Women in Combat Pt 1: A Bad Idea

Physical differences between the sexes are so great that any reasonable definition of fitness for combat will exclude the overwhelming majority of women.  The remainder aren’t worth the justification that they will provide to lower standards or the negative social effects on previously all-male units.

Physical Differences

Strength differences between men and women are so great that only the very strongest women are around the average level of male fitness.  A man of above-average strength will probably never encounter a woman stronger than him between puberty and senility.  This gap can be “rectified” somewhat through the administration of androgenic hormones, but unless the treatment starts before puberty and continues indefinitely it won’t succeed in closing the gap and will probably only make the ersatz male more prone to injuries given differences in skeletal structure.  (Differences in skeletal structure already account for some portion of the increased musculoskeletal injury rate of females under heavy loads).

At any given level of fitness, women are more likely to suffer (noncombat) physical stress injuries than men.  (That study speculatively — that is to say, groundlessly — posits that differences in cardiovascular fitness account for this increased injury rates).  Any apparent female advantage is usually the result of smaller women working without an external load, as in gymnastics.

There are several ways to obfuscate this difference.  The most honest is to list the difference as a percentage rather than a standard deviation.  The last link says that women are “50-60% as strong as men in the upper body, and 60-70% as strong in the lower body”.  This conceptually understates the difference, like the “30% difference” between one man being five feet tall and the other being 6’6″.  Here’s a link to a study that gives mean and standard deviation for upper body (shoulder flexion) and lower body (knee extension) strength for an n~50 sample of active men and women.

Source: Vivian H. Heyward , Sandra M. Johannes-Ellis & Jacki F. Romer (1986), Gender Differences in Strength, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 57:2, 154-159, DOI:10.1080/02701367.1986.10762192

That’s right, four standard deviations.  The difference between inactive/sedentary individuals in probably lower (because of the lower mean among men), which doesn’t help the case for “needing” more women in physically demanding occupations like ground combat but might go some way in explaining certain men’s insistence that they know plenty of women stronger than they are.

They probably don’t, by the way. 

There are plenty of dishonest ways to spin this.  This article quotes a USMC officer:

As best as I could tell, this statement is supported by this study.  Before I show you the money shot, here are the study’s conclusions:

• females were more fatigue resistant as indicated by the minimal change in evoked twitches during the fatiguing contractions

• females demonstrated an enhanced ability to maintain the required force levels

• both genders demonstrated significant reduction in [muscle contraction] from pre- to post-fatigue and throughout the recovery period

• results appear to reflect sex differences that are peripheral to the activation of muscle

And…here’s a graph of the data that allegedly support the conclusion:

Yes, the bars are ranges.  Yes, the data is plotted, not at the mean, but at the upper bound (for females) and the lower bound (for males) in order to demonstrate “convergence” as the subjects become fatigued.  Finally, at exercise #10, the men have become sufficiently exhausted that the lower bound of their group intersects with the upper bound of the females.  This is the source of statements in the conclusion above.  Of course, it’s the integral of the plot that measures total applied force.

The Band of Brothers

The gulf in physical abilities between men and women is broad, but not totally insurmountable.  Given reasonable standards, a few exceptional women can cut it.  How many?  Somewhere between 0.5 – 10%, depending on the specialty.  Canada gives the most detailed breakdown I could find, for combat specialties ranging from .7% in the regular infantry to 11% in a certain reserve artillery specialty.  Wikipedia says the French infantry is 1.7% female, while Israel’s “combat arms” are ~4% female — compare to the standard deviation numbers above, which also imply that Canada has let things get out of hand in its artillery branch.  Should they be admitted to all-male combat units?  No.  Partly because they provide a justification to lower standards, which I’ll discuss in the next post, but also because they disrupt the camaraderie of male spaces.  This isn’t about men being disturbed by female casualties — they can get over that.  The problem is sexual competition.  This dynamic is corrosive to units given the sex ratio, and there’s no reason to let it in the tent so that one woman in fifty or a hundred can play soldier.

Readers should also keep in mind the lawless nature of combat and the totalizing nature of wartime environments.  There isn’t going to be a Sexual Assault Response Cell or whatever at Combat Outpost #33.  There are no cops to call if two soldiers get pissed off and hit each other, even if one of them is a woman.  It’s just the guys in the platoon.  Likewise, there is no going home at the end of the day.  There is no difference between the “workplace” and the “social environment”.  There aren’t any weekends.  The “successful” integration of women into the civilian workplace assumes and relies on all of these things.  Some of structures are in place in military garrison or in rear areas.  They don’t exist on front lines (which continue to exist, by the way).  Unless you assume or insist on only operating from large, well-appointed bases.  That, however, is a subject for the next post.

The social and demographic dynamics of the situation are actually not new.  Historically, the primary way to deal with it appears to have been guaranteeing that the male soldiers had sexual access to the women among their ranks on the front lines and in isolated outposts.  For instance, the French military brothels visiting combat outposts in Southeast Asia, or as Isaac Babel wrote of female Red Army soldiers in his 1920 Diary, they were “whores because they were comrades, and comrades because they were whores”.  Science fiction writers predicting military gender integration often depicted this as well, for instance Vietnam veteran Joe Haldeman in his Forever War where integrated soldiers were required to sexually service each other “by military custom — and law”.  I bring up these examples to show I’m not making this up.  I don’t think that this solution, which seems to have more or less worked, is acceptable to our society (it’s not to me personally).

Anyway, the combination of resentment (because female soldiers WILL NOT be as strong or tough as the men, in general) and sexual competition make the whole thing a bad idea.  But everybody is going to take a bit of this shit sandwich, and we’re all gonna say how great it tastes.  I’ll look at why in the next post.