I intended to include this in the last post but I seemed like a slightly different topic. If a small number of women are allowed into combat arms units, should they be concentrated into specific units or dispersed thinly across the entire service?
The Thin Film
Women soldiers in combat arms units will either be spread in a thin film throughout the entire service branch or concentrated into specific units. The latter can be done either with the goal of having all-female units, or not.
If spread out evenly, each combat arms company will have 1-5% women members. The biggest concern the services currently have with this is making sure a given woman has at least one other female “buddy” so she’s not left completely to the mercy of the men around her in various ways. The low concentration does mean that not every sub-unit will have a female member e.g. only one platoon or even squad in a company might have a woman in it. If this woman turns out to be unfit for “line” duty, which is quite likely, their low density means the company or battalion commander can squirrel them away in their headquarters without serious loss. This already happens on a routine basis as things stand now in all-male units. The chain of command must avoid, or at least avoid publicizing, “disparate impact”-style analysis of such assignments in the integrated force, since they will reveal that such “relegation” occurs far more often to women.
Aside from making integration relatively lower-stakes and therefore easier to manage in the manner described above, it spreads the risk of being blamed for female underperformance evenly across commanding officers, if not “unit leaders” in general. More speculatively, by putting commanders in the same boat, feedback about integration efforts and effects will be more honest and originate from a larger sample group.
As best as I can tell, this is how all major integrated militaries with the exception of Israel manage their organizations.
Going All In
The other avenue is putting women into specific, special units. In my eyes, there are two main benefits to this: the possible elimination or mitigation of the sexual competition problem and amplifying the effects of integration to a level that makes them impossible to conceal, for good or ill. Both all-female units and mixed-but-heavily-female units (e.g. 30-60%) would accomplish this. Such units would not be able to squirrel women away into the clerical and driver positions that exists even in light infantry companies, as mentioned above — they’d have to put women into true line combat positions. (This would also compartmentalize the damage from integration if it turns out to be an absolutely unmitigated disaster — although I don’t think that will happen, if only because of how difficult it can be to evaluate the true effectiveness of ground combat units.)
The middle option — ~50% female — is a necessary transitional state to 100% female units anyway, since the low base of combat arms knowledge and experience among female personnel probably makes it impossible to form an entire functioning battalion if not company out of women in the United States right now.
There are boring organizational problems: NCOs and, especially, officers in the current force need to have a diversity of assignments to be promoted and even to stay in active service. If the One Place To Be a Woman Warrior is in an undesirable geographic location, it would even discourage junior soldiers.
However, there is a bigger problem. The United States expects its combat units to be completely interchangeable cogs. Not all countries do this, and the motivations and mechanisms don’t concern this post, but it’s true. No significant specialization or deviation is allowed for e.g. airborne infantry battalions in the 173rd Brigade vs the 82nd Airborne. Nor for armored battalions in the 1st Cavalry vs the 3rd Infantry, or for the Marine divisions.
The problem exists because an all-female or heavily female unit will likely be markedly less effective, however that’s defined — even in training — than their male counterparts. Israel is the one country I found that has definitely concentrated women into specific combat units — the “Caracal”, “Lions of Jordan”, and “Bardelas” light infantry battalions (70% female, by the wya). Non-official sources claim, plausibly, that these units are essentially border-guard outfits, and on less-dangerous areas of the border at that. The current US military establishment does not assign specific long-term duties to maneuver units this way as a matter of deliberate policy. Given that the IDF policy certainly reflects an understanding of fundamentally different capabilities, it can’t serve as a model for the United States ground combat forces.
Caracal Battalion soldiers
Command of specifically female units would also represent a higher risk to unit leaders, who risk taking the blame both for substandard performance and sexual harassment/assault/other gender-related complaints that are basically outside their control. Without a deliberate thumb on the scale when evaluating commanders and other leaders of female units, officers and male NCOs will try to weasel out of assignment to the unit out of a completely justified fear of damage to their all-valuable careers. If the comparative experience of mixed-gender support commanders and their peers in all-male units right now are any indication, the “surviving” leaders of female units aren’t likely to come away with a positive impression of gender integration beyond the required public platitudes either.
The conclusion to this is that dispersing females evenly among combat units is the way to go for the United States, even if (actually, partly because) their presence in a given unit is likely to be in the single digits.
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