Navy intends to let women serve on subs.........

Originally Posted by PSM

Then again, I do migrate down to the beach every women’s beach volleyball season. That must mean something.

Pat

YEAH, your brains are below your belt, and you have a dirty mind...
AM

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by GratefulCitizen

Given sufficient time, some women can achieve performance comparable to men.
The training time required to get a female on par with their male counterparts would be hard to justify under economic/timeline constraints.

The Army experimented with this, and found that to be the case until you provide the men with additional PT as well, then the numbers skew again even more for the men's performance.

And they discovered that you will injure a lot of the women getting to that point, even if you train and condition them properly.

TR

[PSM]

Originally Posted by armymom1228

YEAH, your brains are below your belt, and you have a dirty mind...
AM

Gee, that's not fair, AM. I’m just trying to be a female athletic supporter.

Pat

[afchic]

Originally Posted by plato

I know what I think, and what I'm "supposed" to think, and I hope I have a reasonable estimate of the distance between the two.

I struggled to pass the final PT test, which seemed to last forever, and was a great test of endurance as well as strength, when the Academy was all male.

Speaking to someone from a class that graduated a few years later, I learned that the length of the ordeal was shortened so that more females could pass.

One of the hardest events of the test was picking up a person of your approximate weight from the ground, getting that person over your shoulder, and carrying that "wounded soldier" to safety. It was one of the last events, when you were near exhaustion, and was a test of the whole body.

The elimination of that particular event speaks to me.

Maybe it was because of the girlie boys that couldn't pass the test either that it was eliminated. I don't know about you, but until about 1 year go when my bad back finally caught up with me, I could pass that certain qualification when many men that I work with couldn't I don't know if it has something to do with the fact that I have worked on a flight line my entire career, which involved a lot of heavy lifting, and most of the men I work with now spent their time in a cockpit. The fact that I have lifted weights most of my life and so have pretty good muscle strength (for a girl) may have attributed to that.

Do you think it is fair to put me in the same category (I am 6'2 approx 185 lbs) with a little thing that is 5'2 and weighs 100 pounds? Yes there is a difference between men and women. But I bet that with my body type, I would have a better chance of passing said test than say a 5'5 guy who weighed 130 pounds.

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by afchic

[COLOR="Pink"]Do you think it is fair to put me in the same category (I am 6'2 approx 185 lbs) with a little thing that is 5'2 and weighs 100 pounds? Yes there is a difference between men and women. But I bet that with my body type, I would have a better chance of passing said test than say a 5'5 guy who weighed 130 pounds.

I believe that you might be able to do that, for a short while.

Unfortunately, I think that the smaller male would, given the same fitness training as you, be able to equal your efforts and do so with less risk of injuries.

TR

[afchic]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

I believe that you might be able to do that, for a short while.

Unfortunately, I think that the smaller male would, given the same fitness training as you, be able to equal your efforts and do so with less risk of injuries.

TR

The fact that I have undergone an MEB would support your thoughts. But then again I am 37 years old, played intercollegiate rugby for 3 years, and have been pushing pallets for almost 12!! Getting old sucks

[Pete]

[QUOTE=afchic;318269......... But I bet that with my body type, I would have a better chance of passing said test than say a 5'5 guy who weighed 130 pounds.[/QUOTE]

Careful with the size thingy. Some of the ruckenest fools I've ever seen were little short guys approaching their body weight with their rucks. Little legs zippin' back and forth were a blurrrrr of motion. Long striders were huffin' and puffin' to keep up.

Way back when my wife tried out for airport security in Fayetteville. One of the final tests was to move a sand man over to a 4 foot wall and get him over - anyway you could. The reason as explained to the folks was you were expected to be able to move a person from an area of danger. My wife could get him over to the wall but not over. Oh, well, somebody else got the job.

I do remember a few cases where there were similar strength standards, trash collection and fire fighters come to mind. I think the trash job was less strength than technique and the female applicant practiced and blew away the competition - then they wanted to change it - not fair.

The problem with "standards" is they are not set. Not getting enough? Lower the standards.

Had a student want to argue the 12 road march standards with me one time - carping about the measured distance. I told him all the companies start here and all the companies finish there. The route is called the 12 road march route. Everybody walks the same course, sandy all the way, up hill and down. And my watch is the official time ---- "GO" tick, tick, tick.

[GratefulCitizen]

Originally Posted by afchic

Do you think it is fair to put me in the same category (I am 6'2 approx 185 lbs) with a little thing that is 5'2 and weighs 100 pounds? Yes there is a difference between men and women. But I bet that with my body type, I would have a better chance of passing said test than say a 5'5 guy who weighed 130 pounds

Given time and training, the 5'5/130 lb guy doesn't stay that way.
I was quite the ectomorph well into my late teens.
Given time and training, I was easily benching well over 300lbs.


