Anonymous asked: Do you think having women in combat groups in the military is bad?
It depends on the kind of war you’re fighting and how you’re doing it.
I think it’s always going to be very damaging to a society to put women on the front lines in a total war where potentially hundreds of thousands to millions could die, just from a population replacement perspective - sending women into no man’s land as infantry in WW1 would have been very foolish, for example, and any country that did that would have been making WW2 that much more difficult for themselves.
I think it can also be very damaging to the effectiveness of a military to lower standards to get women into combat roles simply for the sake of egalitarianism, which is a more current concern for the US military. There may also be cultural reasons that having women in military units could be disproportionately disruptive in some countries, but I don’t think that applies so much to the US at present. There’s also the issue of female soldiers becoming pregnant that needs to be addressed, which AFAIK the US military still doesn’t handle very well.
IMO it makes sense for the physical minimum standards for elite units like Rangers or SEALs to be too exacting for all but the most exceptional women to be able to hope to make the cut, and drafting millions of young women to sacrifice on the front lines of a war of attrition is something only a completely desperate society should consider - there are pragmatic/demographic reasons not to do that which outweigh the egalitarian case for doing it. But as regular soldiers in a standing army in a modern low-casualty high-tech war, I don’t think there are many good reasons to exclude women from combat.
Also, I’ve seen some data suggesting that female police officers fire their guns more frequently and in less dangerous situations because they don’t have the same confidence in being able to physically overpower suspects that male officers do, which suggests that using female soldiers in an occupation or counterinsurgency scenario might prove to be less efficient than an all-male force. We shouldn’t be doing those things anyway, though.
In Ancapistan, I think the combat units would effectively be a combination of mercenary units (which would be elite-level professional soldiers of fortune) along with part-time citizen-soldier militias that’d rely more on numbers than training or equipment, and there are actually good reasons as I outlined above for both of those kinds of units to be all male, with women serving in rear echelon roles. Of course, it’s also possible in the future we might see various technologies such as exowombs or cybernetic body modification become common which could change the equation, and it’s highly possible that in a matter of decades having human soldiers in direct combat at all could be a thing of the past.