🚀 go-pugleaf

At the risk of sounding like more of a twit than usual, let me sort of
get a new ball rolling here and ask (instead of twitting around with the
"should women be allowed in combat" question),

"In which ways might women serve in the military in active duty outside
of direct front-line combat?"

(please keep in mind that the following argument addresses _wartime
only_)

All sorts of people are making arguments for or against inclusion of
females as infantry or gunners. while it can be fairly well argued that
the average 120-pound man in average shape can take an average 120-pound
woman in average shape and proceed to mop the floor with her in a "fair"
fight, it has to be noted that women, on the average, as quite as
trainable as are men in small-arms accuracy. If one wishes to disallow
considerations of front-line duty, where main force is a basic
requirement, and shifts the studies to gender-based comparisons of
non-frontline duties, one finds that women, on the average, are better
at some things than are, on the average, men.

In situations where one is better served by accuracy under pressure,
women tend to excel, on average. They make excellent fire-control
officers, and are less likely to resort to throwing equipment around the
room when they get momentarily balked by reset-procedure requirements
after operator error. They are more willing to "try again more
carefully". They make excellent support and logistics officers, and seem
to be a little better at picking up variations in detail and prethinking
margins-requirements in situations where a backlog could be critical.
There's other things, I'll leave the details to those with better access
to the entirety of the studies.

But there is another field where women are at least as good as are men,
and the intelligence agencies of the world will be the first to tell you
this: There are no better spies. Also, while in a direct confrontation
against enemy forces in a piched fight women might be a liability, women
out of uniform are simply incomparable as a softening-up force. 

A woman with a gun can shoot it as well, on the average, as can a man,
and there is quite a bit of evidence that with very small arms, a woman
gunslinger is likely to get a well-aimed shot off first, due to much
finer (on average) control of the fine muscles of the fingers and wrist.
In any case, when it comes to the preferred weapon of the spy,
slow-acting poison, it matters not who introduces it into the victim,
only that they had access. While hostiles or potential hostiles might be
(as a whole population) looking for infiltrators, as a rule they would
tend to suspect some athletic James Bond type, and would completely
overlook a female of unremarkable appearance. She might gain access
where otherwise you'd need a regiment of your best Marines. Little old
ladies might not be the first people that the enemy would suspect of
being station chiefs, and little old ladies' clubs might be perfect
fronts for the dissemination of operating funds and trasnfer of vital
information.

It has been said that it is better to win the battle without taking to
the field, and by flooding the homeland of the enemies with poor
defenseless women, it would be possible, given the nature of slow acting
poisons, for each of these operatives to kill or incapacitate huge
numbers of your enemy's effectives. Three females with a little
spray-bottle of "perfume" properly positioned in favorite shore-leave
bars could incapacitate battleships. And it was well-known in Vietnam
that the females could be much more dangerous than the men, simply
because they were less likely to be suspected by the fools that they
killed.

But then again, what sort of woman would want to serve in this way? 

I think we'd probably turn out to be a lot better off, in the long run,
if we simply put those who wanted to serve onto the front line or
anyplace else they volunteered to go and for which they could qualify...
rather than to either earn their disrespect by failing to respect their
individual qualifications, or to earn their disrespect by offering them
the above-mentioned alternative to front-line service, at which they
might naturally excel, to return home from their tours of duty with such
skills, to be told that "women just aren't any good in the military".

-- 
Be kind to your       | When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.
neighbors even though | http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/
they be transgenic    | Now. chock full of uninteresting links.
chimerae.             |-- Genesis 19:1-13 - Hebrews 13:2 -- 
---- INCOMING! http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/incoming.html ---------
"Sarah Connor?" All UseNet and BitNet postings are copyrighted.