Marines Delay Female Fitness Plan After Half Fail

[wercal]

105. Some men had trouble with the tank rounds

"As to the M1 tanks and its 46 pound projectile, it only carried 42 rounds and the cannon only survives less then 2000 rounds before it needs to be replaced. Thus you do NOT use M1 tanks as artillery pieces. On the other hand, unlike some of our allies AND the Russians themselves, the M1 tank is dependent on MANUAL feeding of the Cannon. Can women manhandle 42 rounds of 46 pounds in weight? These will be is bursts, not one after another like the Mortars and Field Artillery above. I think the answer is YES, while I think the ability to fire round after round of Mortars and Field Artillery is no."

I was an M1A1 tank platoon leader. Plain and simple, many of the tasks were challenging to the men, and there are very few women who could consistently perform the tasks associated with the M1. Since you brought up the ammunition, I will concentrate on that.

A standard measure of a tank crew's effectiveness is a Table VIII Gunnery. There are 5 engagements, and 10 targets IIRC...and it takes around 15 minutes to make a run down range. Some of there engagements involve multiple targets, requiring rapid reloading. At least one requires rapid reloading of a heavier HEAT round (the SABOT weights the 46 lbs you listed and the HEAT weighed 53 lbs). These rounds have to be loaded very quickly - the standard is 5 seconds. That's 5 seconds to press a switch that slams open the blast door, slide the round out of its rack, pull it out, flip it, slam in breech, pull arming lever, get out of the way, and yell 'up'.

I was in the unique position of being a cadet at West Point...and there were women cadets. So, we did training together, and part of our second summer was a week at Ft Knox, for Armor familiarization. The women cadets at West Point are incredibly physically fit, some of the toughest and fittest women in the army. Not one of them came even close to being able to handle loading a dummy round, within the time limit. Not one. Some of these women could do more situps than me. Many of them could run the 2 mile run faster than me. Most of these women could do more pushups than the average soldier in the army (West Point has accelerated PT tables for men and women). Yet none of them could hoss around those rounds.

An Armor battle is all about speed. Everything we did, concerning gunnery, was meant to increase our speed. A modern Armor battle (if one were ever to occur again) is projected to take just a few minutes, with every tank frantically expending all the ammo in its ready rack as fast as possible. I guarantee you that the vast majority of women would not be physically suited for loading ammunition on an M1 tank. But that's ok. There are lots of jobs in the military that women are very good at. Being on a tank crew isn't one of them.