I think it’s foolish and physically harmful to try and have women meet the same physical requirements as men in elite military units. Women should have their own elite military units.
If this policy was adopted what should the names of the all female units be that are equivalent to the male units?
Seriously, if I was naming such things, I would even skip the Amazons and Valkyries and just get them gender-neutral unit names. It’s not as though the SEALs are called the “Manly Dong Warriors” and there’s nothing especially masculine about seals – we think of the unit by its well-earned reputation.
I’m not the kind to get all huffy about the fine points of equality, but I can’t imagine a need to have two different names for each kind of unit or squad or division or whatever, simply because they might be all of one gender or another. A SEAL team is a SEAL team. If I should ever end up in deep shit and a rescue team shows up composed of individuals who could turn me into steak tartare on a whim, I’m not really going to care which way their underwear fits.
Besides, SEALs (male) wore queen-sized pantyhose for years. S’truth.
I’m probably going to take flack for this but the military is having a hard enough time finding women who can even qualify to go to Ranger school let alone pass it. If there was an elite female only version of the Rangers they should be called the unicorns because nobody will ever see them.
And SEAL is just a military acronym for SEa Air and Land . There’s nothing particularly gender biased about that. Female Texas rangers are called…Rangers.
You’re not suckering me into making up any gender specific unit names, I ain’t that stupid!
At one point the notion of girls having to report for selective service was being contemplated. Mike Royko (well known Chicago syndicated columnist) wrote a column in which he contemplated a female version of the Green Berets, to be known as the Green Bras …
If we take for granted that massive upper body strength is currently demanded of male applicants but not required for the roles targeted by that training, it shouldn’t be required of male applicants in the first place. If it is required, then there should be no adaptation of the training as regards that aspect for women.
Incidentally, does anyone know what the male/female ratio of marathoners or half-marathoners is?
I think that would greatly depend on how you choose to deploy a Special Ops team , though. You could develop different units that specialize in different aspects that enable you to take advantage of the members relative strengths.
Upper body strength is not the only thing men tend to excel at physically. For example in the Army a woman’s max running time, meaning she gets the highest score possible, is about the same as the minimum pass score for men. I’m struggling to come up with a single physical attribute that women would focus on to compliment their physiques other than flexibility which doesn’t seem to have a lot of combat applications.
My vote would be either “Powerpuff Girls” or “Douches”.
Such an elite, all-female squad would get a lot of press. Imagine the humiliation and demoralizing effect that reading such headlines would bring to the enemy:
“ISIS stronghold gets their asses handed to them by the Powerpuff Girls”
or
“After intense fighting, the Douches managed to capture the ISIS command center”