the new enemy

[rmgill]

16 minutes ago, DougRichards said:

Small point, and a question.  Can a female's internal organs deal with an ejection in the same way as a male's external (and internal) organs?

As far as I know. She's gonna have bigger problems though sneaking around in rice paddies for 2 weeks trying to get to a Superjolly though. 

[EchoFiveMike]

3 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

If you looked on Twitter at the moment, the Royal Navy has a feature of a Royal Navy F35 Engineer, also a woman. In fact, the Royal Navy just introduced their first Female Admiral.You have had female pilots in the USN since the mid 90's, and you dont get much more strenuous a job than a fighter pilot.

Can you just wake up and face the 21st Century?

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.  You mean like Kara Hultgreen?  You're just fucking trolling, aren't you?  S/F...Ken M

[Stuart Galbraith]

Just now, EchoFiveMike said:

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.  You mean like Kara Hultgreen?  You're just fucking trolling, aren't you?  S/F...Ken M

Yes, and have you actually bothered to go  back to why that happened? I tell you what, listen to this chap. He is a former Naval Aviator who was a RIO on Tomcats so you can take his opinion over mine.

She made an error at what was probably the worst part of the F14's flight envelope, and she didnt follow standard recovery proceedure. Any other point, it wouldnt have shown. Right there, it killed her. And the reason why it happened is, absolutely no disrespect to her, she shouldnt have been there because she was not a great pilot. And the reason why she was there was because they greased the rails to get women into the job. Why? Because politics

Two things to note from that. Firstly women dont kill themselves in naval aviation more than male pilots. And secondly, there were plenty of poor aviators in the F14 community that were similarly immune because they had political patronage. Hang around the DCS forums and listen to the F14 guys on there. They will tell you that one of them (a self created legend in the Tomcat Community) who was a son of one of the directors of Grumman, and regularly bent his F14's doing BFM, because he knew he was completely bulletproof. And he was.

Revlons death was not a gender problem, it was a political patronage problem, something your Navy had and still has a real problem with. Why do you think they name all their major warships after Politicians?

As Carroll says, they had women in the job after her, and they did the job fine. They still do. So by all means hoist your strawman whilst ignoring all the facts, I expect no less.

[EchoFiveMike]

Blah blah blah, ignore what actually happened, what ALWAYS FUCKING HAPPENS, so you can peddle some fantasy idealistic nonsense. 

I'll always go with what I can see actually happened.

You're like a communist or a lolbertardian..."they didn't try it right" huh Stuart?  S/F...Ken M 

Edited May 28, 2021 by EchoFiveMike

[sunday]

Who are you going to believe, a Marine SNCO with actual combat experience, or a former vacuum cleaner packaging operator posting from the beautiful Cotswolds?

[Stuart Galbraith]

19 minutes ago, EchoFiveMike said:

Blah blah blah, ignore what actually happened, what ALWAYS FUCKING HAPPENS, so you can peddle some fantasy idealistic nonsense. 

I'll always go with what I can see actually happened.

You're like a communist or a lolbertardian..."they didn't try it right" huh Stuart?  S/F...Ken M 

And once again, its not about reality, its not about evidence, its not about how much you know (which as far as naval aviation is lots actually) its about what tribe you belong to. Gotcha.

Go actually read a book. Go listen to something other than Fox news. Who knows, you might surprise yourself at the different opinions you form.

Probably not, but hey, its gotta be worth a try, right?

[Ssnake]

3 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Im pretty sure I said not ALL women are physically capable of being a naval aviator.

Same fallacy.

Even those who ARE capable of being a naval aviator do not necessarily have the fitness to lift the large tires of supply trucks without help, even though "supply" is regarded as a branch with lesser physical requirements. But you don't have a large crew on a supply truck to allow two people to do this job under all circumstances, particularly if some of them are injured.

Qualifying as a naval aviator does not automatically qualify for every other job.

 

What's your point, really?

Nobody here denies that women can qualify as naval aviators. There's plenty of precedent. But while the job is undoubtedly demanding, it does in fact explicitly not require peak performance with a number of physical tasks. Being small and short is a benefit especially with high G maneuvers. You need good general fitness, you need stamina, you need to maintain good situational awareness under highly stressful conditions, excellent hand-eye coordination. It's all true. And yet femal bones are somewhat softer so the peak load they can carry safely is lower, period. Of course they can carry more, until they get injured that way.

