In message , Mike Marron
writes
All true, but not everyone who resists the progress of bringing women
in a warrior ethic are "neanderthals." I'm all for women being trained
to fly high tech equipment in combat...as long as they're also being
trained to fight alongside the men on the ground (as go-gettum
warriors -- not merely support personnel like Jessica Lynch). It takes
three times longer to train a SEAL or special forces operative as it
does a fighter pilot but we don't see any women SEALS, Rangers,
Delta Force, etc.

Where will you recruit them from, since you're legally forbidden to have
female infantry?

They can't legislate physical strength (they
can only bitch to God for creating men and women unequal in the
strength department) but for political purposes they CAN train women
as pilots.

Back when I was in uniform, our job was rescuing and repairing damaged
vehicles.

There's no way that any individual, no matter how pumped, buffed and
beefy, is going to drag a 70-ton tank out of the mud it's bogged in.
What _does_ count is fitness, stamina, resilience, and intelligence (to
pull that seventy-ton tank out of the swamp with a twenty-ton recovery
vehicle without breaking cables, burning out clutches or killing the
recovery team).


I tend towards the "let everyone try for the job" situation, but I also
want solid clear unambiguous standards for any given military role (yes,
this is idealistic). Meet them and you're in, fail them and you're out.
If that means fewer members of $GROUP qualify, too bad - those who _do_
qualify have proved they fully deserve to get in.


I never had the eyesight to fly, and never got fit enough to be a Para
or Marine, but I _did_ prove I could run far enough and shoot well
enough and had the trade and field skills to do my job in the Army.

And I get to sanctimoniously proclaim that the only thing that kept me
out of a fast-jet cockpit was my eyesight (prove me wrong!) because an
arbitrary and archaic bias against severely myopic fighter pilots
prevented me from ever discovering any other reason why I wouldn't now
be converting to Eurofighters at Warton

--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk