“Women’s smaller hearts require more blood to be pumped each minute at a given level of exertion because they have less hemoglobin in their blood to carry oxygen.”
What kind of a sexist thing is that to say!!?? That’s not allowed!!!
It bears mention that Admiral Grace Hopper, AKA “Grandma Cobol,” was the source of the Y2K scare.
What has been called a “sniper” in different eras has been radically different. “Sniper” originally was a tag given to serving British officers who hunted snipe while posted to the crown jewel in the British Empire, India. For the better part, people who in the past were called “snipers” were just marksmen, skilled sharpshooters who had the home court advantage. So they were given a rifle with better-than-average precision and told to go die for god and country. If they got killed it was no great loss because nobody counted them an integral part of the regular force anyway.
The Nazis created the world’s first “professional” snipers. But for some reason, after WWI and the blanket vilification of the Germans, not many countries followed the Nazi example, least of all the Israelis. And no one else focused on making the sniper a professional military occupation until the War in Vietnam, when the US military, spearheaded by a Marine captain by name of Ed Land, rewrote the textbook. So whatever Dr. Ruth was, it came nowhere near the current incarnation of a “sniper.” Sex notwithstanding, the woman is only four-foot-seven. Even when she was only 20 years of age, how far do you suppose she could have humped a 40-lb ruck in a day, plus her rifle, six liters of water and a week’s rations?
The military doesn’t — CAN’T — operate on exceptions. It HAS TO operate on generalities because — especially with an all-volunteer force — the military doesn’t choose the soldiers, the soldiers choose the military. And the trajectory of military recruitment always runs antipodean to the economy. Economy gets bad, enlistment gets good. Economy gets good, enlistment gets bad. Which tells you oodles about the nature of the ‘average” recruit.
If you have two arms suppliers and 90% of the guns one builds are combat effective, but only 10% of the guns the other one builds are combat effective, logic dictates that you don’t buy an equal number from both, then take the time and the trouble to weed out the non-hackers, you only buy from the 90% guy.
That’s why men are accepted by default, because we know from past history that 90% of them can hack it in the infantry. And for the 10% of women who also might be able to hack it, ...too bad, so sad. The military operates on the principle of the lowest common human denominator. And you ain’t it.
Men have no choice. If you’re selected for the infantry, you go infantry whether that was what you wanted or not. So what’s it do for morale if women are allowed in infantry, but only by choice? That makes them “privileged,” a class above. Contrary to the good order and discipline of the service.
And they still only have to get knocked up to get out of their enlistment. Because pregnancy is the ONLY self-inflicted medical condition that comes with a guaranteed honorable discharge (if you want it)
In a saner era, a woman in the US military, when deployed to the field, had to be offered the opportunity to take a shower ever other day. OTOH, a man could remain in the field until eternity plus a thousand years and there still was NO MANDATORY shower opportunity. This was a concession to the fact that a woman’s hygienic needs are more complicated than a man’s. Women also were excluded from certain training activities that involved prolonged immersion in water deeper than the crotch. This is because God or nature (pick one) gave women a urethra a fraction of the length of a man’s, so water-borne bugs and contaminants have far less difficulty crawling into a woman’s bladder and producing a condition that renders her UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY combat ineffective.
Most undeniably, the economics just don’t make sense. If a woman were equally combat effective, it still would only make sense if they cost the same to field and maintain as a man. But they don’t. Without women, your quartermaster doesn’t have to stock brassieres and panties and feminine hygiene products. Not to mention weird sizes in uniforms and boots. And men soldiers tend to visit their gynecologist far less frequently than a woman. In fact, a woman’s medical maintenance costs just about double what a man’s does. There is no justification for the added expense unless they are MORE combat effective than men, when in fact the opposite is true.