My impression is that the naive demand for equal outcomes, the inevitable result once that bureaucrats have to meet recruiting quotas, in essence means that women have to bear a higher injury risk just so that women's rights activists can score equality points, while the genderists declare such injuries as a result of patriachal oppression, or even as a "social construct".

 

I find the willingness of these activists to sacrifice the well-being of women in the name of grrrlpwr! deeply unsettling and fundamentally inhumane. It's one thing to be in denial of reality when there are no real consequences. But here is the line that shall not be crossed.

[Stuart Galbraith]

17 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

Same fallacy.

Even those who ARE capable of being a naval aviator do not necessarily have the fitness to lift the large tires of supply trucks without help, even though "supply" is regarded as a branch with lesser physical requirements. But you don't have a large crew on a supply truck to allow two people to do this job under all circumstances, particularly if some of them are injured.

Qualifying as a naval aviator does not automatically qualify for every other job.

 

What's your point, really?

Nobody here denies that women can qualify as naval aviators. There's plenty of precedent. But while the job is undoubtedly demanding, it does in fact explicitly not require peak performance with a number of physical tasks. Being small and short is a benefit especially with high G maneuvers. You need good general fitness, you need stamina, you need to maintain good situational awareness under highly stressful conditions, excellent hand-eye coordination. It's all true. And yet femal bones are somewhat softer so the peak load they can carry safely is lower, period. Of course they can carry more, until they get injured that way.

My impression is that the naive demand for equal outcomes, the inevitable result once that bureaucrats have to meet recruiting quotas, in essence means that women have to bear a higher injury risk just so that women's rights activists can score equality points, while the genderists declare such injuries as a result of patriachal oppression, or even as a "social construct".

 

I find the willingness of these activists to sacrifice the well-being of women in the name of grrrlpwr! deeply unsettling and fundamentally inhumane. It's one thing to be in denial of reality when there are no real consequences. But here is the line that shall not be crossed.

My point is that the narrative here is women cannot do physically taxing jobs. They can. If you dont accept that my argument about Naval Aviators proves this, there are dozens of examples in various jobs in military occupations where they do just that. Tank Commanders, Naval officers, Submarine Crewmen, even some armies have women in Special forces. There is a long history of women fighting as Partisans, and in Kurdistan these is an established history of women fighting against ISIS making truly formidible snipers.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/female-isis-fighters#:~:text=Long pursuing a state of their own%2C Kurdish,who promotes Marxist thought and empowerment of women.

No, I'm not arguing ALL women can do ALL jobs. But I do have a problem swallowing the premise that always emerges when we have had this discussion over the past 20 years on Tanknet, that one size fits all. All people are the same. This woman cant do this job, ergo, obviously none of them can.That is as ridiculously formulaic as Socialists are accused of being.

I remember clear as day having this precise same argument with someone on this grate site in 1999, his argument was women, all women, cannot do physically taxing work. Rick here, no disrespect, has good as said that. And despite having a war in Iraq, a War in Afghanistan, and a growing amount of women doing all kinds of work in all the different services since that point, the arguments here have not seemingly moved on in 20 years. Its even some of the same people making them.

Im not talking about  equal outcomes. I point to the self evident reality of equal opportunities in which we live. Thats all they are asking for and all they should be given. If they as an individual cannot do the job, then they should not and given something else they are capable of, or pointed to another job entirely.  The argument here does not seem to be asking for that. The implicit criticism is that they are asking for too much because none of them can do the job at all, which is, self evidently, total bollocks.

https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news-and-latest-activity/news/2021/may/26/20210526-jude-terry

Ill leave it there. I said much the same thing back in 1999, and nobody grasped the point I was trying to make then either.

 

[glenn239]

2 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Two things to note from that. Firstly women dont kill themselves in naval aviation more than male pilots.

In air combat it's known that in WW1 and WW2, and afterwards, that a small minority of pilots are exceptionally good at it and account for a disproportionate number of enemy kills.  So, theoretically, I could picture that there are some small  number of female ace pilots out there that are far better than the average male pilot.  

