This particular draft post is really old. Years old in fact. I've nearly brought it up several times, and then set it aside, in part because it didn't read right.
Now Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense, and I'm in the awkward position of posting something on a topic he brought up, which would seem to at least semi align with a view of his, even though I"m not keen on the man (or anything Trumpish).
That's led me to question if I should just dump this post. I've decided not to. In at least one way, as I think I can see what's coming, I want to be a bit ahead of it. That's why it's coming up today. This week is going to see, apparently, a Stalinesque like gutting of the US military. The question is why. It's either, as the heavily tatted up Hegseth, whose dresses like a high school wrestling coach who refuses to dress professionally and whose sports coat doesn't fit, thinks this will make the military a lean, mean, fighting machine, or it's because King Donny the Demented can't stand anyone being around him who doesn't display dog like loyalty, or it's, worst of all, part of a Trump Coup which will see him exhibit absolute dominance over the country and a declaration of a third term in office.
So, my opinion.
I don't think women should be combat soldiers.
Both women, and that is what they are, didn't pass the noted genetic testing, and then did, that are administered by international athletic bodies as the tests revealed that they both probably have a genetic abnormality called differences of sexual development (DSD), sometimes called Disorders of Sex Development or Variations in Sex Characteristics (VSC) or Diverse Sex Development, or intersex. People with this rare condition have female sex organs but produce more testosterone than females generally do. The condition only becomes apparent, if at all, in puberty, when secondary sex characteristics, such as facial hair, breast tissue or distinct body shapes start to develop.
While Imane Kehlif hasn't acknowledged it, and I don't know if Lin Yu Ting has, looking at them makes it pretty apparent. It's now become a big deal as amongst the secondary characteristics they have is heighted strength, which is typical for men. It's caused a big controversy as they have an advantage over other women and some female boxers have pulled out of the competition rather than fight her, citing such concerns.
Note, whatever else a person things of this, Khelif and Lin Yu Ting are not complicit in any advantage they have, and really can't be faulted for taking advantage of it. They were, truly, born that way.
What's interesting, however, as how so many clearly acknowledge the truth that these individuals have an advantage over conventional females, as men have a physical advantage over women, and it's okay to acknowledge this, as its obvious in sports. And not just in boxing.
Duckworth Chant Ft Slocum 1945 VDisc SSgt Woodard WACs
It's obvious in war, too.
Eons ago, when I first started this post I had just posted this item:
I did touched on a couple of items there which might normally be regarded as somewhat controversial, noting as I did that they were in the fools rush in category. The topics specifically were employment discrimination by the Federal Government against veterans if they were reservists and that men's relationship to careers is inevitably different in terms of options towards men, or at least married men, as opposed to women.
One of the items I had in that thread was this:
Men have fewer options on employment than women, in existential terms. Sure, by nature men can be roughnecks and by biology and temperament they're suited to be soldiers, which women are not, in my view
That's right, it is my view that women are not suited to be soldiers, at least combat soldiers.
But that's not where we have been headed as a society.
I'm frankly not sure where we are now.
Major Wars of Comparative Combatants, the Savage Wars of Peace, and the Small Wars of post Cold War Pax Americana. They're not the same.
The reason we've been headed in the direction we have been, society wise, is a simple one. We have not really expected to fight a real war and we have tended view all institutions as liberalized social opportunity institutions, not anything else. Now we seem to be viewing them as a way to oppress what's been liberalized, which ironically enough still treats them as social institutions. We have whole agencies that had "DEI" requirements, which have now been flipped into being almost "anti DEI". It's bizarre.
Anyhow, while we look back with fawning admiration on the armed forces of World War Two, we do not anything of that type today. Rather, what we have today is more akin to a large urban police force/fire department we have not really expected to fight anyone with. And we've been pretty much correct on that since April 30, 1975, although we kept a large-scale fighting force until the end of the Cold War.
Put yet another way, we haven't had a kill people and break things force dedicated principally to killing people and breaking things for quite some time. Perhaps, it its traditional form, the end of the Vietnam War. That is beginning to change, however, and has significantly since I first started this thread around 2018. The Russo Ukrainian War has changed that, but that has not reflected itself in difficult policy changes, yet. The realities of that war, which no doubt are coming home to the military, haven't to society at large to the degree that it raises existential questions.