Have an old friend who is similar size to you.
She was an all-state BKB player, top division 1 player, and could've played pro had she not gone into coaching.
She was well-conditioned, trained, and was a gifted natural athlete.
(At age 16-17, she was my lifting partner and was stronger than I was...)

Had male teammates during the same period who were much smaller than she and had unremarkable levels of natural athletic ability.

They all spent similar time on the court and in the weight room.

It wasn't even close.
The males were much stronger, faster, and had better endurance.

The gaps grew even more into their 20s, despite the fact that she was doing athletic training year-round and the males were just working for a living.

Originally Posted by afchic

The fact that I have undergone an MEB would support your thoughts. But then again I am 37 years old, played intercollegiate rugby for 3 years, and have been pushing pallets for almost 12!! Getting old sucks.

We had two women who were career drivers in our UPS center.
Both of them were top producers when working the heavy routes in Phoenix.

One has retired, the other is nearing retirement.
They both accumulated plenty of injuries over the years, similar to male counterparts who had similar work histories.

The men spend much less time out (if any) when injured, and get back to 100% much more quickly upon return.

[ZonieDiver]

Getting old sucks

If nothing else, on THAT you and I can agree!

[Slantwire]

AFChic, ma'am, I'll start by saying I completely respect you and your opinions. I simply disagree in this conversation.

To my mind, this thread has coalesced into two separate issues: physical abilities (Army restrictions on combat arms such as infantry), and living conditions (Navy submarines / AF missileers).

I'm going to say something about living conditions first. As you've pointed out, professionalism and leadership are not gender-specific. But not everyone meets the high standards necessary to avoid complications. (If they did, we would have no sailors drunk on shore leave, no need to screen for STDs, and no pregnancies canceling deployments.) Ground truth is that mixed genders in close proximity for extended periods DOES cause additional complications. A service has to set up its systems to deal with the "least common denominator" of professionalism.

Will the Navy miss out on some potentially superb female submariners by their policy? Probably. Heck, they probably already have. Would the gain of those personnel outweigh the loss of dealing with the complications? The long-standing consensus has been "No." I don't see anything to change that answer.

(Mixed genders, close proximity, and extended times all separately create distractions to different degrees. The distractions become more severe as the factors combine. Close quarters in a silo for a day or two, is significantly different than an underwater phone booth for months on end. The Air Force has obviously decided that its gain in the silos DOES outweigh the problems, and in my opinion it's probably right. With such a short cloister time, the downside is less severe than what the Navy has to contemplate. It's reasonable to expect the "least common denominator" of professionalism to handle distractions for a couple days in the silo. Same for support roles in garrison. But that's not true in all situations.)

Needs of the service are more important than any desire to be "fair" or "equal," however noble those ideals are.

As for physical abilities, biology doesn't care about human notions of equality. Katie Hnida, Anika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie have already been mentioned or referenced in this thread. I'll toss in another few names.

There was a great deal of outcry over South African sprinter Caster Semenya's apparent masculinity when she won gold in the 800m at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics. In seeming refutation of your assertion that "women wouldn't mind," many of the athletes she beat said that she should not have been competing in the women's event - and she's never been proven to be anything but female. (Incidentally, she had the fastest official women's time of 2009, yet was fully 10 seconds slower than the male winner at those same Championships.)

Golfer Mianne Bagger had a sex change before competing on the women's circuit, and there were complaints that her "genetically male" knees would handle more torque than her "genetically female" competitors, allowing her a more powerful swing.

Your own experiences with rugby, and your opinion that women and men should be allowed to compete in the same leagues, surprise me when taken together. Would you and your teammates have been satisfied in a league where you came away from every game feeling like you'd "been hit by a Mack truck," and gotten your "butts kicked?"

If we can agree that there ARE fundamental physical differences, enforced by biology, then any accommodations for the differences feed back into the gain-vs-cost question. Not an issue when pushing buttons, but definitely an issue when carrying an infantryman. Again, needs of the service rule.

[plato]

[QUOTE=afchic;
Do you think it is fair to put me in the same category (I am 6'2 approx 185 lbs) with a little thing that is 5'2 and weighs 100 pounds? Yes there is a difference between men and women. But I bet that with my body type, I would have a better chance of passing said test than say a 5'5 guy who weighed 130 pounds.[/QUOTE]

I wouldn't put you into a category.