My brother used to fly at Rockton glider club.  AFAIK, there's been two fatalities.  The first was a tow pilot that died on takeoff back in the late 1980's or so.  The seat broke and he fell backwards, or he had a heart attack.  The second was an unfortunate women who decided to take up gliding because her husband was in the club.  She died on her first solo landing because she got into a 'yo-yo' and appeared to have frozen up.  My brother was one of the first on the scene and pulled her from the wreckage, but she died instantly.

I can buy that there is a small pool of female aviators and pilots that are so good they need to be fighter pilots.  I can also believe that it's not a coincidence that it was a female pilot that was the only one in the history of the club to have died during her first solo.    

 

[BansheeOne]

3 hours ago, sunday said:

Who are you going to believe, a Marine SNCO with actual combat experience, or a former vacuum cleaner packaging operator posting from the beautiful Cotswolds?

Damn right, that's why I disregard the political opinion of anybody who hasn't actually worked in politics for ten years like myself. Too many people think they are qualified to debate issues they have no practical experience with by merely watching and posting arguments from YouTube. There are really only something like three TankNetters who can speak on politics with authority ... 

... well actually I disregard most of their opinions, too, because they tend to disagree with me, and I will also welcome unqualified arguments I consider correct. But the point is I can judge them by appealing to my own authority! 

2 hours ago, Ssnake said:

I find the willingness of these activists to sacrifice the well-being of women in the name of grrrlpwr! deeply unsettling and fundamentally inhumane. It's one thing to be in denial of reality when there are no real consequences. But here is the line that shall not be crossed.

Then again, I find the tendency to prohibit people or groups thereof from doing certain things for their own protection (because you're too delicate and not responsible enough, citizen) equally unsettling. When it comes to women, there's really no difference between ideological camps there; just look at the arguments of both the Left and Right why they want to ban prostitution etc. 

[seahawk]

This debate has been solved 2000 years ago, as the bible clearly states in

1 Peter 3:7

Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you^[a] of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.

[rmgill]

8 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

And once again, its not about reality, its not about evidence, its not about how much you know (which as far as naval aviation is lots actually) its about what tribe you belong to. Gotcha.
 

A long serving Marine SNCO isn't going to have seen the same sort of skid greasing behavior to make sure that This person passes through classes and tests which are graded somewhat subjectively OR allowed to re-take tests to make sure they pass? 

A long serving Marine SNCO isn't going to have talked to folks who might have the first hand knowledge of what was going on? 

Here's a trick for you. The Woman that passed Ranger school down at Benning, my neighbor was working as a Medic on that school (He was LURPS among other things and a combat medic, so as a Senior NCO it was a good billet, help with observing and training and dealing with the guys running the course). These schools have a LOT of people involved. When a General officer shows up and happens to accompany someone through the course and stands there the for various tests, how do you think the graders are going to grade when a General is standing there to make sure the historical Ranger Woman graduate is going to pass? 

Quote

Go actually read a book.

You're telling a guy who's a long serving Marine NCO, who's been in combat arms among other things to go read a book on the subject? Hilarious. 

The counter response is go work a physically taxing job for a year. Tell us how many women can work the job. 
 

Edited May 28, 2021 by rmgill

[rmgill]

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

My point is that the narrative here is women cannot do physically taxing jobs. They can.

Read the examples cited. Women can do those jobs. It's women on the outer edge of the standard deviations. They however have endurance problems. Men's bone density and muscle density is physically higher. Testosterone does this. 

This means that when doing the same tasks, if they're physically able, women are going to be injured more. 

 

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

If you dont accept that my argument about Naval Aviators proves this, there are dozens of examples in various jobs in military occupations where they do just that. Tank Commanders, Naval officers, Submarine Crewmen, even some armies have women in Special forces.

Those are examples of exceptional women, usually, AND examples of women who had to do the task because the existential wars required it. AckAck Girls for example. I suspect if you looked at examples though, you'd find that women working a mobile 3.7" HAA battery had a slower time to unlimber the gun than a group of equivalent men. 

 

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

There is a long history of women fighting as Partisans, and in Kurdistan these is an established history of women fighting against ISIS making truly formidible snipers.

Do higher casualty rates matter? 

You have two classes of people. Both you put into combat, one has a higher casualty rate than the other just from injuries. Does that matter or are they disposable to you? 

 

 

[Ssnake]

6 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

Then again, I find the tendency to prohibit people or groups thereof from doing certain things for their own protection (because you're too delicate and not responsible enough, citizen) equally unsettling.

