Should Women be in Combat Roles?
The complicated debate on the role of women in the armed forces. Looking beyond the left and right.
When it comes to women in the military, in particular in combat roles I am of a very conflicted mind.
Be Vary of Gatekeeping
As a leftist I am sensitive to the long history of gatekeeping that the patriarchy has engaged in. We have a long history of claiming women are naturally unsuitable to do almost anything besides cooking food and caring for children. This is why I have a natural skepticism against right-wing claims that women do not belong in the military. We have seen such gatekeeping numerous times before. Most of you are not aware of just how extensive gatekeeping arguments by conservatives have been against women historically and until the present. Let us go through a list of all the areas of society that has historically excluded women and the many absurd reasons given for excluding women.
1. Education
Higher Education: Women were often barred from universities, with claims they were intellectually inferior or that studying would harm their reproductive health (e.g., 19th-century Europe and the U.S.).
Reading and Writing: In many societies, literacy for women was discouraged or forbidden, with claims that it would lead to moral corruption or neglect of household duties.
2. Professions
Medicine: Women were excluded from practicing medicine, especially surgery, with the claim they lacked the strength, rationality, or emotional detachment needed. Midwifery was often undermined to establish male dominance in obstetrics.
Law: Women were barred from becoming lawyers or judges due to arguments that they were too emotional or lacked the logical rigor required.
Science: Women were denied entry into scientific fields because of the stereotype that they lacked the intellectual capability or curiosity for rigorous inquiry.
Politics: Women were historically denied the right to vote, run for office, or participate in governance, based on the idea that they were inherently irrational, emotional, or unable to understand complex issues.
Military: Claims that women lacked the physical strength, aggression, or resilience to serve in the armed forces were used to bar them from combat roles for centuries.
3. Arts and Literature
Authorship: Women were discouraged or outright prohibited from publishing, with claims that writing was inappropriate for their "delicate minds." Many wrote under male pseudonyms to bypass gatekeeping (e.g., George Eliot, the Brontë sisters).
Painting and Sculpture: Women were excluded from academies of art, with claims they could not handle the physicality of sculpting or lacked the creativity for serious painting.
4. Sports
Athletics: Women were deemed physically weak and unsuitable for sports, including the marathon, soccer, or weightlifting. The modern Olympic Games excluded women from most events initially.
Driving and Flying: Women were barred from driving cars and piloting planes, with claims that they lacked the coordination, spatial awareness, or temperament needed.
5. Religion
Clergy: In many religious traditions, women were barred from serving as priests or spiritual leaders, often with theological arguments about their inherent impurity or subservience.
Religious Scholarship: Women were excluded from interpreting or studying sacred texts, based on the claim that they lacked spiritual insight or intellectual capacity.
6. Business and Finance
Owning Property: Women were historically barred from owning property or entering contracts, with claims they were incapable of managing finances.
Entrepreneurship: Many societies discouraged women from starting businesses, arguing they lacked the ambition, discipline, or acumen required.
7. Technology
Computing: In the early days of computing, women contributed significantly (e.g., Ada Lovelace, ENIAC programmers), yet were later sidelined as programming became a prestigious field, with claims that it required "male logic."
Engineering: Women were excluded from engineering schools with arguments about physical strength and supposed lack of spatial reasoning.
8. Daily Life Activities
Driving: Saudi Arabia famously argued until recently that women should not drive, citing claims about emotional stability and societal disruption.
Traveling Alone: In many societies, women were forbidden from traveling without a male escort, based on claims they were too vulnerable or might damage their reputations.
9. Leadership
Corporate Roles: Women were kept out of executive positions, with claims they were unsuited for leadership due to emotional instability or inability to make tough decisions.
Monarchical or Political Leadership: Even in monarchies, women were often bypassed in succession laws with claims that ruling required "male virtues."
10. Science and Exploration
Astronomy: Women like Maria Mitchell and Caroline Herschel contributed to astronomy despite systemic exclusion, with claims that the field was too demanding.
Exploration: Female explorers faced resistance due to arguments they lacked the strength, resilience, or adventurous spirit needed.
Themes of Gatekeeping
These barriers were justified using pseudoscientific theories, religious doctrines, or societal norms that reinforced male dominance. The recurring themes were:
Biological Determinism: Arguments that women’s physiology or reproductive roles made them inherently unsuited for certain activities.
