Posted on 09/24/2009 11:38:30 AM PDT by Ben Mugged
But of course it wouldn’t be the “silent service” anymore.
* ducking *
Good one, Non-S.
-Rex
You bring out a valid point and refreshing considering the knee jerk reactions of most. Women have served on mixed crew duties in missile Launch Control Complexes since the early 1980's where two crew members are locked in a 10 X 20 foot control center 60 feet below the ground for days at a time.
No!!! They are full of seaman.
“I want to hear from some of the submariners that post here.”
Patrols are long and quarters are tight. A Junior officer in my day (on a now decommissioned NUC sub, launched in 1963) had three bunks in a “room” about the size of a closet (three bunks stacked on top of each other). The enlisted had similar space to sleep in with more bunks in a room, NO PRIVACY.
How do you separate male and female? You don’t.
You’d have to be a total IDIOT to believe that this is workable but that doesn’t surprise me at all, look at what Americans elected as Pres_ent.
” You use a small percentage to paint the entire force. “
Small? Try 30-50% were pregnant at one point in many units to get out of the first Gulf War.
There is no reason to change what works, unless there is confidence that that change produces a mission improvement.
as a grunt, I recall back in the late 80’s/early 90’s , we’d be on field OPs where nearby units with females would have to downsize at times to rotate chicks out of the field for showers due to personal feminine hygiene issues.
meanwhile , we rotted in the field for weeks on end.
another time, I caught a chick with her pants down (literally) and her rifle leaned against a tree way out of arms reach. I “wasted her”. I was chastised by her NCO in her REMF unit for being a perv and threatened with a sexual harrasment suit. All for doing what’s done in the “real world” of combat. (hence the saying “caught with your pants down”-nobody was pulling security for her)
so much for equity. so much for realistic training.
I say have woman-only combat units. When they die in equal #’s and have to apply for the draft, then we’ll have “equity” . Until then, no free gubmint student loans or cheeze for them.
The pregnancy rate for female enlisted personnel after Desert Storm was more than 13 percent for the Navy. In Iraq in 2004, there were 2,998 of our military personnel evacuated due to combat wounds. For the same period, there were approximately 4,000 female personnel non-deployable due to pregnancy.
That's in a military that's only 15 percent female. Imagine if the female percentage were higher.
Does it really make sense to impose the extra cost to taxpayers of training, feeding, deploying, (impregnating), and evacuating a population that has such a high risk of non-deployability? To say nothing of the effect on discipline and cohesion that must accompany the, um, preparation for non-deployability.
However, it is easy to coordinate the privacy for two people for a few days than it is for 120 people for months at a time. I never served on submarines but I have been on them. And as cramped and croweded as the destroyers I was on were, it's many times more cramped and many times more crowded on a sub. My disagreement with putting women on subs has nothing to to with their competence and everything to do with the logistics.
Civil lawsuits would not be in Military Courts.
all correct. it boils down to the fact that women get pregnant, men don’t. No amount of diversity lecturing
can erase this basic fact.
What about the requirement of no deodorant?
So what’s the pregnancy rate out in the Fleet these days...???
You might be interested in this thread...
I agree with you.
Good point. I spent most of the 90s in ship rework facilities, refitting ships for co-ed crews (i.e. separate male/female berthing and heads). On a sub space doesn't allow for this. The passageways alone are extremely cramped.
The policy when I was in (it may have changed) was that once a female became pregnant she was rotated to shore duty immediately. With a sub spending the majority of it's time underwater this couldn't happen, not to mention the simple fact that at sea on a sub to airlift someone out you can't land a helicopter like on a carrier. So now you'd have the spectacle of a pregnant woman being hoisted up out into a hovering helo (think of The Hunt for Red October).
As another poster commented, they'd have to show how having women aboard subs enhances the mission before I could support it.
I have always wondered in regards to the practice of ‘hot bunking’. Do they change pillowcases or provide for individual pillows?
Otherwise it seems like colds and flu would just rip through a sub crew like wildfire.
You're right---the Navy doesn't even go there, or even if it does, such statistics are treated like classified information.
A few years ago I read a letter written in the Naval Institute Proceedings by a chief who lamented the fact that so many of his ship's female sailors had gotten pregnant that the vessel had been rendered wholly dysfunctional.
Nothing more was ever said about it in the Proceedings and that's the way the Navy is content to have it.
Make the subs homogenous gender, and I’m all for it. All women, or all men. Pick one.
Subs have a premium on space, and little for privacy. By all means, put them on subs.
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