Your dad, of course. The ballet instructor would go easy on an old man, but then he’d sucker punch her. Possibly with his penis.
I disagree. There’s no shortage (well, at least in US History there hasn’t been) of men to fill the available positions needed by the army. So the draft board is tasked with raising 75 new, qualified troops. Knowing that some people you call up will be unable to serve, what is your next task in selecting a pool of candidates from the general population?
At least my next step would be to call from the pool of people most likely to be suitable for combat. So old people are out. Sure, there might be the rare 75 year old who can serve, but I know that I’ll be eliminating 99/100 elderly people. So I set an upper age limit where it is cost effective to start sorting. Currently that is age 26.
And I keep going down the line looking for combat troop characteristics. Being male is another one of those “not always but a good indicator” classifications to keep my pool manageable.
I think your argument is that in my former scenario, while I might come up with 75/100 qualified troops, RNATB would be able to get a better 75/200 troops because he could find qualified women who would replace my weakest men making his 75 selection an overall better class of recruits.
I would suggest that his class is only slightly better at the edges, maybe getting 5 to 10 marginally better soldiers. And in order to do that, he had to sift through 100 extra bodies. Now multiply that to raise an army of over 1 million and you can see the logistical problem.
Also, it’s not clear that these marginally better women would add much to the fighting strength of a slightly worse male soldier. IOW, if male recruit nos 70-75 were such poor soldiers that they were dragging down the rest of the unit, there may be an argument that replacing them with the female recruits nos 1-5 would be a beneficial result. There is no evidence to suggest that the bottom male soldier brings down the rest of his unit in that way. Drafting women would seem like a massive expansion of the draft both in administrative cost and in uprooting of lives for no promise of any better battlefield result.
You’re being non sensical. If i said women weren’t strong enough to play in the NFL, it would do you no good to ask me if I had played in the NFL.
I would if you went into detail about why you think so and we had some NFL players posting in the thread and disagreeing with you.
True enough, but then the Women In The Military debate has never really been about pushing paper or smoking bowls in the motor pool.
For one thing I expect everybody is clear on the notion that women can push paper with the best of 'em, for another women themselves would be (and were AFAIK) justifiably pissed were they told that they can be in the military just as long as their contribution was limited to fetching military coffees and not worrying their pretty little heads about combat.
That’s a hell of a middle you’re excluding there…
I know! Lets just draft blacks. Everyone knows they’re stronger and more fit and athletic.
What middle ? Either women with given aptitudes can file for the same MOSs as men with the same aptitudes should they wish it, including combat specialties ; or it’s a paternalistic crock of shit. Rather binary. “You can be in the military, but not a grunt. It’s cool, there’s plenty of non-combat positions for you !”, how is that not equal to “don’t worry your pretty little head about fighting, love” ?
Nah, sorry, with you. Misread the post.
Serving in Israel is mandatory, but serving in combat units is more or less voluntary. New recruits are asked where they’d prefer to serve, and if they don’t put a combat position in one of their top three choices, they will hardly ever be sent to a combat unit. They may write infantry and get sent to the artillery corps (because no-one ever *wants *to go to artillery), but a combat unit is a combat unit.
Thanks. Not sure if that makes a difference.
Of course. Like it or not, conscription is a fact of life in times of all-out war, and a civic duty. You may not agree with your country’s ideology but you should at least be prepared to defend it in case of invasion.
You might - notwithstanding lance’s point about how my pool is twice the size - but that’s because you’ve artificially skewed the comparison. Why should my group be full of old people? Nobody is arguing about the age range for mandatory draft registration.
And you may still find a greater percentage of combat qualified troops in your pool, but your pool isn’t just for finding combat troops. It’s also for finding quartermasters and cooks and clerks. So limiting it to combat-ready personnel is pointless.
Beyond that, you don’t draft to replace dead people. You draft to replace people who are being rotated out of service. US conscripts in WWII were limited to 12 months’ service (and later 18).
Can you guess at the ratio of men to women in combat units (or do you know)?
Just 3%, per this Wiki page, although the lines between combat and noncombat roles in the IDF are awfully flexible at times.
I realize this is the most anecdotical of tangents but… seriously ? I’m a cowardly pacifist myself, but I always figured if I ever had to go camo, artillery would be it. King of battle, hands down. You get to play with the biggest fuck-off guns short of a WW2-era battleship, you’re miles away from any dangerous action (and thus don’t get to witness the carnage, sneak plus there) ; rear enough to get the comfort but action-y enough to get some adrenaline flowing ; you’re often bunking with the engineer corps which means outstanding base amenities even in the middle of nowhere since geeks are gonna geek even if it’s just to hammer up a proper latrine ; and if you *do *get hit by counter-battery fire it’s bound to be a pretty quick death. Oh, and you get that cool red stripe on your dress pants.
It’s like all positive, no negative.
FWIW, I met a gal who used to be a Caracal. She was awesome, really cool, super cute…and every time she turned her arm the right way I was reminded she could probably break me in half.
I guess I’m an old time feminist. Every time I had the point on patrol… Hell, come to think of it, at every pre-mission briefing, I said to myself “Hey, I can handle a typewriter as well as any woman! Why can’t I get a clerical assignment?”
Stop bitching and go get me an MRE and my newspaper.
I’d feel a lot better about drafting women if the military didn’t provide such a institutional security blanket for raping COs.