Ironically, that's not true in something that tends to be a substituting for combat. . . sports. It's fully hit home there.
Now, okay, I know that I'm going to be immediately corrected on that, as it isn't really true. Since that date, the date upon which Saigon fell, we've fought two wars in Iraq, or three if you consider the insurgency a separate war (which I would regard it as), our longest running war save for the Indian Wars in Afghanistan by some measures, and a host of smaller wars, conflicts and engagements. But if we approach this honestly, which most will not, we'd have to admit that all of the wars since April 1975 have been comparatively small in comparison.
Now, as Bill Mauldin noted in Up Front, the foxhole you are in is the most important one in the world, to you, so I do not diminish the nature of the later combat, but the numbers themselves say all that is probably needed to be said. At the height of the Vietnam War there were 500,000 men serving in the country, which doesn't count those stationed in neighboring Thailand, on ships in the South China Sea, and in Air National Guard units that flew in and out of the country. I don't know how many men that added to the total, but it'd likely add up to a total of 600,000, or maybe 700,000, a huge commitment.
In terms of numbers, moreover, 58,209 servicemen were killed.
If we look back from the Vietnam War, just in total of deaths, 36,516 servicemen were killed in the much shorter Korean War, 116,516 in World War One, and 405,399 in World War Two.
In comparison, there were 294 deaths in the Gulf War, 4,497 deaths in the Iraq War, and there's been 2,216 deaths in Afghanistan.
Again, taking it for scale, that means that fewer men, albeit just slightly fewer, servicemen have been killed in Afghanistan than have were killed at the Battle of Pearl Harbor, and it was a battle. 2,403 servicemen were killed at Pearl Harbor.
If its not clear what I'm saying, I'll make it blunter. The combat conditions of Vietnam, Korea, World War One and World War Two were worse. . . much worse, than anything we've been in since. By leagues. That doesn't mean that subsequent wars were walks in the park, but not all wars are the same. And part of the way they're not the same is this.
When looking at wars, you have to accord that servicemen who served in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, Korea and Vietnam, served in much worse combat conditions than servicemen who served in the Indian Wars, the Banana Wars, or the post Cold War wars. It's a simple fact.
You can take anyone post Cold War battle, to be sure, and say "wasn't that horrific", and it may have been, but it'd be horrific in the fashion that the Battle of the Little Big Horn was horrific. A concentrated horror. It wouldn't be horrific in the way that Iwo Jim was horrific, a streaming horror. If you were a Marine at Iwo Jima, you probably fought on some prior crap hole island before that and you were going on, if you weren't killed, to Okinawa.
And if it isn't clear what that means, 7,000 US servicemen died at Iwo Jima. 12,450 US servicemen died at Okinawa.
There's no comparison whatsoever.
To expand that out just a bit, a friend of my father's landed in North Africa in Operation Torch (520 US dead, quite light in context), went on to fight in Sicily (2,811 dead), went on to Italy (no estimate here as it'd be out of context), landed on D-Day (2,501 dead), and fought all the way across France and into Germany before being shot in the homeland of his enemy, but managing thereby to not become one of the 104,812 US servicemen killed in Europe.
And that from a country with half the population of the US today.
We've seen nothing like that since, but we've also seen nothing like Korea or Vietnam since 1975.
But we might be heading towards something like that, maybe.
Not caring if you live or die.
The reason there's been nothing like that has a lot to do with everything we've just mentioned. The Western Allies during World War Two were causality adverse to start with, which is fine. That's why American casualties aren't comparable to Soviet casualties, or German casualties. The Soviets didn't really care if their men lived or died, they only cared that the Soviet Union live. The Nazis didn't care if their men lived or died, they only cared about their image of Germany and if it survived and didn't value life at all. Indeed, the Nazi had a worship of death itself. The fascist Italians probably didn't care if their men lived or died, but the Italians themselves very much cared, making the Italians by far the most patriotic and smartest fascist population in the war, as they gave a "non" to Mussolini's call on their lives and souls.
And the thing is, much combat in history has been like that.
