I am happy for women to be in the front line. They can carry their packs in the APCs, as long as they get there with rifle in hand.

Fact is that women voted overwhelming for Chicken Hawk Menzies' plan to send young men like me, who were excluded from the vote, to Vietnam.

Maybe when an equal number of women come back in body bags women voters will be less inclined to send soldiers to wars that Australia should never have been involved in.

Onthebeach
<Fact is that women voted overwhelming for Chicken Hawk Menzies' plan to send young men like me,
who were excluded from the vote, to Vietnam.>

I don’t doubt what you say about Menzies winning the vote, but I do know that
my husband’s( who was then 21years, and old enough for the conscription} mother, said, “I didn’t raise a son for 21years
to have him sent to war and killed”. She was not at all happy about him being conscripted.
So maybe it was the women who weren’t mothers and older men who voted for Menzies at that time.

I totally agree with this article. That women can't match
the sheer physical and evolutionary warrior skills of men in
times of war. It's just woolly, Pollyanna thinking.

However, the rich at the top, only keep us
peasants around and feed us as a protective shield around them
in times of attack. So when the chips are down, they will take
men, women and even lower the fighting age to include children
as young as 14years if the war is going badly. Anything to
win and save themselves. We are only gun fodder for the elites who control armies. We are their shield.

Good evening ONTHEBEACH...

I wasn't aware you're also a veteran ? When were you there, and what unit did you serve with ? Golly it was so long ago, I'm over 70 now but remember vividly some of the events that occurred there.

I'm not sure of your view, but these people pushing for women to serve in combat environments, obviously have never served in a rifle platoon ? I have no doubt some women would be capable, but it's simply NOT appropriate for them to serve as a grunt !

Sure as a pilot, or Intel, or in some other combat related support capacity, OK. But not in an Infantry Platoon, 'drop shorts' (Artillery), Combat Engineers, etc.

I will readily admit, I'm old fashioned, but I'll say again, it's simply NOT appropriate for women to serve 'outside the wire'.

A few points:
Firstly I don't credit the "sisterhood" with much influence in this matter, they've jumped on board because, as with the vote it's now reached a point where putting women in combat units isn't going to cost them anything, I'll explain why.
The bulk of the frontline warfighting these days is done by commando and spec ops units, no woman could ever pass the SAS, Delta Force,Foreign Legion or Paratrooper requirements so the likelihood of women going hand to hand or even exchanging small arms fire with an enemy is remote.
Secondly women are simply not going to be able to keep up with the men in the field and will be left behind or quickly removed from combat teams. Has anyone watched that program on TV about the British mine clearance teams in Afghanistan? The Brits actually do have women in those roles and one episode followed a young woman on her first deployment, she fared badly. Even though she was a large, young and fit girl she was assigned to carry a 20+ kilo electronic warfare system, the device that jams incoming radio and phone signals while the defuse bombs in addition to her weapon, armour and bandoliers.
Basically she need the full time assistance of two other team members just to do her job and in one particularly hairy operation she became stuck in a bog, nearly wrecking the jammer and had to be rescued.
Talk to a soldier about what happens to their feet, about shin splints, torn ligaments and cracked bones from carrying your own body weight in gear up hill and down dale, talk to an old veteran about what kind of shape their bodies were in when they came back from New Guinea or Borneo.

The feminists are just plain thick about the unintended negative consequences of their very flawed beliefs and they are prone to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Not surprising for a movement that is based on a lie and is captive of and serves the few, the educated middle class elite who worship shoes, restaurants and Beamers. Middle class materialism. Egocentrism. Me, me, me. All obvious in the self concern of their articles.

An example is walking women into a higher qualifying age for the pension. That only affects the herd and not feminists. The middle class careerists get golden handshakes and super. They will never need the age pension. Will Julia Gillard or her Emily's List feminist mates ever need an age pension? Not bloody likely!

Another easy example is their truly dumb-ass arrogance and spite towards women who want to raise children themselves and horror of horrors, breastfeed them.

Feminists can only imagine getting senior officer positions. They have no concept of what it takes to get there, or the requirement for such leaders to have field experience. Nor do they care. But anyhow it is enough to make outlandish demands for women to be 'equal' and show up in SAS officer numbers. The sensationalism is worth it to revive a flagging and tired movement that is showing its cracks (in more ways than one).

Now, the Walking Haircut, the Defence Minister says women are discriminated against by not being equally represented in the SAS. There have been umpteen reviews of Defence, which Julia's uncharitable 'misognyists' (sic) say were intended to divert attention away from her mistakes and to cover the Walking Haircut's lack of decisions. The big slugger for feminists and certified victims for the guvvy gravy train, HREOC, says women should get shot as often as men. So there you go, it must be right.

But I don't mind because if equality means anything at all it is that a life is a life and a wonderful womyn's life is only equal to a man's. A glimmer of truth, unintended.