"Four Women Pass Marine Corps Infantry Test For The First Time" Army headed in same direction?

Take the sex of the person out of it and then ask the question. I am not saying that SPC Lindsay is asking the question. it appears that this was a question that was posed somewhere else and she is just asking it here.

looking at all the statements so far, the underlying concept that is common specifically targets the ABILITY of the individual.

Don't get caught up in the female versus male ideology....I learned this the hard way in Basic Training when my Drill Sergeant scared the living shit out of me, and she was a female.

Was she capable of leading soldiers? Yes! Did she emeluate professionalism? Yes! Did she exceed the standards for Army life? Yes!

To this day, I don't give a second thought as to the capabilities of males versus females, but I do watch actions and abilities very closely.

Many questions, such as the one posed here, already portray females in a bad light because of the context and the way it is worded. Because the word female is used, it already sets the stage for a discriminatory discussion.

As leaders, do not allow the narrative of the question to control your responses, or to allow it to divulge an unprofessional attitude that you may have against women as your statements could be seen by others in your chain of command, and that opens up a whole can of worms. 

As with any Military profession, every requirement is waiverable. However, every waiver of requirements has risks associated with it

In the end, it all comes down to how much risk the Chain of Command willing to take to allow a sodlier to function in a unit when they are unable to meet or exceed the REQUIRED STANDARDS for the tasks at hand.

Take infantry for example....What is the REQUIRED physical ability for all infantry soldiers? Is this REQUIREMENT across the board?

I have seen many statements inthis thread that give examples of what women can't do in the infantry, or the doubts about what they can do.....but what is the official standard?

well, i'm not infantry, but i'll toss in my two cents. evolution and society have played their roles for the last thousand years, but I think women are overall capable of the same things as men. 

                                                                                                                                                                             1. Physical. Assuming everyone joins the Army at roughly age 18, women start out severely behind the power curve. they grow up playing Barbie while men grow up playing sports - which makes their bodies more sucseptical to muscle growth and handling physical stress (wear and tear). this is changing as more women get into sports at a younger age and boys stay inside and play video games - putting them at closer to an equal playing field. Future generations WILL have women that can physically outperform men ON AVERAGE. The fact that men typically have more muscle mass then women is true, but it doesn't have to be. Diet and Training can fix this over time, but they aren't going to join in todays generation and be the same. I always use Ronda Rousey as my example of someone that I think can serve as Infantry right now. She isn't a sasquatch. She trains hard and can still maintain her femininity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpwiVon3EiQ The biggest complaint I have heard is that most women can't carry out a wounded male who is 200+ pounds. And that's why God invented the litter. There is not enough WIA and KIA in todays battles to suggest she would be all by herself and not able to get some help in this task. Many hands make light work. What is more likely is that she cannot charge a MK-19 or single hand her M4 while changing mags. These can be corrected with Rousey-like training. It is 100% true that women and men need to have the same APFT standards to be perceived as equal. I'll one-up that and say age shouldn't matter either. Bullets don't go slower for us older guys. when we try out for airborne, ranger, SF everything is based off the male 17-21 age scale. we should all just go with that until they come up with something better 

                                                                                                                                                                        2. The Dreaded Period. if they are willing to do something medical to put it on hold then more power to them. if not, the stress of hard training might make it go away as well. if it still happens then it can be taken care of as nature intended without putting a lot of stress of a unit. she has to just deal with the cramps by herself the same way men keep pushing forward when their backs hurt or they rolled an ankle. If she has ever given birth then she knows pain management, if she hasn't then she will. 

                                                                                                                                                                               3. The human perception. Although chivalry is dead, many men think that males will take special care to attend to a wounded female when they shouldn't or that America isn't ready to see their daughters come home in coffins. Or wives don't want their testosterone filled husbands working with women, thinking it will cause divorce, sex assaults, etc. which still has to do with our society. The Israelis do it. Their country is in constant threat to the point that mere survival ensures women in their infantry. America either is or will be in that state as our enemies grow and our security is lax. as for the sex assaults and divorce rates, that is because men look at these women as a piece of ass instead of their Sister-in-Arms. I can honestly say I have never been drunk enough to want to fuck my sister. I have never been lazy enough that I would rather knock on my sister's door down the hall then walk down the street to the neighbor that isn't related to me. So our entire society needs to change its way of thinking, but it can be done. The most disappointing comments on this original thread is that many women don't think women can do it! if they have submitted to being inferior to men, a lesser species of human, then they are surely fucked for all future endeavors. 

                                                                                                                                                                     4. Unit Cohesion. women can win over the men by their performance. They can win over their squad first thing in the morning during unit physical training. She must outperform them. During battle drills and training, she needs to pull her weight and have a working knowledge or what needs to happen. She needs to step up, volunteer, and basically do more work than all her counterparts. this is extremely unfair to her, but necessary to win them over. she has to know that. she also has to avoid all drama. she cannot date anyone in her unit, spread gossip, wear provocative clothes, and pretty much be the Virgin Mary. if she fails to perform then she will fail to integrate honorably into her unit, leading to the social aspect...trying to fit in by drinking with them, going to clubs, etc. and for the male that isn't convinced that this is his sister, this will be the prime time for sex assaults. all because she needed a way to fit in and she couldn't earn that respect during duty hours. 