We don't like that, as a population, and truth be known most people everywhere are pretty horrified by war even if fascinated by it, or rather even if men, and its mostly men, are fascinated by it. For that reason, as a technological people, we've worked, since World War One (but not before that) to outpace our enemies technologically, making the reasonable assumption that it was better to spend a lot of cash than a lot of lives. We did that during World War Two which ultimately meant that we had better weapons, no matter what Wehraboos may think, than the Axis powers, with the ultimate best weapon being, no matter what you think of it, being the Atomic Bomb.
The Atom Bomb is indeed nearly the symbol of this approach to war, and the one that has identified us ever since. Yes, its use was horrific, but . . . that kind of war is something a woman can do.
Well, not in 1945 and not for societal reasons either. Flying a B-29, the bomber used to drop the Atomic Bombs over Japan, required a great deal of physical strength, particular to put the plant into and keep it in the hard banked turn the planes executed shortly after dropping the bomb. But you get the point; remote technological killing is hardly like killing at all.
Killing Is A Male Thing
Killing people is almost exclusively a male thing. And to be clearer yet, men killing other men, is mostly a male thing. Men will kill women, but they're instinctively reluctant to for the most part. They aren't so much with other men.
Now, I'm well aware that modern sociologist will maintain that it's hard to get people to kill each other, and that's why, some will claim, the service developed (which they didn't) video games. The goal was to desensitize soldiers to killing.
Bullshit.
In reality, the entire "people are reluctant to kill" and how that translates to soldiers is based, at least in part, the work of S. L. A. "Slam" Marshall and his fraudulent text Men Under Fire. Marshall was a liar who bullied his subordinates into supporting a text that they knew the data didn't support. More on that in a moment, but the point is that men kill pretty darned easily, and for that matter, men commit other acts of violence, including acts of violence against women, extremely readily.
While sociologist wring their hands a thesis that the facts don't support, and modern social engineers try to construct a world that violates reality, the fact of the matter is that men are programmed in their DNA towards violence. Women are not. Men and women have a similar set of biological impulses here, but they work distinctly differently Men are programed to spike to stress and react. Women climb slowly into stress, ponder it, peak over prolonged time, and then decline in stress over a long time. Indeed, prolonged stress, as its contrary to how male biology works, kills men. When we hear "stress kills", it kills men mostly.
The reason for this has everything to do with our sexual dimorphism and how we were evolved.
What we aren't evolved to do is sit around in glass and steel buildings working in cubicles all day. Nothing but spiders, perhaps, are evolved to do that. Rather, we're built for a type of aboriginal existence of one sort of another. And in that existence, which predates our own species and reaches back to the couple of species that preceded us, there were distinct male and female roles that had nothing whatsoever to do with "the patriarchy" or even "culture", but everything to do with DNA.
In that world, men hunt and fish. Women will do a little of both, but much less. Men also defend the band, tribe, or whatever you may have, i.e., their extended families, against external threats, most of which arrive suddenly and quite a few of which present physical danger. The classic example, but not the only one, are other humans who are not part of your band. But dangerous animals also presented a fairly constant threat.
In that environment, the threat arrived suddenly and men, the bigger, stronger, and less tied to children and hence long-term survivability of the band, reacted suddenly and violently when called for. When another tribe arrived, it was instantly adjudged on the level of threat it presented, and if it presented one, or appeared to, close combat ensued.
And let's not be squeamish in any sense about it, or dishonest. In primitive societies, combat could become without quarter, in regards to males.
Now, it normally didn't. It's well known that in aboriginal societies an individual death is more imperiling than in a "civilized" one. The death of just a couple of men could impair the bands ability to survive, although was we'll see there's an important caveat to that. Generally, therefore, most combat involving aboriginal peoples is low casualty. The goal is to inflict injury on your opponent and drive them away, not to get yourself killed. As that's also the goal of the aboriginal contestant, most aboriginal combat involved sharp contact and withdrawal. Indeed, raids are a favorite tactic of aboriginal bands as they involve low risk, usually involve taking critical assets of an opponent, and withdrawal.
In other words, if you hit your opponent, take his horses, kill a couple of them, that's a really big success, and they might move off, which is what you wanted in the first place.
