I have given you my reasoning. We are just not going to come together on the issue. That's fine. Everyone can't agree on everything.
i had a long reply all ready to go but realized salty nailed it and I only repeated what he said. there's not much else to say except women have their place in certain support roles in the military. I also know that the air force has less stringent physical requirements than army or marines as does the navy. well at least all the transfers from both were never in fighting shape. I dont think its enforced near as much. either way, there's nothing really to argue on this except its politically correct BS that has hurt the overall strength of our military since they had to lower the standards across the board. Now this not only lets women in, it allows lazy male slobs who couldnt get accepted beforehand in as well. until people get over this PC bull**** or we get conquered there's no end in site.
As far as women pulling back the charging handle of a 50. cal machine gun, in Desert Storm we had women manning a .50 cal machine gun on top of Humvees, and I don't recall any having any problem with that during training. I have a high regard for the Marines, and while I cannot speak from first hand experience, I find it very doubtful that the Marines would put someone on a weapon that they could not handle. The fact that women were put on .50 cal machine guns implies they have been trained on and passed training. One assumes that training included pulling back the charging handle. I have never fired one, to my regret, so I don't know what strength it takes, but I am sure the Marines do. Refering to women as "weak" who needs our protection is a very outdated view of women. I respect your experience and your service, but I have to disagree with you.
dude, i understand. you dont want to have your woman see this, because you will be sleepin on the couch. perfectly understandable. carry on.
Let me clarify something. I can understand that sometimes an individual can be given responsibilities that they should not for PC purposes. I remember some years back the Navy qualified a female carrier pilot just because she was the first female to become qualified. She was also the first female carrier pilot to get killed when she crashed her plane. An investigation showed she should have never been given her wings. That was PC at its worst. But that is a far cry from saying no female should be allowed to be pilots.
Bengal, I have to say that your experiences with women in the Air Force and Salty's in the Marines are very different. In the Air Force you don't have to be as physical as you do in the Marines. For the Air Force, I say not ever being involved with but almsot everyone of my friends either being in the USAF already or in AFROTC here at LSU don, women don't have as high of a physical standard to live up to, especially if they are enlisted, as do the marines. In the USAF the officers (read: pilots) are really the only ones that actually get into real combat, the enlisted are usually involved with making sure a plane is combat ready therefore they don't have as many physical requirements as does a marine or someone in the army. I'm not denigrating women at all, I just have to say that women aren't as physically strong as men and therefore probably can't put up with the rigorous physical activites that the marines and the army go through but are able to put up with the boot camp of the USAF and USN because they are less physically demanding.
Not all women are weak and need male protection, most women in America however do. If you take an average female and an average male and compare strength the man will always win, it is the way we were designed and there is nothing wrong with saying that.
I'm a reasonably strong person and even I had trouble pulling the charging handle back on a .50 cal. The females that I went through The Basic School with had a helluva lot more trouble than I did. I'm not really going to get into this argument, but I can say that in my limited experience, I've seen both ends of the spectrum: female officers who've been able to hack it with the males and female officers who couldn't hold a candle to the males. To prove that there are some females out there who are definitely capable, the number 1 person in my graduating class from The Basic School was a female who, incidentally, also finished number 1 in her class at the Naval Academy. What you have to understand is the culture that Salty comes from: he's a Grunt and there are no women among the Grunts and for good reason. Women can serve vital roles in the military, but I agree that it should not be on the front lines serving with the tip of the Spear.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I see no problems with women being radio and radar operators, air-photo analysts, missileers, EW specialists, . . . even pilots. No problem at all in many rear echelon jobs like medical and food specialists, truck drivers, clerks, mail handlers, and supply specialists. But not in the tracks and not in the foxholes.
