On the Reality of Combat

[jmowreader]

150. This is going to sound a bit sexist...

...but every Marine infantry battalion commander is salivating at the prospect of being able to have female staff officers. Y'see, not every infantry officer can be a platoon leader or company commander - jobs where you get to command groups of men in battle - and they all hate it. I can almost guarantee that any woman who graduates infantry officer basic course will find herself in battalion headquarters pushing paper and the male she replaces will be sent to a line company.

And really, this isn't a bad thing. In the Army her promotion path would be assistant S-3 as a lieutenant, battalion S-3 as a captain, brigade S-3 or assistant division G-3 as a major, division G-3 as a lieutenant colonel, corps G-3, J-3 (this is an officer who works with more than one service of the US military) or C-3 (these guys work with allied forces) officer...within 30 years we could see female four-star generals because of this. Yes, we would have four-stars who "never spent a night in a foxhole..." but we have that now, and the current officer evaluation report has nowhere to list the enemy soldiers you killed.

The reason I don't want female enlisted grunts is because of the way they make grunts. The Army uses COHORT units. Those units are formed at Fort Benning, trained, sent to field units, serve and discharged as a team, and they've done it that way for decades. Most women cannot pass infantry school, so if you build a COHORT with ten women in it and they all fail, your outfit starts life understrength - and understrength infantry companies die quick.