That can be taken too far however. If the threat, or opportunity, is so great, the combat can be totally without quarter. In other words, if you are presented with the 7th Cavalry making a tactical error, and you have them, you aren't taking prisoners. Everyone of your opponents that can be killed will be, and without remorse or regret, which will also get to.
But let's note here again that this is mostly an all male thing. Contrary to what some movie makers would have it, even aboriginal combatants almost never kill women.
Instead, they take them.
Which gets back again to DNA. And we'll get back to that in a moment.
But first, lets discuss women in this scenario. No matter what Ancestry may like to advertise, while there may be matriarchal societies, there are almost no examples of female aboriginal combatants whatsoever and that's no accident.
In aboriginal societies, i.e., the societies of our origin and the ones our DNA live in today, women's biological dimorphism made them, rather obviously, the bearer of children and also tied, for much of their lives to their children. To start with, the very feeding of their children was tied to their own bodies, and it still is in spite of all the intrusion on it. Women nursed their infants when young, fed them when still young, and nurtured them following that until their own genders began to determine their roles. For girls, that nature typically meant an ongoing close association with their own mother through her life, nearly always. Men were of course attached to their parents deeply as well, but he societal phenomenon of men becoming part of their wives' households is likely more of an aboriginal norm than the opposite.
Being village centric, therefore, their role in food gathering and processing was distinctly different. There are examples of aboriginal hunters and fishermen, but they're somewhat rare and probably contextualized. Women will kill animals readily for food, but hunting with an infant is difficult so it just likely happened less often. It did happen, of course. Gathering plants, or tending gardens, on the other hand, while difficult, more readily suited their biology. This is evident across cultures and societies.
And because of these roles, women's roles in the life of the band are different. Any married man will see the results of this fairly easily today. Women worry about the coming crisis, not temporary ones. When temporary ones arise, they usually defer or demand their male "partner" take care of it. 1 Any man is familiar with a short term crisis, with that term used lightly, arising and a female demand of "you should say" which is a summons into some allegorical combat. The Huns are here. . . shouldn't you be getting on your sword?
In contrast, women agonize over events in the future,and day after day. This harkens back to the aboriginal state. Winter is coming, there isn't enough food, what will we do? That is the sort of question and the sort of scenario that confronted women more than men, and often women with babies at their breasts. It's not patronizing to imagine what this must be like, with women looking out at one child, holding another, and then looking at the baskets of maize and realizing there isn't going to be enough.
That sort of psychological engineer is completely different from thinking "the Pawnees are nearby again. . . we'll steal their horses".
All of which gets us to the next thing. Women will kill another human being, but not very readily. It wasn't their role, and it still isn't.
I've known men who have killed other men. More than one, and not all in wars. I've known, vaguely, one woman who killed a man. The examples are instructive.
Of the men I've known who killed other humans, in every example it was male on male violence. In one instance it was a self defense against armed theft. In several it was in combat. In another, it was drug fueled murder. In the latter example, which was an example of "cold blood", there was more than one person killed, but they were all men. There were women present, and one other man, who weren't touched. Frankly, it was probably a shooting over one of the girls.
In the one female instance, the killer who was a young woman who had been raped for years by her father. The father had raped her sisters too, and was moving on to the next younger one while still assaulting the killer. She'd had enough, but she was also protecting not only herself, but a sibling. And it took years to get her to that point.
Note, I said this thread wasn't going to be squeamish.
What this tells us, I think, is that men get to killing pretty quickly. My friend who shot a guy trying to rob him had no remorse for it whatsoever, and frankly I think the movie image of men having perpetual regret in the case of justified killing, or in combat, is largely bunk 2 Women, on the other hand, have a really difficult time getting to killing, even to defend themselves. The exception is to defend their children. They'll kill readily to do that.
As noted above, starting down this road, men will kill other men pretty readily, but they tend not to kill women very easily. We can look at this a number of ways. One is that women instinctively kill to defend, and they instinctively kill, or act in violence, to defend women. It's often noted that January 1945 is the month during World War Two, for example, when combat deaths between the German Army and the Red Army went through the roof. It was late in the war, and from the outside that doesn't make sense. The reason, however, is that German soldiers were well aware that the Red Army as committing mass rape wherever it went, and at that point the driver in combat became primitive and personal.