Emotional Instability: Claims that women’s emotions made them unreliable or unfit for leadership and decision-making.
Moral Justifications: Fear that breaking gender norms would disrupt societal order or morality.
Accepting Biological Reality
The challenge in dealing with this issues is that because so much sheer bullshit has been leveled against women, we may end up mistakenly not taking any criticism serious. So let us look at biological factors that do matter in combat.
Men have VOâ‚‚ Max (Aerobic Capacity) which is 10-20% higher than women. Improves ability to operate at high intensity.
50-60% higher grip strength and upper body strength. Important when lifting heavy equipment or fellow soldiers.
10-20% higher reaction times. Useful to hit target faster.
Higher composition of faster-twitch muscle for quicker burst movements such as hand to hand combat or evasive action.
These are simple reason why top performing female athletes are often outperformed by men who are only doing the sport casually or at a much lower division or age.
I am positive to women in the military but we cannot get to a point where we completely ignore vast biological differences. When having this discussion we have to accept reality and work from there. It doesn't mean that we must cede all ground to the right-wingers who love to find excuses for excluding women in as many areas as possible.
Are Men Physically Superior in all Manners?
By focusing on data which I just pulled it is very easy to give the flawed impression that men are physically superior in every way to women. One has to realize men and women are optimized in very different ways. You can think of a man as a gas guzzling American monster car with a big V8 engine while women are more like smaller fuel efficient Japanese compact cars.
I write about all sorts of technology stuff and this tradeoff is very common everywhere. You see the same with rocket engines. The very powerful engines are not very fuel efficient. Rockets are staged because different stages need different optimizations. Getting off the ground requires massive power, but once in space you need fuel efficiency, not power.
The same can be observed between women and men. In moderate intensity work women tend to outcompete men. Study, cleaning, washing, office work, sowing, knitting etc. Women are better at enduring this. Men will tire more easily. It is why men can often be perceived as lazy in the home. While women are busy tidying, cleaning and cooking the guy is passed out on the couch watching football and drinking beer. Okay it is a stereotype but it doesn't exist without reason.
We must not exclude cultural factors. Women are often pushed to take care of everything whether she is tired or not, so we should not take to be only about physical ability.
Let us look at the actual concrete biological differences that give women physical advantageous in various scenarios.
1. Fatigue Resistance
Muscle Fiber Composition: Women have a higher proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibers compared to men. These fibers are better suited for endurance and sustained, low-intensity work because they are more resistant to fatigue and rely primarily on aerobic (oxygen-based) energy systems.
Efficient Energy Use: Women metabolize fat more efficiently during sustained activities, sparing glycogen reserves for prolonged effort. This is advantageous for endurance-focused, repetitive tasks.
2. Cardiovascular Efficiency
Heart and Blood Flow Adaptations: Women’s smaller hearts and lower hemoglobin levels mean they operate at a lower oxygen delivery capacity than men during high-intensity tasks. However, at lower intensities, their cardiovascular systems are highly efficient, making them well-suited for long-duration, steady efforts.
3. Hormonal Influence
Estrogen: This hormone supports endurance by enhancing fat metabolism and promoting the resilience of muscles during prolonged activities. It also has anti-inflammatory properties, reducing muscle damage and fatigue after repetitive tasks.
Testosterone: In contrast, men’s higher testosterone levels drive muscle growth and power, making them more suited to short bursts of intense activity rather than prolonged lower-intensity tasks.
4. Pain and Discomfort Tolerance
Studies suggest that women often exhibit higher pain tolerance and can better cope with discomfort over time, which may contribute to their ability to sustain repetitive, monotonous work without as much perceived fatigue.
How to best utilize women in combat roles
There are many ways to think about what roles women could fill in the military. One of the approaches I am skeptical towards is viewing women as equivalent to weaker men. There are two who argue we should have one set of physical tests for all genders and whoever passes the test can serve in the military.
At first glance, this may seem like a rational choice, but if we dig deeper, I think there are many reasons to avoid such an approach. These tests are typically built to test what men excel at, which is high intensity tasks and max strength.