                                                                                                                                                                            5. so how to do it? Pioneering is tough, that's why it is pioneering. if it was easy someone would have done it by now. There isn't going to be hundreds of them to start. maybe onesies and twosies. this lonely one is going to have to be mentally tough and take a lot of verbal abuse while still pushing forward. the problem so far is that the ones out there pushing for this are some minority group that really has no affiliation with the military and are too old to join. the ones out there that are capable are also content in their current line of work and enjoy having a marketable skill set for when they get out. there really needs to be someone guarding the gates to the army that judges potential and puts people in their MOS, cuz line scores don't tell the whole story. Selective Service needs to be equal and APFT standards need to be equal. and if we stay on the same course, someday barracks rooms, bathrooms, and showers will all be communal without regard to gender (which is not what I agree with, but an inevitable event because the guy that wrote Starship Troopers was a visionary).

About Nathan Smith

A 2003 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and
former Marine infantry officer, Nate is the Executive Director of Hire Heroes
USA, a nonprofit organization that helps veterans get jobs. He is a candidate
for a Master's in Public Administration at the University of Georgia.

Women do not belong in the infantry.

It’s a simple statement and one that, until recently, nearly
every civilized culture seemed to accept as a truism. For reasons as
multitudinous as they are apparent and profound, in time of war men have
shouldered arms and marched to the clash of legions or the sound of the guns.
Women as a rule have not. Even in those scattered and wretched societies whose
women prowled the battlefields to torture the wounded and desecrate the dead,
no woman was thrown into offensive action against the massed ranks of the
enemy. Show me an exception and I’ll show you savages.

Yet now, in the bosom of modern democracy and in the heart
of its most disciplined warrior elite, the prohibition against employing women
in the infantry appears about to change. The Marine Corps announced recently that it plans to send women to
the brutal, 11-week Infantry Officer Course in Quantico, Virginia.
Simultaneously, the Corps plans to enroll women into the enlisted infantry
schools at Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton.

Frankly, I am astonished.

If the enrollment of women into previously all-male infantry
schools is designed as an experiment, with the results to be examined and the
suitability of women for combat arms assignments then debated, determined, and
declared, I could save the Marine Corps significant expense and ferocious
opposition by predicting the inevitable result. They will find that women are
different from men and those differences severely prejudice the value of women
to the infantry.

Wait. Women and men are different? Can’t we just gender-norm
the infantry standards, modify the equipment, and make the barracks coed? Don’t
women deserve the same opportunity that men have to fight and die for their
country?

The answer is no. Let me explain.

Physiology

Since the obvious has apparently escaped social reformers
and military planners, I will restate it: there are fundamental physical
differences between men and women. I could quote facts and figures about the
difference in average body weight of men and women, the distribution of muscle
mass, and the capacity for heavy lifting and muscular endurance. But since facts
and figures haven’t deterred those who argue for women in the infantry, I’ll
just use a real world example.

Marine Second Lieutenants at The Basic School – just across
the street from the Infantry Officer Course – conduct at least a half-dozen
conditioning hikes during their six months of basic officer training. The hikes
range from 3 miles to 12 or more, and are conducted with full packs, body
armor, personal weapons, and the machine guns and mortars organic to an
infantry battalion. Since “Every Marine is a Rifleman”, all lieutenants –
male and female – learn the basics of infantry leadership. The hike pace is 3
miles every 50 minutes, followed by a ten minute break. Forever. Or so it
seems.

Most service members will admit that conditioning hikes are
grueling exercises in physical and mental endurance. I personally despised
them, especially when it was my turn to shoulder a 25 pound machine gun or a 45
pound, .50-caliber receiver. Each hike took all of my effort and physical
fitness to complete. Unsurprisingly, during my time at The Basic School no
female lieutenant completed a hike of greater than 6 miles with the rest of the
180 or so male lieutenants. Not one. And that’s with the male lieutenants
carrying all of the radios and heavy weapons.

A hike only gets you to the fight.

Am I disparaging my fellow lieutenants simply because they
were women? Of course not. Many of them were smart, fit, and exceptionally
disciplined and dedicated. Hell, they chose to lead Marines. I’m certain that
the majority of them went on to serve bravely in the stinking streets of Iraq
and the austere mountain valleys of Afghanistan. But not with the infantry.

