority of the staff.
> The 1077th Anti-aircraft Regiment ... fought during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 ... like many of the anti-aircraft units, was made up almost entirely of young women volunteers, barely out of high school. They are mostly known for their bravery in the defense of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), when they engaged an advancing Panzer unit by setting their guns to the lowest elevation and firing them directly at the advancing tanks.
The fact that there were relatively few such women doesn't detract from my point that they were volunteers, making m0zg's statement simply wrong.
The earlier argument was that women shouldn't be drafted into the military because their wombs need to be ready for post-war repopulation efforts. My question again is, if that is a valid argument, why should women even be allowed to volunteer? And my follow up is that women can be drafted without being ordered to fight on the front lines. .. eg, as service personnel.
2) You write "perceived". How much of that perception is due to propaganda? In the US, post-war propaganda de-emphasized the importance and competence in doing what was previously considered "male" jobs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_women_in_World_War_II#W... suggest a similar effect in the USSR.
> 1930s Stalinist propaganda promoted the image of women in the home, caring for their families. This ambivalent conception of women's role in society parallels the state's attitude towards females in the military; women's patriotic duty did not include combat until it became absolutely necessary. Even when the efforts of female soldiers could no longer be ignored, state propaganda concealed the full extent of their participation.[24]
> Propaganda concerning female soldiers often functioned to preserve male societal dominance, portrayed them as motherly and sisterly figures, an image more consistent with women's role in Soviet society. Furthermore, propaganda emphasized that women joined the army for patriotic reasons, such as protecting the fatherland or avenging dead relatives. These commendable motivations explained women's ability to kill in combat, a phenomenon that contradicted established gender roles.[25]
> The Soviet state resisted the deployment of servicewomen, using propaganda to justify female combatants after they became necessary.[26] Conze and Fieseler argue that once women soldiers were no longer needed, they stopped appearing in the media. The state prevented female soldiers from marching in the Moscow Victory Parade. The gains of servicewomen towards female emancipation were ignored after the war, and the state encouraged women to return to their duties at home.[
Everyone knows about Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya in Russia (well, maybe not current generation, but my generation for sure), and about the occasional sniper or pilot. That doesn't change the fact that women were a tiny minority of the forces in combat, and that is how it should be, because women are demographically far more precious than men.
Consider that children also volunteered, and served on the front lines and as partisans. It was a tiny percentage but there were probably more of them there than women, and more than enough to fill up a Wikipedia article. Surely you aren't going to argue that children should go to war just on that basis?
My question again is, if women must not be conscripted in order to save their wombs for postwar repopulation efforts, why should women even be allowed to volunteer?
If women can volunteer, why can't they also be conscripted? As I point out, conscription doesn't require that everyone see combat duty.
I already pointed out that the percentage was tiny. I quoted "roughly 3 percent of total military personnel", and the source describes that many of them were medical personnel, not combatants. But there were volunteer combatants, and my point was to show that you were wrong about the non-existence of volunteers.
I think "people not dying in a war" is common sense. How about "avoid wars". My country - I am a US citizen - loves going to war. It's been at war for 93% of its existence. I can only conclude that my view isn't that common.
The US also has a history of children lying about their age in order to volunteer in the military. But I don't why we should compare the decisions and actions of adult women with that of minors. (To be clear, the US allows 17-year-old minors to join the military with parental consent. That's how my wife enlisted.)
In the US, which is currently an all-volunteer force, woman can volunteer for combat duty in the military. Children under 17 cannot. The question is, since adult men are required to register in case there is a draft, why shouldn't adult women also be required to register?
Even if there is a draft, it doesn't require that all or even most women must fight in hand-to-hand combat, or other places where they are physically unqualified to work.
why? one woman can have 5+ children. so even if you had a 25-fold decrease in population, you can repopulation in a few generations. Why would that result in 'permanent decimation'?
The other aspect of gender roles here is the idea that women ought to stay away from battle because they should be raising children or doing housework - to me this reads simply as another manifestation of what feminists since the 60s at the latest have been arguing against - the separation of women into the private sphere of life. There isn't much reason I can see why that should be further carried over to the matter of war.
In the end, I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but I must admit they are almost entirely ideological ones, based on new rationalizations of ancient ideas of 'the fair sex' and influenced by modern attitudes towards masculinity and femininity.
There are two good papers on the topic of women and conscription and their actual experiences in places where it's practiced (e.g Israel):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0891243207303538
https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refer... (see section V, "Analysis" on whether women are "different" enough to be exempt from conscription).
From a survival standpoint, it's not about raising the children but creating the children. Men went to war and the ones that came back fathered all the children of the next generation. Even heavy losses in battles wouldn't really affect the ability to grow the tribe's population that much. And the fathers of that new generation would be the strongest and most able to survive combat.
A good example of this is Paraguay, which lost about 70% of its male population back in the 19th century in a war with its neighbors. But the population recovered in the course of 1-2 generations because the women mostly survived.
But in militaries that aren't going to experience the kind of staggering losses that Paraguay's forces did and in societies that have no shortage of population like ours does, the policy of sending only men to war makes less sense.
>What if there were a genocide occurring in another country?
How does a military solve this? Create an even bigger genocide?
I'm very much against war but if there was impending danger locally I would sign up to sit near the beach and shoot down any danger coming my way.
In the past, there were exemptions for pursuing higher education, and (not surprisingly) many people went that route. I would guess that people would do the same to avail themselves of a motherhood exemption.
a) Plenty of roles for women to do that don't involve the kind of 'direct combat' type scenarios we may have concerns over.
and b) That they are effectively just as good as men.
Only a small portion of fighting forces actually 'fight'.
The argument remains 'should women be in front line combat' - but my point is that in reality, it's kind of moot. We don't even need that kind of debate in order to have women broadly in the forces.
I'm saying that for 90% of roles 'gender doesn't matter' really. So it's 90% a 'moot point'.
Without taking a stand on the issue ... I believe that in reality if there were a relatively major conflict today, women would be getting close to the lines but not on front line units for the most part. Pretty much every other role they would do.