[Vision2020] Testing women for combat jobs

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of the Army Times.

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Testing women for combat jobs

For the past month, female soldiers have been getting a taste of what it takes to serve in combat.

At Fort Stewart, Ga., 60 female and 100 male soldiers volunteered to spend the past month drilling on the most physically challenging tasks demanded of infantrymen, cavalry scouts, mortar launchers and tank crews. In March, scientists from the Army’s Research Institute for Envi­ronmental Medicine will have the troops perform those tasks while wearing heart rate monitors, masks that monitor oxygen intake and other equipment to study the effects of their physical exertion.

By spending their days lifting 65­-pound missiles and .50-caliber ma­chine guns, while wearing 70 pounds of body armor, they’re helping make history as part of an Army study that will determine how women will be deemed fit to join combat roles.

What you should know:

1.  Realistic standards. Testing at Fort Stewart and other U.S. bases is breaking away from the Army’s long­time standards for physical fitness— pushups, sit-ups and 2-mile runs— to focus instead on battlefield tasks, such as dragging a wounded com­rade to safety or installing and re­moving the heavy barrel of the 25mm gun mounted on Bradley vehicles.

Some people think the Army is coming up with unrealistic require­ments while others believe standards will be lower to let women fight on the front lines, said David Brinkley, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Eustis, Va. “We intend to do neither. That’s why we based this on the actual thing you have to do,” he said.

2.  Catching up with men. Giving sol­diers a month to prepare meant women who have never been trained to scale a 6-foot wall or pull a casu­alty from a tank have had time to learn the proper techniques before they are tested for real over the next month.

Staff Sgt. Terry Kemp, a cavalry scout who’s helping train the volun­teers, said female soldiers started to catch up with their male counter­parts after two weeks. Missile toting drills that initially took the men seven minutes were taking women 12 minutes to complete, he said. But by week three, men and women had trimmed their times to about four minutes.

3.  It’s about the tasks. The Army took a lesson from fire departments by not focusing on soldiers’ ability to perform pushups or pullups, which favor men because they test upper body strength, Brinkley said. Offi­cials realize women do physical tasks differently, using more core strength and legs, he said. By focus­ing on tasks rather than exercises, Army officials hope to eliminate gender bias from their study.

4.  It’s for the 8 percent. In a recent Army survey of 30,000 female soldiers, only about 8 percent said they would want an infantry, armor, artillery or combat engineer job.

An overwhelming number of those who did want combat jobs said they’d like to be a Night Stalker, a member of the elite special opera­tions helicopter crews.

5.  Get over it. Surveys have shown male soldiers fret that their unit’s readiness will be degraded because of what they term “women issues,” such as pregnancy and menstrual cycles. Or they worried that women incapable of the physical demands would be brought in anyway.

Maj. Gen. Mike Murray, command­ing general at Fort Stewart, said it’s time to open combat jobs to women and “this is going to get studied to death” in order for the Army to prove to naysayers that female soldiers are physically capable.

Those who insist women can’t perform as well as men in combat “can beat their chests about it all day,” said Kemp, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. “But eventually it’s going to happen.”

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Spc. Sheena Mature hoists a 44-pound section of a 50-caliber machine gun onto an M1 A2 Abrams tank during a physical demands study Feb. 25 at Fort Stewart, Ga



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Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

  
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