It would be a bit like comparing an efficient economy car against a pickup truck by comparing how heavy loads they could pull. I badly designed pickup truck would pull the same load as an economy car. But can you really say a weak truck equals a Japanese economy car?
You cannot. That is why I caution against the idea that a weak man equals a woman. If this were true, then a weak man would excel at all the same tasks that a woman excels at. But that is simply not the case.
For instance, women excel at endurance tasks. This can make women perform well in sniper roles carried out over time. Women have similar accuracy in shooting as men but can retain that accuracy over longer time.
Tests designed around skills of men for sniper uptake may focus on accuracy and reaction time over a short time period, favoring men, while tests focused on accuracy over time would favor women. That bias in testing aimed at capturing male advantages is something to take into consideration.
Women are better than men at multitasking, which can be an advantage when operating complex modern equipment in modern combat situations. Women also have generally stronger attention to details, which is why so many factories involving assembly of intricate objects prefer hiring women. This is why women may be better at tasks like intelligence analysis, logistics management and medical care.
But let me talk about why specifically, I think women are needed in the military. A long time ago, I had a friend working as a security guard. He wasn't a big guy. Usually, he walked around with a large body builder guy. The strong body builder guy was not very intelligent and did not handle interactions very well. The security company and realized that they could pair up strong guys with smaller, sensible guys or women. That way, they had someone who could effectively handle communication and de-escalation with people, while having the strong guy as backup.
Since then, I have talked to police, social workers and many other people who are in conflict situations. Many remark on the same. Women are often much better at de-escalating a situation. Big tough guys facing another big guy typically get fired up as they get into a typical male competition mode. Macho men don't have the same desire to demonstrate towards a woman that he is stronger or more dangerous than her. Thus, around women, many of these men calm down.
This is important as avoiding physical confrontation not only makes the job of the police safer but also ensures the health and wellbeing of the suspect. It should not be a goal to hurt and beat up as many suspects as possible.
I like an example from the 1990s Norway had problems with violence against prison guards. This led to a transition from what they would call static security focus towards dynamic security. The Norwegian Correctional Service explains the concept.
Static security physical and procedural methods aim to maintain safety within a correctional facility. Examples of static security include locks, cameras, and prison layout, as well as enforcement of rules, adherence to daily schedules, and "maintaining order."
While dynamic security is described as:
Dynamic security focuses on training correctional officers to use relationship building and open communication with incarcerated individuals to create an environment conducive to rehabilitation, reduce prison-based violence, and facilitate positive change.
In essence, with better social skills and more interaction with prisoners, they improved the safety for prison guards and reduced violence. Soft power matters, in other words.
Winning the War vs. Winning the Peace
One thing that should stand out if you look at many recent Western wars is that winning on the battlefield is rarely the problem. Modern Western weapons and training tend to destroy the enemy quickly. The challenge in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq has been winning the peace.
That comes down to how civilians view and experience the occupying force. I remember a peace keeping veteran from my native Norway remarking on his time in Kosovo and Bosnia. He said they avoided standing next to Americans because that risked turning them into targets. Why wast that? Why were Americans more likely to be attacked than many others?
He remarked on how American soldiers were always fully geared, wearing sunglasses and appearing ready to go on an attack at any point. Other nations would often strip down, take off sunglasses so you can see their eyes and interact with the local population. That built trust and safety. We are talking about the equivalent of dynamic security.
This echos American failures in Iraq. They intimidated the local population making themselves unpopular. The British forces more accustomed to tactics for winning hearts and minds had more success with their approach, despite operating in areas that were more volatile.
We might wonder why America has developed such a reputation. During WW2, American soldiers were the ones local populations were more likely to trust and feel comfortable with. The US generally did a good job with their occupations and transformed both Germany and Japan into democracies.
I pondered this during the height of the Iraqi war and remember reading a Michael Moore book, which contained letters from US soldiers. One of the things they talked about was hate training. An experience from WW2 was that few soldiers were able to kill the enemy directly. A method to overcome this problem was to train soldiers to dehumanize the enemy. That may have made the into more effective killing machines, but it also made them into a terribly occupying force.
One might remember the Collateral Murder video from Julian Assange. It showed soldiers more focused on turning everyone into enemies and killing them than actually building peace. This problem has carried over into US police and border guards. It is not without reason that so many people have negative experiences with US immigration. I can include myself.