In principle I don't like that argument either. I have stated on every possible occasion that I'm all for letting women into any Army job they like, provided that they meet uniformly applied physical and mental application standards.

The practical reality however pushes the principle with ease into the running wood chipper every single time.

 

At the beginning is the principle of equal opportunity, with the unspoken (and demonstrably false) assumption that women want to make up 50% of every job there is. Next comes the evaluation, which invariably proves that women do not make up 50% of the job force of job X. This is where political ideology kicks in, leading to the fallacy that if we have no equality of outcome, there must be something preventing equality of opportunity.

Now comes the regulation. Bureaucrats are tasked with implementing hiring quotas. Because the real-life decisions of women are different from what they say that they want (which is not a women thing, don't get me wrong here), incentives are being created (nothing wrong about them, except that they are deceitful and misleading like all propaganda) and obstacles are being removed.

80% of all women candidates for job X are rejected because they don't meet physical standard X? Let's create a different standard! The hiring quota goes up, and the problem for the bureaucrats is solved ... at the expense of the women who are let into a job for which they actually aren't qualified. This makes people in administrative jobs "just" unhappy for life. But in army jobs that eventually gets people killed in some cases, and ruins the health of those overtaxed with the task in a much larger number.

 

Men and women aren't much different in their averages and medians. They do however deviate significantly in a large number of properties at the extreme end of the spectrum.

Hyperproductive people with no life? 98% male.

STEM jobs? The more male dominated the more egalitarian a society becomes. The biggest deviations in employment rates are found in Scandinavia - because if you remove external pressures, people settle for their genetic variation of propensities.

Upper body strength? The top 5 percent of women is equal or stronger than the weakest five percent of men. Bone density, peak load carrying capacity, you name it - the strongest men deliver more with lower risk of injury. Can a woman train to pass the physical examination? Demonstrably so, if sufficiently motivated (see "incentives" and "lies" above). But this short-term success sets her on a long-term track for more and more severe injuries. I've ripped my ankle tendons five times in preparation for and during life in the army. When I left the army, my knees were shot. I could have continued for a few more years but only at the price of mild invalidity.

I'm not complaining. But the army deal is, you give up a portion of your health in exchange for the job. And if you're in good shape, the price is smaller. At the same time if you overdo it with the body building, you're eventually increasing the chance of negative long-term effects. And I'm all for full disclosure (which is why I'm a terrible sales man). That means, I can't advise women to seek certain jobs in the army. Because at the age when they enlist, they are only marginally smarter than I was at the time, and they are being manipulated into a choice by bureaucrats and politicians that seek equality of outcome because they are stupid, or cynical, and they deserve the truth before signing a contract that is deliberately hard to exit prematurely for a career that will have a price to pay much longer than the duration of their stay in the army.

I think it is morally wrong to incentivise women to take up army jobs in the name of some ideology when those who lure them into the jobs have zero skin in the game. They are sacrificing other women in pursuit of a political agenda. They will never face the consequences of their disastrous decisions which they sell as "empowerment" and "benevolence". It is anything but.

[BansheeOne]

And I don't disagree. In fact, everbody typically agrees that anyone regardless of gender should be able to do any military job based upon uniform standards within the first couple pages of such threads. The other couple dozen pages are then filled by people fighting over outlier statements whether women are generally fit for military service.

[Ssnake]

My concerns stem mostly from the dynamics that are being initiated by activists who - through stupidity or malevolence - argue that non-equal outcomes are proof of denied opportunity, spineless politicians who readily agree with them in the hope of scoring fleeting points in public opinion, and then order the bureacrats to solve it, which they do at the expense of, in this case, young womens' health.

I'm pissed off at the heavily tilted risk-reward ratio that puts all the risk on the women that the activists claim to be helping, and all the reward on the side of the activists and bureaucrats.

We're fighting over outlier statements - at least I do so - because they are an indicator of activist ideology at work. Blanket statements like "all women are just as good as men in every aspect" (rather than "men and women are equally valuable, but different"), and the then dangerous policy recommendations that follow from it. Fallacies like Stuart's

1) (some) Women can be naval aviators

2) Naval aviator is a profession as hard as it gets

3) If you can be a naval aviator, you can be anything (neurosurgeon? music composer?)

Therefore, (all) women should be allowed into any profession, and if you disagree you're a manifestation of oppressive patriarchy.

