If a soldier can't react well to their own allies... I'm not sure I'd rate their chances at reacting well to, say, civilians in the area. I mean, we're meant to be in Afghanistan to
protect the civilians there, right? The shocking things we've seen about women's treatment in the US army seems to be a call not to remove women but to tackle the underlying cause.
Putting a woman infantry soldier with a rifle in charge of a blockade checkpoint in a middle eastern country is just begging for dead male middle eastern drivers. While this might be best for the gene pool in the long term, it won't do us any good in the short term.
What... what.... WHAT??
Actually, the decreased muscle and bone mass is a huge problem. Also women, due to the higher amounts of estrogen would me more emotional, not less.
Sometimes this thread has me convinced that I've gone back in time to 1910 and we're discussing whether women should be allowed to vote or not.
the UK trialed female frontline combatants a few years ago. Women were found to be combat capable, but similar to the isrealie example mentioned a few pages back there were issues. If a female solider got injured all the men would stop to help, and it couldnt be drilled out of them, so they found over all combat effectivness was reduced. Essentially British line infantry were considered too gentlemanly.
Aside from the apparent unfairness of this ("Some else is screwing up, sorry, you'll have to go") this would seem to necessitate the removal of women from any job in which they could conceivably get injured. No female police officers, firefighters...
Anyway, I don't really see a problem with letting women enlist, as long as the same standards apply to them. Also, I don't think they should get much special consideration with separate facilities and stuff. It's the military, you're not supposed to be comfortable, you're supposed to crawl through mud in 60°C, wearing a gas mask.
And you're supposed to be at constant risk of being raped by your colleagues, I guess?