IMHO, the best reason for segregation of women from submarine duty is medical. Having served aboard a Submarine tender with a crew of 1600, I can factually state that women require three times the healthcare resources of men.
We had 1200 men, 400 women, yet treated equal numbers of men and women every day. Every woman had to be seen at least once a year – some men were seen only once every 3 or 4 years (other than immunizations). The sheer number and variety of female medical problems was truly amazing.
All personnel were prohibited from sexual contact with each other, yet we went through 100 condoms a week (from free dispensers throughout the ship), and saw two pregnancies a week. Yes, that’s correct – a 25% turnover rate for women every year.
On a submarine, there are very limited medical facilities. On an attack boat, it’s basically one guy, with a bunk. He also does all the personnel and finance records for the crew. There’s no way he could be equipped to deal with the variety of issues women have.
Well, you train them. You give them lots of “simulator” time (does the Navy have effective submarine mockups? I’d be surprised if they didn’t) and send them out with a small supervisory crew of experienced (male) submariners which gradually gets phased out as the women adapt to their new jobs. I don’t doubt there are enough determined women in the U.S. Navy who would seek out sub duty, even under these conditions, including having to adapt to a few men (the men themselves would have to be carefully chosen to minimze the chance of, ahem, friction) until such time as the female crew was ready to sail on their own.
It’s not that simple. Certain jobs require prior experience in another related billet. You would need an engineer, for example, that had already served a tour as a junior officer standing engineering watches. You’d want your XO to have served a few tours in various jobs on subs, and your CO to have served as an XO.
Hey, I never said it was simple. I’m just saying it’s possible. There would have to be a lot of training runs with experienced male crew members, and I suppose some of the female officers would have to serve on (normally) all-male subs to gain experience. It would be a while before the all-female sub (SSBN If You Don’t Why I’m Nuking You, I’m Not Going To Tell You?) had enough experienced crew members to go out on a serious tour, but it could be done.
There would have to be a lot more pressure put on the Navy before they invest the time and effort, though, which is perfectly understandable. I’d like to see it happen, just out of curiosity, but I ain’t underwater so I’m not holding my breath.
One time I was with a hiking group from DC walking along the Blue Ridge. Among these was a lady officer (Ensign?). She explained to us that her duties was overseeing the “quartermastering” of a ship (don’t ask me what the precise term is, this was 12 years ago). She was checking up on supplies for sick quarters and ask the corpsman if they had birth control pills. They said no, and she asked why. They said no one ever told us to. She ordered them to get the pills. She said they seemed shocked at the suggestion. She said that it was naive to assume otherwise. I wasn’t convinced of her argument either, I mean why take the chance of blowing your career?
About a year later some friends of mine, who were civilian contractors, had returned from a journey up in the Arctic (on an USN surface ship). They had suffered a tragedy up there (a diver had drowned in an accident), but compounding the problem was a male officer fraternizing with an enlisted female. The junior officers were deeply ashamed because the captain knew of this, but did nothing about it (the captain was scheduled to retire in less than 60 days.) They kept telling my friends that this wasn’t the way the USN did things. My friends said the crew was about demoralized as one could ever imagine. Everybody wanted to get off of the love boat. About a month later, I was scanning through the newspaper, and found out the ship’s commander was undergoing an investigation for the above. I don’t recall the outcome, but he was only 20 days shy of 20 years.
That it was very naïve of me to assume that human nature would take less precedence then one’s career. However having known a few members of the “club”, they consider themselves to be in the best in the Navy, even more so than carrier pilots. My impression is that it’s a matter of pride more than anything else is, and they don’t want that kind of potential disruption to endanger their mission. A sex scandal in the Silent Service would be considered very offensive to all and they don’t one any part of that.
The armed forces are a boy’s club where boys get to play with their bang-bang toys and hit people. Boys don’t want girls joining in because girls have germs.
If women require more medical care than men it just means that the medical care provided in the past has been insufficient. If men won’t “close the door” on women it just means that the men are badly trained. If men (or women) and women (or men) want to have sex then provision should be made to accomodate them. What’s wrong with people being naked? It happens all the time in nudist clubs (actually, it’s more natural than wearing clothes). There’s no logical reason for a submarine to break its mission just because one of the crew is pregnant; she has up to 9 months before parturition.
If anyone can show me an example of women “breaking” the armed services of any country I will eat my words. Meanwhile, how many women fought in WWII for the various underground armies? Heck, Audrey Hepburn was a courier. The Israeli AF are full of women. The Australian AF have women on combat duty (my flatmate’s best buddy’s girlfriend was in Gulf War II).
My point is, the problems that might arise from having women on a submarine arise from the fact that submarines were designed and created to only have male crew. That can be fixed the same way that surface ships and space ships have been.