Still..... I would think that some sort of qualifying eval could be done so that people who don't really stand a chance of passing don't take up space and waste resources. It seems a small hurdle to overcome, and a poor reason to just exclude women.
I think that's part of the solution, and believe me, I think there IS a solution.
I just don't think that women meeting the existing men's standard is sufficient because women are going to break down if under load for extended periods a lot more quickly than men will.
We're just psychologically and psychologically different that way.
We know that if the average man meets a given standard there's a reasonably good chance that he'll be able to stand up to the rigors of service in the Infantry.
Since women are psychologically and psychologically we need to figure out what minimum standard a woman needs to meet in order to know that there's a reasonably good chance that she'll be able to stand up to the rigors of service in the Infantry.
Maybe that standard is the same, and I (and those like me) are just making too much of things.
Maybe the standard is much higher.
There's no way to know unless we test it.
So far, except in cases where standards have been lowered in order to accommodate women's passage through a particular school and ensure graduation, no woman has yet been able to meet the minimum standards required of men.
But like you suggested, none of the women entering any training program have been required to pass any kind of pre-training evaluation which had been designed specifically to determine a woman's suitability for the training.
If we get to a point where we've found some means of effectively screening women for this type of training which can reliably predict success both in training and then further down the line in active service, and women successfully complete training to the standards required of them, I have no objection to women being permitted to serve in Special Operations or in the Infantry (or in other, lesser, Combat Arms roles).
But I'm not willing to take the chance of degrading combat effectiveness in the name of social justice.
Doing so isn't fair to anyone, not the men and certainly not the women who will be going in to harm's way.
There's a saying in the military, or at least in the Army Infantry, that you "sweat in training so you won't bleed in combat".
I think that's the philosophy that should apply here.
Maybe the politicians and senior military leaders who have to make these decisions should have to sweat out the fact that some of their decisions might be unpopular, or un-PC, or even to some degree discriminatory, in order to save lives when you get down in the dirt in that last 150 meters where American foreign policy is being projected through the barrel of a gun.
I'm all for women serving, but we need to be sure that they're an asset and not a liability.
Once we're as sure as we can be that we've got the right women for the job, BZ and all that.