Which takes us right to our next point. The women of your enemies present DNA opportunities.
It's an odd point of human nature that we're attracted to our own kind and culture and fascinated by others at the same time. Sociologist have, in recent years, repeatedly been stunned to learn that Homo Sapiens have bred with other Homo genus people as far back as contact first occurred. This tends to illustrate this. They aren't that different, and the attraction obviously existed.
It exists in this context as well which goes to the point above. Men are reluctant to kill women in combat, but they'll take them for sex, sometimes permanently and sometimes temporarily. The biological imperative is likely that these alien women mix up the DNA a little bit. We tend not to think of it that way, but deep seated in the DNA the attraction to the "other" explains it.
The examples are so numerous they hardly need to be cited. Rome was reputed to have been establish by its own legend by the mass rape and capture of the Sabine women. The practice was so widespread that its mentioned, and governed by both the Old Testament and the Koran, which approach the topic completely differently, the Old Testament restricting what a Jewish combatant could do with the captured wife of an enemy, and the Koran informing Muslim combatants that they could simply use females captives for sex.
In ancient combat the raping of foreign captive women was routine. Occasionally women fought back, but it was relatively rare. Muslim seafaring North Africans engaged in combative raiding simply for the acquisition of sex slaves. Native bands that hand an opportunity to wipe out a competing band usually just killed the men and carted the women off. Even the 7th Cavalry under Custer appears to have done this in at least one singular example, that of Custer, reputedly, following Washita. Modern armies have generally acted vigorously to restrain this conduct in their soldiers, but where allowed, as with the Red Army in World War Two, it will resurface. Even the U.S. Army, notoriously, had several horrific examples of rapes by combat soldiers of Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War, 3 ISIL has returned the practice to Middle Eastern combat in dramatic and horrific fashion.
And of course, in civil life all this plays out as we'd expect. Individual acts of violence are usually committed by men. Urban tribal combat, or gang wars, are almost all male deals as well. Occasionally we see women in these roles, but its extremely rare. Rapes are almost exclusively a male crime. Women occasionally kill attackers, but a man attempting to rob another man is a lot more likely to get shot and killed than a man attempting to commit a rape.
All of which takes us to this. Men are violence inclined by nature. Women are not.
Perversion.
Which doesn't mean, we'd note, that as with all things human, it can't be perverted.
We'd note first that the strong instinct of men not to kill women, which obviously doesn't carry over into not committing acts of sexual violence against them, doesn't mean that they'll never do it. But what we also should note is that once these boundaries are broken, real perversion is usually present or unleashed.
The Germans, for example, managed to get their men over this so that they could and would kill Jewish women in vast numbers. Be that as it may, we should note, the Germans nonetheless retained a perpetual problem with German men engaging in sexual acts with Jewish women if the opportunity availed itself, something that was a crime, and even the same men who would kill Jewish women would also do that. Having noted that, however, what we'd also note ist hat once the killing of women started, the floodgates of real mass bloodletting were completely unleashed.
To given another example, the Frontier U.S. Army, in spite of the reputation to the contrary, would nearly never target women and children. Women did become casualties of Army v. Native combat, but rarely intentionally. When it occurred inside of villages, which it sometimes did, this was because it was inside of villages. An Indian women with children in a camp would fight back, for the reasons noted above, and soldiers would accordingly too. But the "kill everyone in a village" type thing was rare, and when it did occur, was usually an example of outright perversion of some kind.
I can think of one of this, which is the Battle of Sand Creek. This battle by the 2nd Colorado Cavalry during the Civil War is notorious for being unjustified and genocidal, and very much featured the killing of women. This is also why it provoked a societal horror and caused the Army to want to court martial Col. Chivington who lead it. Even the notorious more or less contemporaneous Bear River Massacre saw almost only male Native combatant deaths, with the women and children taken prisoner.
This will get to the below, but there's a warning here. Placing women into the position of combatants goes a long ways towards overcoming a biological norm, and when that norm is overcome, the results tend to be horrific
But what about women warriors of the past?
The female samurai Tomoe Gozen, a Japanese literary legend for whom there's no proof of existence.
What about them, they barely exist.
