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Korea’s a completely different kind of environment for women to function in, compared to the Middle East; imagine a female officer trying to order a bunch of hot-headed young Moslem men about when those guys wouldn’t even put up with their own mothers asking them to wipe their feet.

Every other professional in every other walk of life knows there’s a strict boundary between how you treat people you’re familiar with in your private life, with how you treat colleagues and clients at work. But in every other walk of life, lapses in self-discipline don’t normally threaten the lives of your colleagues.

That is why basic training should “hardwire” a unit to work like a unit regardless of race, color, gender or whatever, and treat all people in the unit as equals (except where rank is an issue). And it should “hardwire” to treat an enemy as an enemy whatever their race, color, gender or whatever.

Sure the women you’re talking about are obviously damaging the cohesiveness of the unit but if they’re sleeping with serving men, then those men are just as responsible for damaging the unit.

fr_freak, one has to ask the obvious (if obtuse) question, who was knocking up the serving females? If it’s their male colleagues then it suggests that self-discipline is not the focal point of basic training that it should be.

The level of self-discipline (or lack of it) is not the issue here. The issue is that women are biologically different from men, and no amount of politically correct sensitivity training and rules of conduct can change that. Women can get pregnant; men can't. Women have menstrual cycles and thus varying hygiene needs, among other things; men don't. Women are physically weaker than men. Period. These realities cannot be tossed aside as if they don't exist merely because we want to believe that men and women can perform equally in all areas. That's fantasy land, and military operations are extremely dependent on the hard, unforgiving nature of reality.