https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44541440

In other words, Finland needs the OPM to spend on migrants, so this particular social justice experiment is no longer affordable.

During the Second World War, a number of Soviet women served as night bomber pilots, flying the obsolescent Polikarpov biplane. A favorite tactic was to cut the engine and glide down almost noiselessly to the bomb-release point, and these flyers were known to the Germans as the “Night Witches.”

I reviewed her memoirs here.

The Ex-Army blogger had one pithy blog entry in which he essentially asserted that “soldiers carry things.” The essence of a combat soldier is to carry heavy stuff, sometimes for long distances, and also to move it around (imagine unloading artillery shells). Thus men are better qualified for it. If the median soldier can’t carry all his or her own stuff, that soldier is a weak link, because someone else will have to do it. Therefore, the use of women in combat infantry is contraindicated.

That is a hypothesis, but it suggests things to look for.

My impression of successful women in combat roles tends to put them in situations such as sniping and driving — roles that may involve privation (cold, hunger) and boredom, but not upper body strength.

My sense is that women were used successfully in those roles in World War Two in Soviet Russia and Yugoslavia. In both those settings the women may have been fighting off perceived invaders rather than serving in expeditionary forces far from their home.

One is also tempted to ask “What do the Israeli Defense Forces do?” They draft everyone. What roles do they include or exclude women for?

Sooo… Maybe the solution is that we should use the girls in a different mode of warfare. One fully in keeping with their physical capabilities, capacities, and inherent natures.

How has that been done, historically? Has it actually been done, and was it at all effective?

Historical research points to a couple of areas where women were really effective: Espionage and covert guerrilla warfare. See the OSS and SOE efforts in Northern Europe, and the Vietnamese in Southeast Asia.

You’ll note that neither the SOE, OSS, or Vietnamese utilized women as front-line combatants like machine-gun crews or playing Sergeant Rock-like heroics. They were suborning the enemy, inveigling secrets from them in sexual encounters, and playing Mata Hari…

Soooo… Maybe we should instead be recruiting women to serve in these roles, instead of infantry, artillery, and so forth. Play to their strengths, not their weaknesses. After all, what red-blooded jihadi hasn’t had dreams of his very own All-American blonde cheerleader as a sex slave…? Train the girls to infiltrate, and slice throats late at night. Make our model of feminine warriordom the Biblical archetypes of Judith (who slew Holoferne…) and Delilah (who did for Samson…).

Oh. That’s not what the girls want? That’s not what would be politically correct, to suggest that they work as deep penetration (see what I did there…?) agents behind enemy lines, slaughtering them in their sleep, at their most intimate moments…?

Oh, well. I tried. I guess we’ll just have to accept that 15% of our forces are going to be 90% of our business at the VA in a few years, and for about half to a third the service time we’re getting now from the boys…

Combat is a young man’s game, and the bigger and more fit that young man is, the better the odds of victory and his survival. Putting women into direct-combat-probability jobs makes about as much sense as hobbling your football team before the Super Bowl.

Common-sense facts that only the intellectuals and theorists of the world would even attempt to refute. It’s actually a mark of how ‘effing stupid in practical terms that these people are that they’d even make the Marines run those tests.

And, it leaves entirely aside the question of long-term health issues for the women involved. Anecdotal evidence I witnessed as a senior NCO in the Army leads me to believe that the attempt to integrate the average US female who actually has a propensity to enlist (the vast majority of which sure as hell ain’t in the 95th percentile where they’d be physically as capable as their male peers…) is going to suffer disproportionate long-term damage to their health and fitness. Little things, ya know, like blown-out knees and hips, significant musculo-skeletal injuries, and all the rest of the issues they encounter at a disproportionate rate.

They badly need to do some long-term longitudinal studies on these things, and figure out of putting women into the combat arms is even sensible with the ones who can do the jobs… Women’s bodies simply are not the same as men’s, and sticking them into positions that are inherently designed around male capabilities and strengths is just plain stupid. We are a sexually dimorphic species, and trying to just hand-wave that away is incredibly, incredibly stupid.

There’s probably a reason we can only point to a couple of actual historical cases where women were used as front-line combatants, and why the societies that used them aren’t around anymore to pass on their rather questionable “wisdom”.