Usually when you bring this topic up, you'll be confronted with examples from the past cited as if as much is known about them as may be known about combat units from the Second World War. Far from it. Indeed, the examples that are brought up are uniformly murky and subject to question.
Next to none, or may none at all, of the examples are in fact well established from the ancient world and quite often, when the very few examples that are capable of being proven in any fashion bear the classic stamp of being exceptions to the rule that they effectively are the exceptions that prove the rule. This doesn't mean that examples are wholly absent from history, but it does mean that the tendency to leap to the conclusion that in some ancient societies female warriors were common is a big mistake. Indeed, this is completely counter to the cutting edge woke articles that you'll find that "Contrary to what Gamers Believe, the Ancient World Was Full of Women Warriors".
No, it was not.
In all aboriginal societies, as already noted, it's the men who did the fighting, normally. Women will fight, but only under defined and fairly desperate circumstances. Here, however, is the accounts from early civilized societies that we're dealing with.
Greek and Roman accounts of armed female warriors are the most commonly cited examples. Both societies had such accounts and given that, they tend to be accepted at face value by those who want to accept them at face value for modern conclusions. They have to be taken, however, in the context of their times.
To more than a little extent, such stories are simply myths, and fit in with tales about cyclops and sirens and the like. There may be a grain of truth in them, but just a grain. Beyond that, however, some tales of that type, taken in context, are likely misinterpretations by the cultures telling them, as they're almost uniformly about other cultures, or even tales that were meant as cultural slights.
That desperate cultures will arm women, as a matter of desperation, for combat is clearly the case. It doesn't provide a good example for those who cite to women warriors, but it undoubtedly happened in the past just has it has happened in more recent times. When the Greeks or Romans noted their presence, often in shock, they may have simply failed to appreciate that the culture they were fighting was in desperate straights.
Sometimes, however, they were likely simply insulting them, something that those who repeat Greek and Roman accounts in the modern world sometimes fail to grasp. A Roman account, for example, exists regarding what the teller regarded as the horribly libertine conduct of females of one of the pre literate Iberian bands that the Romans defeated. That story is repeated at face value often failing to note that the Romans were fairly slack in moral conduct in their early days as well. That a Roman would note this of one such band may mean that he was generally disgusted and shocked, or it may mean that he was simply relating it to build up his own group over a neighboring pre literate one that the Romans were overrunning. I.e., "look how disgusting these primitives are". Such rationalization is pretty common in all societies in all eras.
If that sounds extreme and unlikely take into account that even in modern times the gross mischaracterization of enemies is common. Perhaps the best example actually comes from the United States in regard to the Japanese during World War Two, in part because it comes from a quarter that we wouldn't really expect.
Theodore Seuss Geisel, aka "Dr. Seuss", depiction of Japanese individuals, the distinction between foreign born and American born isn't made, in the US during World War Two. This cartoon is from 1942.
American depictions of the Japanese were frequently astoundingly bizarre and racist. Thsi was even the case in regard to the depiction of the average civilians. Japanese soldiers were commonly depicted as wearing thick glasses and hardly being human, a stereotype that was sufficiently strong that it was still replicated, in comedic fashion, in the form of Andy Rooney's depiction of a Japanese landlord in 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. It is, of course, completely false.
The false nature of it, however is the point. If an archeologist were to discover American propaganda from the 1940s regarding the war with Japan, and if that archeologist were to accept it at face value, they'd have to conclude that the Japanese enemy was uniformly buck toothed and had horrific vision. In reality nothing of the case was anywhere near true. Indeed, the origin of this stereotype is hard to determine as it predates the Second World War by a significant degree. At best, the smalls stature of Japanese people in general combined with a preference for very simple glass frames in the era, for the minority who wore glasses, seems to have bizarrely lent itself to the horrific racist portrayals that endured all the way into the 1970s.
By extension, therefore, when we read of accounts by one people about the conduct of an enemy, we need to take it with a grain of salt. Almost every Plains Native American tribe was tagged with dismissive monikers by their enemies, many of which stuck. The US portrayed the Japanese as oddly nearsighted and of endemic bad dentistry, a depiction that endured for years. Americans dismissed Asian populations they were fighting in later years as "gooks". The Germans depicted the Red Army soldier as animalistic beasts dating all the way back to the 1920s. Ancients maintaining that an opponent had female warriors may not have been so much of an observation, as an insult. Their enemies were women, in other word, or needed the assistance of their women, or perhaps needed the civilizing influence of Rome to think right.