I know the US is getting a lot of flak here, but it is a well known country and their wars have been thoroughly covered and studied. And having lived there, I can relate to how I experienced the police and US immigration. De-escalation tactics do not seem to be something getting priority. The "shock and awe" tactic is more in vogue.
You have probably guessed by now that I have been building up the case for a softer touch as often exhibited by women. The skills that women bring to the battlefield in terms of social interactions with civilians is likely exactly the kind of thing one needs more of to win the peace.
While occupation and peacekeeping roles are not the same as frontline assault they are still combat roles. And these are combat roles where I believe women have a lot to contribute. In Afghanistan female soldiers helped reduce tension by doing the interaction with female members of families that patrols visited. In a conservative muslim country it would be taboo for a man to interact closely with their daughters or wives.
War is a Numbers Game
So we can make the case for using women in combat roles related to peace keeping and occupation. That would involved securing towns after it has been captured as well as for longer term operations after the war is over.
This may be relevant to large powerful countries such as the US. But women play perhaps a more important role in smaller countries such as my native Norway. War is a number game as we can see in Ukraine today. Ukraine has struggled against Russia despite better organization and tactics because Russia can throw more soldiers at them. In fact Russia often won many wars despite bad tactics because they had more soldiers.
Norway with 5.5 million inhabitants, cannot face a huge country like Russia with 140 million people while cutting its pool of soldiers in half. Israel faced the same problem. A small country surrounded by countries with vastly higher population. They had to include women in the armed forces. There was no other chance.
When I debated online the use of women in the military, one of the arguments against using women was a Marine Corps study of the performance of mixed-gender infantry units.
Data collected during a monthslong experiment showed Marine teams with female members performed at lower overall levels, completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts. In addition, female Marines sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall, officials said.
Should we be surprised by this result? I don't think so. This is the kind of high intensity military operations that favors men. They have higher upper body strength, stronger joints, higher VOâ‚‚ Max (Aerobic Capacity). Women are better suited for lower intensity tasks happening over a longer timespan.
Interestingly, this article was presented as a counterargument to my claim that a larger military force (all other things being equal) beats a smaller one in most cases. For a small country with a conscript army it would be suboptimal to reduce the total military force in half by excluding women.
The article, of course, is no counterpoint. It tests mixed-gendered Marine Corps teams against all-men teams. That means men were excluded from the mix teams to make their total number the same. Also, these teams were not facing each other. Rather one looked at statistics such as average number of accidents, firing accuracy and so on.
That has little bearing on my claim that a unit of twenty men and twenty women would likely beat a unit of only twenty men. That is what we are talking about here. We are not substituting men for women. We are adding women to increase the overall size of the military.
Final Thoughts
I do think women should have a role in the military. However, I do think we have to take physical reality into account. For an elite unit which is only there to pack a punch, it may not make sense to include women.
But this still leaves lots of jobs for women such as handling occupation and peace keeping as well as for less physically demanding combat roles. That could be tank crew operators, air force, marine and similar. A woman getting into Navy SEALs likely should have to pass similar tests as the men.
There are also practical concerns in a large-scale war such as the one in Ukraine. A country cannot risk losing a large number of its female population as that will be very bad for children that are left as well as ability to produce new children.
Hence, for practical reasons, I think one should try to avoid having mothers in very high risk front-line operations. Women should generally serve in safer roles with lower casualties. That is not merely about capability, but the fact that men cannot simply step up and give birth if numerous women die.
We see similar consideration from hunter-gatherer societies. Women have indeed participated in hunting but rarely in the more dangerous hunts.
Women in the military is not merely about defense of a country, with also the social fabric. In countries with conscript armies there is a sense of duty to your country and shared experience of everyone having served. In South Korea, there is resentment among many men that they serve but not women.
To avoid polarization and conflict between the genders, there is a value in both genders serving in the armed forces.
Personally I don't think a country should have to include women as conscripts, but I can see a benefit in both approaches.
My motivation for writing this piece was to elaborate on the positive aspects of having women in the military while acknowledging physical reality. I think the argument would be less convincing if someone straight out denied the obvious physical differences between men and women and how that affects military performance.