[IronDuke99]

Originally Posted by dmnt

I used to coach female athletes and from what I learned during the courses in coaching and the experience is that the rule "Women athletes achieve 90% of the strength level of men except for shoulder and arm strength where they achieve 67%."

The big question is if pushups are a good measure of combat readiness or if it is just strength training. If the latter, then knee pushups are fine although I personally never let my athletes do them if they were able to do real pushups.

I'm all for equal requirements as long as they relate to capability in combat.

My view is you set a high standard and then you stick to it, for everyone. Anyone who cannot make that standard does not get in.

Trouble is that if recruitment is low due to no combat (and yes recruitment, to the British forces at any rate, is always actually higher when there is actual fighting going on somewhere. Operation 'stay in barracks' not being very exciting to young men) and/or a pay freeze, etc, they tend to lower standards, especially where women are concerned.

There is a reason that the more elite the military force the harder the training, in every way, is a unbreakable rule.

It is not just, or even mainly, about the physical, it is about searching for the mental breaking point where someone cannot take any more and just gives up. Evolution has not really fitted women for that, they have a very different evolutionary survival strategy. Neither is better, they are just very different.

In Ancient society - and to a more limited extent even today - men who lost in war mostly died. Women might end up enslaved, but they did not normally die, providing they 'changed sides' at the right point. You can even find evidence of this in what happened in WWII in Europe. You cannot just change millions of years of evolutionary psychology.