Women of one of the three Russian "battalions" (actually much smaller units) that enlisted in the service of Imperial Russia. Their history in the Great War saw only one actually combat engagement.
Coming forward in time, to eras we can really establish a real record for, we see next to no use of women as combatants except in time of extreme desperation. Japanese female combatants are known of, for example, but only in times when deploying every last person seemed to be called for. Some women were enlisted for military's service by Imperial Russia at the end of World War One and some women fought in the Red Army during the Civil War, but in both instances Russia was down to absolutely nothing in terms of resources. Indeed of the Russian women who enlisted for Imperial service during World War One, only one combat engagement seems to have taken place using them, although that did occur. Of those in the Red Army, very little is known.
The Red Army and Imperial Army examples do significantly differ, however, in that the Imperial Army example was designed with embarrassing men in mind. It didn't work, but the thought was that Russian men, who were giving up on the Imperial cause, would be shamed by women rising to fight for it. The Red Army example was more genuine, and harder to track, as the female volunteers were volunteers on an individual basis and therefore not part of any singular unit. The number of individuals who served as combat soldiers was quite small, however, with the 80,000 women who served in the Red Army overwhelmingly volunteering in medical and clerical roles. This is significant in that, at the time, the Communist advocated a social revolution as well as a political and economic one that disregarded all male/female traditions and distinctions in general, with women who were high in the Communist Party particularly exemplifying that by their rejection of the roles of mother and spouse quite notably. In spite of that, most women who volunteered for the Red Army did so in roles that were more traditional for their gender.
Which takes us forward to World War Two, as we usually started to get the "what about. . ?" example in regard to an army that seems to have enlisted women and deployed them as combat soldiers. It proves to almost uniformly to be highly mythicized.
The classic example is women in, again, the Soviet armed forces, and indeed women did have a notable presence in the USSR's military during the war.
Red Army snipers Natalya Kovshova and Mariya Polivanova. Both were killed in action in 1942.
800,000 Soviet women served in the Soviet armed forces during the Second World War, the overwhelming majority of whom served in medical units. However, over 2,000 served as snipers, some served as fighter pilots and Aleksandra Samusenko served as a tank commander and liaison officer. So what about this example?
Well, it's actually not much of one. Over 34,000,000 Soviet citizens served in the Red Army alone during World War Two, so the overall number of women who served in the Soviet armed forces is actually quite small. In contrast to the USSR, 350,000 American women served in the US military during World War Two, a little less than have the number who served in Soviet service but then a little over 16,000,000 Americans served in the armed forces during the war. Given that, the level of female participation was about equal in both countries. The roles were largely similar as well, with the exception of snipers and combat pilots, although the US did have ferrying pilots who only recently were recognized as having provided military service.
Additionally, not only is the nature and extent of female participation in the Soviet military during the Second World War grossly exaggerated as to scale, it's exaggerated in nature. Women were ground combatants except in the case of snipers and the singular not well understood case of Samusenko who seems to have somewhat wondered into that service and about whom a lot of myths have attached. The largest role of females as combatants, in the Soviet armed forces, was as pilots, although frankly that was not a particularly largescale role either.
Which takes us next to this. While a very small number of women did serve in the Soviet military in combat roles, they served in roles that were physically, and perhaps also psychologically, suitable for their gender. Snipers carry hardly anything, in comparison to infantryman, for example. Aircraft, or at least some aircraft, had advanced to the point where physical strength was not a premium and small size not a detriment. In both instances, the killing involved was not up close and personal, although it was still very real.
Indeed, while we're at it we should note this. 500,000 German women served in uniformed military auxiliary services during World War Two and the same number served in antiaircraft units in one form or another. 400,000 German women served as nurses during the war, but like all of the armies of World War One, much of the German nursing services were provided by civilian, and not military, personnel, a least in Germany itself. None the less, that places German female participation directly in the armed forces at 1,000,000, higher than Soviet numbers and completely contrary to the general assumption that the Germans never deployed their female population. In fact, in spite of a strong Nazi ideology against doing so, they did. This means that, taking into account that somewhere over 14,000,000 Germans served in the German armed forces during World War Two, German female participation in the armed forces was the highest of any of the combatant nations.
