Men and women in the trenches together

As I grunted for the tenth time to an upright position with a heavy barbell across my back — well, okay, 125 pounds — the young woman on the rack next to me commented, “you should make sure your knees don’t go past your toes.” I knew what she meant. In doing squats, proper form will make sure the stress stays on your quads and hammies, not your knees.

This woman looked like she belonged in the gym. We chatted, and she told me her goal was to lose 20 pounds of fat (I squinted but couldn’t see it) and gain 10 pounds of muscle, all following the birth of a baby. I thought, not a bad prescription for myself, even if I haven’t had a baby.

This conversation came to me when hearing and reading about Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s decision to open all combat responsibilities to women. I’m not sure what I think about this, except that the only criterion should be whether it will make the force more effective and lethal. Or at best, not detract a bit from their current effectiveness and lethality. But let’s face it, a lot of politics and agenda-furthering went into this decision, and not necessarily the agendas of the armed forces chiefs.

Still, a somnambulistic Congress isn’t going to check it. Women in combat will happen. So how to deal? If women like the young lady in the gym sign up, there’s reason to be optimistic.

Women have served in near front-line combat jobs for some time. Didn’t Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) lose her legs when the Black Hawk helicopter she was co-piloting in Iraq take on rocket-propelled grenades?

As retired Lt. Gen. Dave Barno told me in an interview, other militaries already have women in combat. He says the logistics that you might be thinking of — bathrooms and such — long ago ceased to be issues.

Physical strength and culture: those are the issues.

Only military people close to the situation can change the culture in such a way as to make women next to men in the most extreme combat situations seem normal. The rest of us should butt out of that one.

Critics often misstate the strength issue. Women do not have the same absolute strength capacity as men. I looked it up. The top female Olympic weightlifters, for instance, can “clean and jerk” close to 308 pounds (that’s nearly both of us combined), and men around 473 lbs. The fastest male marathoner can get under 2:06 or 2:05, the fastest woman 2:15.

But the real question is whether a given woman can approximate the physical capacities of a man in the same unit. Or will the standards in place for men stay put and also apply to women? The Army claims that the first two women to clear Ranger School did so under the same criteria as the men. I  suspect that, while absolute strengths and speeds are important, average sustained abilities —endurance — may be more important in combat. But endurance at a given level of exertion.

When it comes to mental application, men don’t have it over women. I learned this training for marathons over 15 years. For many of those years, I trained in coed sorts of pick-up groups. People would meet at a spot on a Sunday morning, and we’d all run 20 miles or so. Or at a track to do hard intervals. Whether training hard or actually running races, the man-woman issues faded pretty fast.  You feel great, or feel like dying, pee in the bushes, throw up, blow snot into the slipstream, discuss various bodily functions and metrics (“Did you poop this morning?”) all in a unisex manner. Only today’s training and the ultimate goal matter. On one of the more difficult training runs I ever did, which include running up Sugarloaf Mountain in Comus, Maryland, I was coached along by a female friend for whom it was easy. She toughened me up.

The kind of people, men or women, who are going to volunteer to join the military, go to basic training and then maybe on to combat units, likely have that sort of attitude toward physical accomplishment, a large component of which is mental. Maybe Ash Carter gets this aspect of the question, maybe not. I’ll bet many military officers do.

This could work.

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