Greetings, loyal minions Your Maximum Leader noticed an interesting piece on the new wires. The title of the piece is: Stress Equal for Female Soliders. The piece is all together too short on specifics, but it is good news to hear that men and women serving in the military seem to suffer at statistically equal rates from “mental disorders” after serving in Iraq. (To the extent that any such news is good. Your Maximum Leader would hope that no solider would suffer from any mental disorder after a deployment, but that hope is not founded in reality.)

The only “mental disorder” listed specifically is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Other disorders like “depression” are mentioned as well. On the whole there is not much substance to the article. Well, not nearly enough for your Maximum Leader.

But that bit isn’t the full reason why your Maximum Leader wanted to opine on the subject. There are two portions of the piece that struck your Maximum Leader as out of place - yet worthy of comment - in a news piece dedicated (supposedly) to the results of mental screening on servicemen and women.

They come at the end of the article when suddenly the discussion changes to women in combat. There is a quote from Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America. She says: “But the best-trained women still can’t keep up with the best-trained men physically. If we’re putting men in harm’s way, we owe them battle colleagues who are just as strong as they are.” In the next paragraph Kim Gandy of NOW is quoted as saying: “There is no job that women should be excluded from because of their gender. If you can do the job, you should have an opportunity to get the job. If you can’t, you shouldn’t be there, male or female.”

Humm… This in an interesting subject, women in combat. He is sure it is one on which we’ve opined before, but is too lazy to look up the citation… Anyhoo…

Your Maximum Leader has always had mixed feelings about women in combat. But his feelings have been based more on his desire to avoid women POWs and concerns about “chivalry” (aka: men disregarding a tactical objective in order to protect a woman they were fighting alongside) than a woman’s ability to fight in a combat role. But the salient point to this discussion is the physcial requirments for combat service.

He got to thinking about these two quotations and he found himself agreeing, at least in part, with both of them. On the balance, a young man (17-21) will be stronger than a young woman (17-21) and therefore one surmises might make a better infantryman. But then again, if the basic physical requirements for serving as an infantryman were met by a woman what justification other than her sex could one make for excluding her from that billet?

Your Maximum Leader did some poking around and the only basic physical training requirements he could find were for the US Navy. They break down the various physical tasks by age and sex. You can see them here.

Now, he understands how we came to have two sets of physical requirements - one for men and one for women. But if the US Army started to allow women to fight in frontline groups would the current physical standards for men be raised or lowered? It wouldn’t make sense to continue to have two sets of physical standards for the same job. If a infantryman has to be able to run 1.5 miles in 10 minutes why would you allow an infantrywoman to be able to run the same distance in a longer time?

Your Maximum Leader supposes that if the military could establish a baseline physical requirement based on a specific specialty regardless of sex. That woul eliminate one barrier to women serving in combat roles. Of course other barriers would remain. They would be the arguments of pregnancy in frontline units (which could be remedied by required use of birth control), and group morale problems (including chivalry mentioned above as well as other problems like sexual harrassment and such). Frankly there are probably many more that your Maximum Leader can’t even think of right now.

But your Maximum Leader does believe that physical requirements for various specialties in the military should not be normed by sex. There should be one set of physical requirements for every specialty and all soliders (regardless of sex) should have to meet them.

Carry on.