clouded_perception wrote:Heiden wrote:clouded_perception wrote:Heiden wrote:clouded_perception wrote:Finally!
Are we allowed to disarm sea mines or guard airbases yet? Last I checked (a few years ago now), women couldn't do that due to the "combat nature of the role".
Why stop there? You should enjoy the benefits of equality with men, such as catching bullets on the battlefield and being drafted in times of war.
Hell yes.
Exempting women from draft in times of war is stupid. I can see why men would be preferable because of the average better strength etc. and it's a bit hard to do Australia-wide fitness tests and expect honest results when you're drafting people who don't want to go, but making economic and social sacrifices in order to take only men makes no sense.
Of course, there would need to be rules in place to ensure that both parents of a child (or single parents) don't get drafted.
That's how you could increase the population in countries with low-birth rates.
Institute a draft for both men and women, and only exempt those who have children.
lol... but only one parent would be exempted. My guess is that drafts would still favour males for the aforementioned physical reasons as well as outdated gender bias, and the fact that the panic parenting you allude to would result in many women being pregnant at the time of drafting.
Then just be fair about it and draft both of them. If they have children, then let the grandparents or some other guardian take care of them. That would be, afterall, equality. Or perhaps another solution would be only taking one of the two. But don't just excuse the mother because she's female. Instead, have the father and mother draw straws. The one with the shortest straw goes off to fight. The one who has the long straw stays to care for the child. And women being weaker than men shouldn't matter all that much, because the US army is full of women who perform in a great many areas of combat. Afterall, combat today often involves technology and logistics that aren't determined by a person's physical strength. And lastly, women can catch bullets just as well as men can. Don't deny them their opportunity at dying for the country.
Policy on women in combat bears no relation to reality
USA Today
May 12, 2008
In print, the Pentagon's policy on women in combat looks like this: Women shall be excluded from assignment to most units "whose primary mission" is "direct combat on the ground."
On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon's policy on women in combat looks like this: Women risk their lives as truck drivers, mechanics and medics attached to combat units. At checkpoints, they do a job that men can't: search Iraqi women. They fire rifles and lob grenades. And when they are struck by the IED blasts and suicide bombers that characterize this war, they are wounded or killed just as surely as their fellow soldiers.
In other words, the written policy is divorced from reality.
In part because a few jobs — in the infantry, field artillery and special forces — remain off limits, there is a lingering myth that women are not in direct combat.
In truth, about 7% of the 191,000 troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are women, and they are doing just about everything they are physically capable of doing. That's as it should be.
The existing Pentagon policy dates to 1994, when then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin loosened what had been far tighter restrictions. By 2006, according to a study by international think tank Rand Corp., more than 92% of Army occupations were open to women. That's progress as far as it goes, but today the combat exclusions make little sense.
The policy, for instance, talks about combat taking place "well forward on the battlefield." In Iraq and Afghanistan, there are no front lines. Danger is everywhere.
Smart commanders use women "in all the positions for which they are qualified," as the 1994 policy also envisions. But when it comes to the exclusions, the Army has to tie itself in knots to show that it's complying.
Thus, in talking about Spc. Monica Brown, a medic who won the Silver Star in March after running through gunfire to save injured comrades, the Army is at pains to underscore that Brown wasn't "assigned" to the combat unit where she showed such courage, but was only "attached" to it. That's just silly.
Most of the opponents of women in combat seem to have gotten over their objections. In a USA TODAY/Gallup poll in September, 74% of Americans agreed that women should be allowed to hold combat jobs, up from 36% in an NBC News poll that asked the same question in 1981.
In 2005, when a band of House Republicans tried to limit women's roles in the war, the top brass objected so strenuously the critics were forced to retreat. (When we sought a lawmaker to debate this issue today, several one-time critics of women in combat declined to write an opposing view.)
Even if you accept one of the objections raised by past opponents — that female POWs could face rape and other abuse — keeping women from the so-called front lines won't help. Female soldiers are subject to capture at a checkpoint or in a convoy almost anywhere in Iraq.
Not surprisingly, neither military leaders nor soldiers clearly understand the current policy, according to the Rand study. Those who think they understand the policy offer differing interpretations.
This doesn't need to be complicated: Women should be assigned to any specialty for which they can pass a test to qualify. The U.S. Army Research Institute wrote in 2002 that more than half of Army officers and enlisted men agreed with this standard.
Such a policy would match the facts as they exist on the ground in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would be more fair to the women already serving so bravely.
Now we've just got to get countries to implement this.