The categories are,
1. Can be built into someone who can perform all functions, and
2. Cannot be built into someone who can perform all functions.

Had the washout rate for females been 85%, and for males, been 50%, someone would have declared that "unfair". I would not.

However, politics would have prevailed and heads would have rolled.

Letting "gender identity" be for a moment, I reassert:

The army is either someplace for people to be ( my son with MS, my very small granddaughter), or it is a very important team that must focus on winning.

When we use the word "disabled", we are really talking "less able". Few would agree with putting physically disabled soldiers into an airborne infantry squad. When we get to applying abilities to gender, we duck, dodge, and dance an *declare* that we are all equal.

That, of course, means that I can whip Michael Jordan's butt about 50% of the time on the hardwood court. Yeah, right

If we are supposed to have a "representative percentage" of "can't find his ass with both hands", and "hasn't been sober in 20 years", in order to be fair to whatever groups, in whatever way we divide our society, I'm against that too.

[greenberetTFS]

Originally Posted by ZonieDiver

If nothing else, on THAT you and I can agree!

Agree totally.....................

Big Teddy

I got this from a retired Naval Officer via Email this morning. Decided to add this to this thread. For no particular reason than it is a worthy read, and a bit humorous in places.

Once Upon a Time
by Bob 'Dex' Armstrong
One of the benefits of growing old is the gift of time ... time to look back and revisit your collective 'Life Experiences',
For old smokeboat sailors, that means time to shuffle through memories of pissing against the wind in faded soft dungarees, frayed raghats and zinc chromate-spattered broghans. You can close your eyes and be transported back to a time when men wore acid-eaten uniforms, breathed air worse than the primate house at a poorly managed zoo, whittled mold and rot off food of advanced age being reclaimed by the gods of purification, and surgically carving off the stuff and eating it. You survived and built up an immunity that could handle leprosy, lockjaw and cobra bites. We survived. Submarine duty was rough.
Many of us 'hotsacked'. For those of you who missed that life experience, hotsacking was sharing sleeping arrangements (to put it in easily understood terms). A system that required lads at the entry level of the undersea service profession, to crawl onto a sweat-soaked flashpad just vacated by another bottom-feeding shipmate. Lads of today's modern technically advanced undersea service would find it damn near impossible to imagine a day when lads who hadn't showered in weeks, climbed a tier of racks sharing sock aroma on par with three-day old roadkill, with his bunkmates... A time when raghats communally shared blankets that looked like hobo camp hand-me-downs.
It was a time when the common denominator of the naval supply system was the cockroach, with the longevity of Jack LaLanne. Cockroaches that could deflect claw-hammered blows and could reach rodeo entry size.
In the late 50's, the submarines built in the twilight years of World War II were rapidly approaching an advanced age comatose state. The navy quit making many of the replacement parts for these seagoing antiques, so we cannibalized the boats in line heading to the scrap yard. It was like harvesting organs from a dead Rockette to keep the chorus line going. After decommissioning, the old boats would have electricians and machinists crawling all over them with shopping lists and wrenches.
Memory is a wonderful God-given gift. There were sunrises and sunsets, rolling seas, visits to exotic places, and ladies with loose panty elastic and no AIDS. There were consumable combustibles on par with the liquids that propel hardware to outer space.
It was a time when the world's population loved the American submariner. Boatsailors in port meant good times, hell-raising and calling in the night shift at the local brewery. It was a time when the United States Navy had no recruitment problems, paid no incentive money and had to kiss no butts to entice grown men into accepting their manly obligation to their nation. Men signed up for undersea service, motivated by patriotic obligation, a sense of history and adventure, and to follow the gallant submariners who rode the boats against the Japanese empire. We wanted to wear the distinctive insignia universally recognized as the symbol of the most successful and demanding submarine service on earth.
We were proud. We had a right to be. We were accepted as the downline fraternity brothers of the courageous men who put Hirohito's monkey band all over the floor of the Pacific. We rode their boats, ate at their mess tables, slept in their bunks and plugged the ever-increasing leaks in the hulls they left us. We patted the same barmaid butts they had patted when they were far younger and half as wide. We carved our boats names and hull numbers on gin mill tables in places that would give Methodist ministers cardiac arrest.
We danced with the devil's mistress and all her naughty daughters. We were young, testosterone-driven American bluejackets and let's face it... Every girl in every port establishment around the globe both recognized and appreciated the meaning of a pair of Dolphins over a jumper pocket. Many of these ladies were willing to share smiles and body warmth with the members of America 's undersea service.
It was a time when the snapping of American colors in the ports of the world stood for liberation from tyranny and the American sailor in his distinctive uniform and happy-go-lucky manner, stood for John Wayne principles and a universally recognized sense of decency, high ideals and uncompromised values.
It was in every sense of the term, 'A great time to be an American sailor'. There were few prohibitions. They were looked upon as simply unnecessary. It was a time when 'family values' were taught at family dinner tables, at schools, the nation's playing fields, scout troops, Sunday school or other institutions of worship. We were a good people and we knew it. We plowed the world's oceans guarding her sea lanes and making her secure for the traffic of international commerce. But at eighteen, let's face it... We never thought much about the noble aspect of what we were doing. Crews looked forward to the next liberty port, the next run, home port visits, what the boat was having for evening chow, the evening movie after chow, or which barmaids were working at Bell's that evening. We were young, invincible and had our whole lives ahead of us. Without being aware of it, we were learning leadership, acceptance of responsibility and teamwork in the finest classroom in the world... A United States submarine.

