And what does the female naval aviator have to do with these two female Rangers, except nothing?
I expected more critical and strategic thinking from a senior officer or at least it was expected of me when I was one.
This is not about two very capable female officers and their admirable achievement. This is about how the country runs the armed services. To say that females do not bring capability to the fight is silly. In my experience serving with them they ranged from really good to really awful, just like men. From a training matrix standpoint they can do the job and increase the readiness of the unit from a paperwork/reporting standpoint.
When the train runs off the rails is the burden to accommodate them into the unique environments. This means more berthing and sectioning the ship into increasingly small segments. I'm sure in the ground-based services this is not an issue in battalion but when you get to the field it gets much harder. In addition, it means that you are now mixing sexes of 18-30 year olds in remote stressful environments far away from home. I know what was on my mind when I was 18 (OK, to be fair it's on my mind at 51 too! ) So ask oneself, does that make us more capable or less capable? Feel free to not like the pregnancy numbers Jorge posted but that does not make them any less true and it's just biology that woman bear the burden of that. It has a very real effect on readiness.
That's really the bottom line. Is it worth the benefit to have woman in the deployed services? I can certainly see it in some roles and locations but I find it hard to believe it is worth it as deployed Rangers or in Attack Submarines or some other close quarter isolation scenarios. I'm no bigot here but the Military isn't there to be "fair" or "equal". It's there to be a irresistible force. In some cases woman add to that equation, in some cases they don't.
While it's cool to think about that tip of the spear, the reality is the logistics and undercarriage of the military have to support that tip and that gets much harder the further you get in the field. With a few women it gets a lot harder and the benefit is much smaller than the burden.
If something on the internet makes you angry the odds are you're being manipulated
) So ask oneself, does that make us more capable or less capable? Feel free to not like the pregnancy numbers Jorge posted but that does not make them any less true and it's just biology that woman bear the burden of that. It has a very real effect on readiness.