The German example is interesting, however for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the Germans were compelled to it out of desperation, which demonstrates the points we've made above. The Nazis were philosophically bound to a barefoot and pregnant ideology and actively campaigned to boost the German birthrate to the point where the League of German Girls, a compulsory service organization that was the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth, began to take on an increasing element of scandal as the war went on and yet at the same time the Germans were forced to resort to the recruitment of women for their armed forces. They never served in a ground combat role but they did ultimately become part of the Luftwaffe's anti aircraft system which was definitely a combat role, although they did not man the guns themselves, that being a role that required a fair degree of strength. All in all, most German military women served in support and clerical roles.
On this we need to keep in mind how desperate the German manpower situation became as the war went on. The Germans did man antiaircraft crews with teenage boys who where under military age and in the final stages of the war they deployed Hitler Youth members as combatants. The German conscription age range ultimately ran from 16 years of age to 60, and antiaircraft crewmen were assigned down to age 12. Women in the German armed forces, which bore a real societal stigma, wasn't a sign of equality of any sort but of desperation.
Okay, well what about partisans?
Partisans tend to be a bit ignored in this category, which is odd as it isn't too hard to find examples of female partisans during the war. Here too, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, most female partisans occupied support roles, rather than combat roles. This is the case in the Eastern countries occupied by the Germans in particular where the partisan movements were quite large but were also Communist dominated. There are exceptions to be sure but by and large, those are once again exceptions to the rule.
Women in Western European resistance forces is a surprisingly difficult topic to really address. There were women in these organizations but its' important to note that by and large, they didn't do very much fighting.
Women did have some participation as combatants in the Spanish Civil Wars, and its often tempting to compare resistance units to the Spanish ones. The problem here is that finding out good information that topic isn't easy either. Contrary to the common portrayal in the US, Spanish Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War were Communist or near Communist, or Anarchist, and they still retained the really radical pre Russian Revolution culture regarding men and women. Therefore its not too surprising that some women did fight in the Spanish Civil War, but while they are a celebrated cause, its really hard to figure out how many it actually was.
Communist dominated a lot of the resistance forces all over Western Europe as well, although certainly other ideologies, even monarchist, were represented in those groups. As noted, they did very little, indeed next to no, actual combat and they would have been extremely poorly suited to have done so. Most of what they did was in the nature of sabotage and espionage, and therefore they aren't very illustrative on this topic. They did do some fighting in some towns as they were liberated or near liberation, but the problem there is that those examples, such as that which occurred in Paris, were basically uprisings and featured a lot of civilians who had not previously fought at all. Indeed, most of those on the streets in those uprisings had likely not participated in any prior combat at all.
What all that leaves us with is this. The pre 1945 examples we have basically aren't very good and actually tend to support the evolutionary biological point raised above.
So, what about from 1945 to the present day.
Well, the same is largely true.
One thing we'd have to start off with noting is that those few established armies that had female soldiers during the war who were near the front, or on rare occasion actually front line soldiers
Which should lead us to the contemporary examples.
The problem is, there aren't really very many, and likely for a reason.
The one that's most frequently given is the Israeli Defense Force. The IDF does have some female combat soldiers, but their use has been very limited. During the recent war they did fight, however. There are some female combatants in the Ukrainian forces, and in the contemporary Russian ones, but we don't really hear much about them. At least the Russian ones have reported terrible abuse by their own army, which isn't really surprising given the armed mob nature of Russian forces as a rule.
Which leads us to a final topic.
Women in armed forces, any nations farmed forces, are constantly abused. It's horribly wrong, but its a fact. It's probably an irresolvable problem. In the conditions in which they live and work, there's virtually no way to eliminate sexual contact, and some of that is going to be rape.
That contact that isn't rape, on the other hand, will forge bonds that really shouldn't exist between combat soldiers. Men will die for women as its in their DNA. Men are more likely to die for women that they've slept with. You can't really somebody you've slept with behind at a cross roads to die.
But combat soldiers have to do just that.