It was a simpler time. Lack of complexity left us with clear-cut objectives and the 'bad guys' were clearly defined. We knew who they were, where they were and that we had the means, will and ability to send them all off to hell in a fiery package deal. We were the 'good guys' and literally wore 'white hats'. What we lacked in crew comfort, technological advancements and publicity, we made up for in continuity, stability and love of our boats and squadrons. We were a band of brothers and have remained so for over half a century. Since we were not riding what the present day submariner would call 'true submersibles', we got sunrises and sunsets at sea... The sting of wind-blown saltwater on our faces... The roll and pitch of heavy weather swells and the screech of seabirds. I can't imagine sea duty devoid of contact with these wonders. To me, they are a very real part of being a true mariner.

I'm glad I served in an era of signal lights... Flag messaging... Navigation calculation... Marines manning the gates... Locker clubs... Working girls... Hitchhiking in uniform... Quartermasters, torpedo men and gunner's mates... Sea store smokes... Hotsacking... Hydraulic oil-laced coffee... Lousy mid rats... Jackassing fish from the skids to the tubes... One and two way trash dumping... Plywood dog shacks... Messy piers... A time when the Chief of the Boat could turn up at morning quarters wearing a Mexican sombrero and Jeezus sandals... When every E-3 in the sub force knew what paint scrapers, chipping hammers and wire brushes were for... When JGs with a pencil were the most dangerous things in the navy... When the navy mobile canteen truck was called the 'roach coach' and sold geedunk and pogey bait... When the breakfast of champions was a pitcher of Blue Ribbon, four Slim Jims, a pack of Beer Nuts, a hard-boiled egg, and a game of Eight Ball.

It was a time when, if you saw a boatsailor with more than four ship's patches on his foul weather jacket, he was at least fifty years old and a lifer. A time when skippers wore hydraulic oil-stained steaming hats and carried a wad of binocular wipes in their shirt pockets. In those days, old barnicle-encrusted chiefs had more body fat than a Hell's Angel, smoked big, fat, lousy smelling cigars or 'chawed plug', and came with a sewer digger's vocabulary. It was a time where heterosexuals got married to members of the opposite sex or patronized 'working girls', and non-heterosexuals went Air Force ... or Peace Corps.

It was a good time... For some of us, the best time we would ever have. There was a certain satisfaction to be found in serving one's country without the nation you so dearly loved having to promise you enlistment bonuses, big whopping education benefits, feather bed shore duty, or an 'A' school with a sauna and color TV. It was a time when if you told a cook you didn't eat Spam or creamed chipped beef, everybody laughed and you went away hungry... And if you cussed a messcook, you could find toenail clippings in your salad.

Our generation visited cemeteries where legends of World War II undersea service were issued their grass blankets, after receiving their pine peacoats and orders to some old hull number moored at the big silver pier in the sky. We were family... Our common heritage made us brothers.

There came a point where we drew a line through our names on the Watch, Quarter and Station Bill, told our shipmates we would see them in hell, shook hands with the COB, paid back the slush fund, told the skipper 'goodbye', and picked up a disbursing chit and your DD-214. We went up on Hampton Boulevard, bought a couple of rounds at Bells, kissed the barmaids, gave Thelma a hug, then went out to spend the rest of our lives wishing we could hear, "Single up all lines ..." just one more time.

[LarryW]

Thank the guy, AM. Thanks for posting.

[incarcerated]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8652180.stm

US navy lifts ban on women submariners

Thursday, 29 April 2010 16:04 UK
Women can now serve on US submarines, after a ban was lifted.
The US defence department had announced the move in February and the deadline for any objection from Congress passed at midnight on Wednesday....