The fact is that an infantryman’s job is a mix between
professional athlete, police officer, mechanic, and construction worker. It is
a physical job. Infantrymen are affectionately and accurately known as “grunts”
because of the sound made when shifting a 120-pound pack closer against one’s
agonized shoulders. It isn’t good enough to survive the physical requirements
of a 12 mile mountain ruck march if at the end of it an infantryman cannot
fling down his pack and sprint in short bursts of speed across an undulating
farm field while delivering effective and disciplined fire against a concealed
enemy who is desperately trying to kill him.

It would be the rare woman that could meet such an exacting
physical standard. Yet, undoubtedly some could. A 73 year old Japanese woman
summited Mount Everest this past weekend. There must be a few 20 year old,
female athletes that could excel in the infantry. So why not keep the standard
the same and allow women who pass it to enlist in the infantry? This brings me
to my next obvious point.

Sex

There are sexual differences between men and women. I’m
surprised that this point needs elaboration, but unfortunately it has been
downplayed in official circles and formal reports, leading to an
underestimation of the negative effects it can have on mixed-gender military
units and an overly sanguine view of young military members’ self-control. Good
order and discipline are just words to the armchair feminist or social
reformer, but to military leaders they are the ether in which healthy,
disciplined units function and accomplish the Nation’s difficult business.

With mixed gender units inevitably comes sexual tension and
relational drama. Such hormone-induced activity is often no more than an
unfortunate distraction in non-combat units. But in the strict world of, say,
nuclear weapon security, where I commanded platoons of infantry Marines
alongside female Masters-at-Arms, the distractions resulted in potentially
serious security breaches. In the rigidly controlled environment of a stateside
submarine base I was still so disgusted with the sexual antics between security
professionals that I christened the barracks and berthing areas “Bangor Junior
High”. Were the Marines and female Sailors good service members? They were some
of the best in the world. Did that stop them from acting on impulse during long
hours of boring duty and close proximity to members of the opposite sex? Not
always.

When the US Navy assigned female sailors to the formerly
all-male aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower and sent them overseas, the
leaders and planners did not anticipate that 15 sailors would have to be
reassigned due to pregnancies. Forever after, the Eisenhower would be
known throughout the Navy as “The Love Boat”. Less humorous were the scuffles
and stabbings that resulted from jealous lovers quarreling in the close
environs of a warship underway.

If the largest warship in the world is too small of an
environment to diffuse the hormonal impulses of its clean, comfortable sailors
quartered in separate male and female berthing areas, imagine the result of
infantry men and women sharing a squalid fighting hole or passing the time
during a midnight watch in a machine gun tower in Afghanistan. Good order and
discipline is essential to the effective performance of an infantry unit during
the dirty, dangerous deployments to the cesspools of the world. I cannot
foresee a reason strong enough to justify the damage to unit esprit,
discipline, and morale if women are integrated into male infantry units.

Of course, such good order and discipline issues become moot
if infantry women are formed into separate, all-female units. I imagine this is
the direction intended by the Marine Corps. Admittedly, all-female search teams
gained notoriety in Iraq as the “Lionesses”, where they bravely contributed to
mission accomplishment of combat units outside the ”wire”. Nevertheless, the
Lionesses were escorted by regular infantrymen, shielding them from the overt
responsibility to engage and destroy the enemy. This brings me to my last
point.

Psychology 

Americans do not want their women hunting and killing the
enemy, nor are their young men psychologically equipped to accept with stoicism
the violent, gruesome deaths of female comrades in arms. This is not a
pervasive, sexist sentiment birthed in our Puritan past and nurtured into
maturity by Victorian prohibitions. It is an honorable mantle of respect and
protection bestowed upon the gentler, softer sex by a culture grounded in
Judeo-Christian ethics and fundamentally aware of the distinct roles that naturally
fall to men and women.

Whether religious or irreligious, Americans cannot but admit
a natural separation of responsibility between men and women. An infant without
a mother cannot be equally succored by a father, in spite of a love that runs
just as deep. A man can never be a mother, just as a woman can never be a
father. This, despite a century’s worth of neutering and gender-norming, is as
much a fact today as it was 2,000 years ago.

It’s Not Fair

I can hear the plaintive cry of the social reformers: But
that’s not fair! That is correct. Combat is not fair. During one assault in
Iraq, we shot at a lone enemy gunman with a tank. An M1A1 Abrams Main Battle
Tank engages a lone enemy gunman in Karabilah, Iraq during the first day of
Operation SPEAR. June 17, 2005. I imagine he thought that was pretty unequal,
too. Then we dropped a bomb on him. That’s why we win.

There are fundamental differences between men and women that
make them better suited for different roles. These differences do not make
women less courageous, less honorable, or less patriotic than men. The Silver
Stars, Bronze Stars, and Purple Hearts awarded to women in Iraq and Afghanistan
emphatically declare otherwise. But there are differences
nonetheless.  

Women do not belong in the infantry. But they do belong in
the military. We cannot simultaneously honor their service and dishonor the
vast majority of men and women who serve in combat support roles by inferring
that non-infantry service is less valued than that of the infantry.