Would gender-integrated armies be a strategic failure?

[InmostLight]

It seems like the answer would be an obvious "yes", but it would be interesting to see any opposing viewpoints.

With the question of whether or not women should be added to the selective services in the United States, all gender-roles bitching aside, nobody ever seems to consider the grave strategic disadvantage that would be wrought by adding more women to the military. If Country A had a 50% male and 50% female army, and Country B remained with a majority male army, wouldn't it give country B an automatic advantage on an individual, soldier-scale level? To me, it just seems like shooting yourself in the foot.

Is there something here I'm missing?

[Loki]

Welcome to the forum.

[Kurgan]

I would say no depending on how you define gender-integrated.

Men and women are distinct and have different abilities and strengths. I don't believe in lowering unit standards to accomodate women, but there are plenty of roles where women would, at the very least, be equal to men. There are probably plenty of roles where they might even be better than men.

Just to name a few...

Modern examples:
Israeli Defense Forces
Qadaffi's Amazonian Guard

Historical:
Boudica
Joan of Arc

Other:
Xena Warrior Princess

[Dick]

Nazis would shoot female soldiers on spot, they looked at females being in the army as a communist thang

[NSXD60]

Any female prisoner would have to endure repeated gang rape.

[Kurgan]

Nazis would shoot female soldiers on spot, they looked at females being in the army as a communist thang

The nazis were also douchebags who lost the war.

Any female prisoner would have to endure repeated gang rape.

That's true, but doesn't necessarily negate a female's ability to perform militarily and men, to some extent, are also at risk of rape in a POW setting.

[Red Pill]

The problem is that integration nowadays is not just seen as a way to give women who have the qualifications for the job the same chances as men, but as a goal to be pushed forward at any cost. It's a fact that on average women are physically much weaker than men. On average they are probably less aggressive as well, as there is a link between hormones and aggressiveness. At the individual level however there are women who are much stronger than the average men, and who have aggressiveness to spare. In theory, if they fit the same qualifications as male soldiers, there is no reason why they cannot perform as well as the latter in combat duties. There are two additional problems however. One has already been mentioned, the risk of rape in case of capture, which is much higher than for men. And I wouldn't like the idea of a female prisoner getting pregnant from her rapist captor. The second problem is having women and men in the same unit on the front line. Soldiers in a military unit don't have much privacy to start with, and in combat conditions it gets worse, for instance tankers having to pee in their helmets besides their comrades. And the stress conditions of combat are much higher than in civilian life. Having a bunch of young men and women living close together in those extreme situations looks like adding even more problems than what you would already have in a sex-segregated unit. In the past there have been examples of women in the military, even in combat roles, but they were generally in all-female units, which seems wiser IMO.
That said, there are plenty of roles in the military that don't require much physical strength or much risk of capture. Actually most personnel in the military today aren't in combat or combat-support roles (like artillery etc). For instance a female expert in electronic warfare or a female intelligence analyst would perform at least as well as a man without much of the problems mentioned above. But modern feminism requires that women compete with men in every field no matter what.

[Incal]

Maybe on hand to hand combat but don't think so with assault weapons.

[JamesBond007]

Is there something here I'm missing?

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Fourth-generation warfare (4GW) is conflict characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, combatants and civilians.

The term was first used in 1980 by a team of United States analysts, including paleoconservative William S. Lind, to describe warfare's return to a decentralized form. In terms of generational modern warfare, the fourth generation signifies the nation states' loss of their near-monopoly on combat forces, returning to modes of conflict common in pre-modern times.

The simplest definition includes any war in which one of the major participants is not a state but rather a violent non-state actor. Classical examples of this type of conflict, such as the slave uprising under Spartacus, predate the modern concept of warfare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_warfare
.

[CDeBris]

Israel does this. They have huge problems with femoid soldiers getting raped. They get raped by enemies. They get raped by their own soldiers. They get pregnant. They get diseases. A woman solder has to go in knowing she's going to get raped regularly for the rest of her service. No sane woman WANTS to go though that. No real man WANTS to send a woman ruined that way.