Integrating women into combat units is a bad idea, but it’s going to happen anyway, because integration has nothing to do with increasing (or maintaining) unit effectiveness.

Women are fine for sedentary and rear area activities.  Many of these duties — what go generally under the moniker of “combat service support” — have a very long history of being done by women.  They were gradually professionalized and put into uniform beginning in the early 19th century.  This trend isn’t going to be, and shouldn’t be, reversed; think of it as imposing certain duties and expectations on what would previously be “camp followers” in return for increasing their prestige.  Even then, the 6th Century Byzantine Strategikon contains a reference to these camp followers having some role in defending what would now be called a forward operating base from attack.

Must Standards Be Lowered?

The primary challenge for the services is to prevent lowering of standards (formal AND cultural) in order to increase the “representation” of women.  The Air Force and Navy have only a single-digit percentage of women flying their high-performance aircraft after over 20 years of integration.  Concerns about lowered training standards for these aviators currently have nothing to do with women.  That’s extremely encouraging, and suggests that ideologues will be mollified by a small number of women, somewhere, being called “infantrywomen”.

Fawning public affairs profiles of these women of the sort I groused about in the last part will be critical to this.  I, for instance, had no idea that the number of female fighter pilots was so small before I searched for the information in the previous paragraph.

Ground combat units can endure a lot more rot in their timbers, however, especially in peacetime.  If an unqualified pilot gets into the cockpit of a jet, they’ll crash.  Detecting incompetent ground forces is much more difficult short of actually going to war.  (This is half of why ground combat services are more prone to political corruption than navies and air forces, the other being coup threat).  Evaluating the competence of ground forces — via the Combat Training Centers — is actually something the United States really is the best in the world at, but it’s fundamentally a more difficult problem than evaluating whether a plane can fly or a ship can sail.

Fighting the Careerist Impulse

Careerism is a trickier beast.  In the military, the most common form is “just get to 20”, and this majority group isn’t cause for concern here.  The problem are young women who want to go all the way to the top, becoming a four-star general and therefore winning the game.  Not some lame four-star either, a cool job like Service Chief of Staff or Combatant Command.  More charitably, senior leadership in the most publicly-visible (remember, we’re actually talking about junior and prospective NCOs and officers here) units like the Brigade Combat Teams, division command, SOCOM, etc.

Right now the track to all these positions runs through tactical leadership billets (e.g. Rifle Battalion Commander) closed to women.  The “careerist” angle on female integration is, a woman should have the ability to be the CENTCOM commander, but right now that’s impossible because all of the jobs that put one into consideration for being the CENTCOM commander are closed to women, and all the jobs that put on into consideration for THAT job, and so on down the line right to lowly platoon and ODA leaders.

A much more honest and possibly even more effective line of argument, in my eyes, would be to open up the area of consideration for strategic leadership positions.  Improvements in raid tactics, for instance, have probably been driven more by advances in tactical intelligence than by any improvement in operator skills.  This had made intelligence leaders more critical than they were in the past, even as considerations for leadership positions in Army SOF have allegedly narrowed.  Observers have long noted that demonstrated excellence at a lower level of warfare doesn’t imply ability at higher levels.  Instead of trying to fill the current pipeline with women, maybe the pipeline itself needs to be reconsidered.  I’m not positive this is ideal, but it’s certainly better than trying to increase the number of women in senior leadership by lowering standards for specific junior positions.