Women in Combat

The Pentagon just announced that it is opening up the ground combat arms to women. I think this was a bad decision.

My concern however, is much less about the women than the men.

Male decision making ability goes down in the presence of women. Combat requires quite a bit of decision making – dig in or advance? Flank or assault? Dodge left or right? Press the attack or withdraw? The male members of a mixed unit will thus be less effective than if they were in an all-male unit. “Less effective in combat” of course, leads directly to higher casualties.

The problem remains even if the women are segregated into their own units – the commander of the next higher echelon still has to make decisions about them. Less of a problem then if the women are actually present, of course, but still a problem. And how will the neighboring units (some of them inevitably all-male) react?

Then there’s the elephant in the room – pregnancy. Women in the military do get pregnant despite the best efforts of birth control, regulations, separation off-duty, and everything else that has been tried. If a woman in a support role becomes pregnant she can generally be replaced with minimal loss to unit cohesion. Combat units, however, need to be very closely tied together. Short term replacements (even, as demonstrated painfully during WWII, when they themselves are veterans) die at a MUCH higher rate than those fully integrated into the unit. Do we mandate abortions for women who become pregnant? What if the woman in question doesn’t want an abortion? Do we limit combat positions to women willing to have abortions if they become pregnant? What if they change their mind?

Finally, there’s the companion to the elephant; the practical bottleneck to producing the next generation are women, not men. A man can conceive hundreds of children (allowing just one per day) in the same time a woman can carry just one to term. A woman’s biological ability to put her genetic material into the next generation is a long term process. A man can do so while on a 24 hour pass. The women who are willing and able to ‘stand between their loved home and war’s desolation’ are among the ones we’d most like to pass their genes onto the next generation… and just about the least able to do so while doing their job.

It has been argued that women are already on the front lines of the current war (as the current war has no ‘rear area’). This is more the exception than the rule, but let’s stipulate it for now. We are also assured that the current war is ending Real Soon Now. The next war’s character is unknowable. Counter-insurgency seems like a reasonable guess, but even counter-insurgency missions often have secure rear areas.

Of course, the nature of the current geo-political situation means the US is unlikely to be endangered by a decrease in the effectiveness of its military forces any time soon. In fact it would be years before even the total elimination of the US military would present a serious risk to the continental US (or, at least, one more serious than already exists). Once the decision to put women on the front line is implemented, however, it can not easily be undone (see the notes about unit cohesion). If we do find ourselves in a ‘war to the knife’ twenty years down the road (or a hundred, if you prefer) we will likely be outnumbered – counting on superior skill and decision making for our survival.

We might be doomed by men making decisions about women under fire.