 

The principle of equal admission standards is never applied because an influential part of society does not allow it, in pursuit of the elusive goal of cosmic justice and equal outcomes. This dangerous thinking can't be left unchallenged.

[BansheeOne]

I get that, but your reaction is already a mild over-interpretation of what Stuart was saying due to your own general offendedness.

[Adam Peter]

22 hours ago, glenn239 said:

I can also believe that it's not a coincidence that it was a female pilot that was the only one in the history of the club to have died during her first solo.    

Was the people who cleared her for solo flight questioned that they have cleared her because she was able to fly alone, or because "her husband was in the club" ?

Edited May 29, 2021 by Adam Peter
ctrl+v devil

[glenn239]

1 hour ago, Adam Peter said:

Was the people who cleared her for solo flight questioned that they have cleared her because she was able to fly alone, or because "her husband was in the club" ?

I'll ask my brother next time I see him.  He's done endless training with students over the years both powered and unpowered, but in this case he was not involved.  I seem to recall him saying that when she was being trained that there was issues with landings that were of a concern, but apparently her instructor decided she was ready to solo.   I would doubt that she would be allowed to solo because her husband was in the club, but that must have been her own motivation for deciding to fly - I don't think she would have done anything like it if not for the fact that her husband did it.

 

[Ivanhoe]

Y'all's sub-thread is an illustration of the equal-opportunity versus equal-outcome.

Politicians and activists prefer equal-outcome because its easy to measure. People who are responsible for Getting Stuff Done™ prefer equal-opportunity because it produces optimal outcomes.

In the military context, it seems like there are two approaches:

- set a high bar, and accept that small percentages of service members will pass;

- design things so that a low bar will work, possibly including the acceptance of high casualty rates.

For the role of fighter pilot, stringent and objective standards seem optimal, due to the cost of the pilot and airframe, and small numbers of actual airframes (the naval context has the 3rd constraint of how many fighters a CVN can operate).

For spec ops, the move part of shoot-move-communicate seems like a challenge. Doing a 20-mile ruck march with 100 lb ruck and rifle seems like a performance criterion which maybe 1 in 10,000 women could do; and how many women who could do it, would do it?

For the role of truck driver*, redesigning things so that a lower standard does not result in a fail-blizzard seems possible. Though changing a tire on a HEMTT looks like it would be a real chore for a 200 lb man; how to redesign things so a 110 lb woman can do it?

* In my previous job, I had a few female students who were truck drivers in the Army; deployed downrange and the whole bit. In civilian guise, you wouldn't guess such.

[bojan]

Thing with anecdotes is that they are... anecdotal.

Local aero clubs statistics, from 1950s until today says women are more than 2 times less likely to have accident than men, but when it comes to a critical accidents are about 1.5 times less likely to be able to recover from them.

[Adam Peter]

4 minutes ago, bojan said:

Thing with anecdotes is that they are... anecdotal.

Local aero clubs statistics, from 1950s until today says women are more than 2 times less likely to have accident than men, but when it comes to a critical accidents are about 1.5 times less likely to be able to recover from them.

That is an another interesting angle. Can we consider "fired at" as an accident regarding the probable sudden nature of it?

[bojan]

We know no causes of the "irrecoverable accidents", but it has been speculated locally that in most cases it was inability to recover from a spin due the lack of the physical strength, as a lot of planes flown were old types w/o practically any kind of power assisted controls and some of them were known for a nasty spin tendencies. So that is not really applicable to today's standards. But the fact that women are more than 2 times less likely to have accident is interesting. We don't know if that is due the better adherence to the rules with less risks taken, or is it due the better ability to multi-task or something else, or combination of the factors. If it is due the stricter adherence to the rules it is not helping us a lot, except that would make women better transports/airliners pilots, but probably not the combat pilots. If it is due the better ability to multi-task, then women are better pilots in general. My guess is on the combination of the factors.

[rmgill]

 

[Tim the Tank Nut]

who would've thought that Ssnake was a right wing extremist?

In any event's Ssnake's point is right on target as the wear and tear on the body is a pretty serious issue and the male body takes a little bit more to wear out than the female body does.  Proper soldiering is hard, very hard work.

It's telling how upset people get over such an obvious statement.

One thing is certain, if you repeatedly jump off of a tank for the first 20 years your knees are destroyed for the next 20....