DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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In December 2015 the American military was ordered to accept women in all jobs, including infantry and special operations. This decision involves about 220,000 jobs and about 20,000 of these are for special operations personnel, commonly known as commandos. While the politicians who pushed for this policy now consider the issue settled and done with, the officers and troops in infantry and special operations units are not pleased and concerned about how to deal with it. Senior officers are bracing for more retirements or troops simply walking away when their current term of service is done. Recruiting for these strenuous and dangerous jobs is seen as even more difficult. In other words opinion surveys indicate that many experienced combat troops are ready to vote with their feet and will be impossible to replace.

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Because the risk of injury and many other reasons, most countries found that over 90 percent of women in uniform did not want to serve in any combat unit, especially the infantry. Those women (almost all of them officers) who did apply discovered what female athletes and epidemiologists (doctors who study medical statistics) have long known; women are ten times more likely (than men) to suffer bone injuries and nearly as likely to suffer muscular injuries while engaged in stressful sports (like basketball) or infantry operations. Mental stress is another issue and most women who volunteered to try infantry training dropped out within days because of the combination of mental and physical stress. This is all a matter of sturdiness because men have more muscle and thicker bones. This makes men much less likely to suffer stress fractures or musculoskeletal injuries than women. Modern infantry combat is intensely physical, and most women remain at a disadvantage here. There are some exceptions for specialist tasks that do not involve sturdiness or strength, like sniping. Then there is the hormonal angle. Men generate a lot more testosterone, a hormone that makes men more decisive and faster to act in combat. Moreover testosterone does not, as the popular myth goes, make you more aggressive, it does make you more aware and decisive. That makes a difference in combat.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2016 at 07:28 and is filed under Your tax dollars at work - and play.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.