Women?

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by John D Salt:

I think there is more to "pressure" than raw casualty rates. In terms of keeping the primary group gelled and maintaining the mental health of the individuals, the occasional short, sharp bloodbath may be a lot less stressful than a sustained "low-intensity" grind over months and years. You'll often have heard it said that "the waiting is the worst bit", so more waiting and less fighting may be a much tougher proposition, psychologically, than the old-fashioned close-combat wargasm.

That's been my thought for a long, long time. While a sudden shock might shake one morally for a time, once it is past there is a good chance of nearly complete recovery. But a stress that is constant, even if of only a modest intensity, can have a deeper, more permanent effect. It's very inescapability becomes a demoralizing factor.

I do not believe that it is aggression that keeps soldiers fighting instead of running, but rather loyalty to the primary group with which they have strong social bonds. While it may be necessary to "summon up the blood" and have the red mist come down at the point of a final assault, simple animal aggression at any other time is I think most likely to result in people doing something stupid and getting themselves killed.

This is consistent with all I have read on the subject.

Michael

[SgtMuhammed]

One of the reasons Delta prefers older soldiers is because they tend to be calmer. They have the life and military experience to realize that agression must be tempered by reason.

Soldiers will fight to survive and to achieve their missions (which most often goes hand in hand with survival) without any artificial reving up. The extreems, failing to fight or going berserk, are the exceptions. The majority will do as they have been trained, which has little to do with pure agression.

[akd]

Interesting, in light of the current discussion:

Invisible Women Warriors

November 5, 2005: Ivory Coast president Gbagbo's new security detail is made of 300 women – allegedly because male attitudes toward women are so negative in Ivory Coast, that the new bodyguards have a good chance of not being noticed by any assassins, until it's too late. The presidential security detail in Libya is also full of women. This is largely because Libyan dictator Kadafi trusts the women more, believing they are less likely to betray him, or succumb to bribes. Using women for the “palace guard” is actually an ancient custom in Africa. For this job, loyalty is more important than physical strength, and in pre-gunpowder days, the “Amazon” bodyguards could be quite deadly around the palace using swords, spears and bows. An army of such women might not do so well in a pitched battle out in an open field. But in the closed confines of the palace, trained and determined women could, and did, turn out to be quite deadly. Nowadays, with lightweight firearms, body armor and physical conditioning programs adapted to female physiology, female bodyguards are equal to men in deadliness, and a big business. Most people, including potential assassins, still don’t see women as a part of a security detail. But they are there, and they have the element of surprise because of their gender. As a result, several commando organizations have female members, which they don’t like to talk about. These women are far more effective if the bad guys of no idea what they look like, or even know they exist.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htm.../20051105.aspx

[Bigduke6]

John,

Probably the simplest base of my arguements are descriptions of intense combat in Keegan's Face of Battle. I would say Hasting's Overlord is a good example of my POV in terms of the effects of keeping primary groups in combat over the long term, i.e., a month or more.

On pressure, I certainly agree there is more to pressure than raw casualty rates. However, in my opinion death is so much more worse (to the vast majority of humans) than all the other things that happen to soldiers in a war, that the presence of absence of death in a soldier's primary group pretty much determines the degree of pressure of the war on the soldier.

My specific argument is that driving around in a Hummer and worrying every day about a statistically nonexistant roadside bomb or a fantastically unlucky (for the worrier) bullet, tough though that is, is not comparable to getting up in the morning and knowing 1-2 per cent of your primary group died yesterday, and when today is finished another 1-2 per cent will very likely be dead, and tomorrow the death rate is very likely to be the same - and it goes on for more than a week.

Why a week? My opinion, because after a week or so fatigue and the understanding that the killing will go on kicks in, and that lowers resistance.

On agression, I wasn't being clear, my apologies. I'm not arguing agression is critical to keeping small units together as it helps keep the soldier hard-charging, although certainly in some situations that helps, obviously.

Rather, I am talking about the fight or flight decision, and what makes soldiers elect the first option. I go straight back to the playground, or a human vs. a big dog. A person tending towards a fight option (be it due to testoserone, socialization, small unit bonds, whatever) is more likely to place himself at risk. I am not romanticizing but stating what I believe to be a fact: The "fighter" is better suited for those stressful situations.

Therefore, male agression is very useful if you are picking humans to stick into those situations. I think this is an important reason why soldiers throughout the ages have valued "fighters" - not because of their ability to kill (although that helps) but rather because "fighters" are willing to continue to risk their own lives, in order to have a chance at killing the designated enemy.

I am not talking "hate training" as much as I am talking the individual's inherent willingness to "fight" - to stick it out, to repress fear, to believe staying in this deadly environment is, as stupid as it sounds from a personal preservation point of view, worth something.

I contend that attitude is critical, as it is veteran units that win wars, and members of a unit willing to make the rational decision - what the heck am I doing here, I could get killed, death is not worth this - are not going to become veterans. Certainly women can be "fighters" the same way as men, to a certain degree. But to all degrees? To the maximum degree? As well as men?

Intuitively I doubt that, women are generally more rational than men when it comes to self-preservation. That makes them less easy for a military to exploit.

So not Lord Moran's courage to charge into the teeth of bayonets, but rather Keegan's understanding the killing will continue, and reaching the basically irrational decision that continuing to participate in that process makes sense.

It is my contention that socialization over millions of years, plus to a certain extent biology, make men the definite better choice when you are talking about wars where death is regular for weeks at time. It is certainly true war no longer is as deadly as it was in the past for a modern army facing a fourth rate army, or an insurgency. That's one (lower) level of stress.

But in a war against an near-equivalent opponent? When the war kills people regularly? That's another level of stress, and from my POV male agression though the ages has been exploited to make (mostly) young men participate in deadly wars.