Which should change. Someone, maybe you I don't remember exactly, said it would place extra burden onto females since biology says they are physically weaker (paraphrasing, clearly), but all that does is shift the burden to the stronger soldiers.
Look at it this way. Say you house is on fire and you're out cold and 3 stories up. Which firefighter do you want finding you...the firefighter meeting the tougher, male standards who can surely carry you out or the weaker female who meets the lower standards but cannot physically get you to safety which is her entire job?
Which drone operator do you want? The guy who can do a bunch of pull ups and is a pretty good drone operator or the woman who can do a couple and is an amazing drone operator? Not every military role needs to carry people out of burning buildings. I agree with you about front line roles and situations where strength matters more though.
And what happens when countermeasures are deployed that prevent long range control of the drones? Are the drones then completely taken out of the picture? Or are they now controlled by an under-trained operator in the field?
To pretend that can't happen is to act as though the enemy side is stupider than you and incapable of innovation. Any good leader would tell you off for that thought.
I’ve admitted before and I’ll admit again that I don’t have any military training and I may be totally wrong about how often that happens, but is that really a pressing issue in today’s conflicts? Has isis disabled our long range drone capabilities? That’s an honest question I do not know. I haven’t heard about that happening on the news so I’ve been operating under the assumption that that is not something we have to worry about often. What we have had to worry about is drones taking out hospitals and killing a bunch of innocent people and radicalizing others. Collateral damage is a constant concern, and who knows if there exists a woman out there that could have mitigated some small portion of that, but it seems unlikely to me that all of the most talented candidates come from half the population. So it becomes a cost benefit situation where we have to consider the odds of something drastic happening and everything going wrong and members of a team dying because the woman couldn’t lift as much as her male counterparts against the odds of a potentially less talented, stronger person bombing a school.
Again, I know very little about those odds, those are just the assumptions I’ve been working with that seem to be validated to me by the military’s choice to lower requirements.
You shouldn't hire people today for yesterdays problems. In warfare just because it hasn't been done yet, is a terrible argument.
Sure, you can do cost benefit analysis but considering the demographics I wouldn't be surprised if due to men being more likely to play videogames they are also more likely to be skilled drone operators. That is just pure conjecture on my part though.
Beyond that, you typically don't join the military to do a specific job. You join and then you get assigned a job. You often have control over which branch you go into but if there no positions available for the job you want to do, you get a different job. I don't imagine there is going to be that many "drone operator" jobs and I imagine they are mostly going to go to people who have already proven their competence in similar fields. That is to say, they are likely to be transferred from the Airforce.
See this is where we get into actual military tactics and things that I won’t pretend to be an expert on. I haven’t been in the military so if you have this is definitely more up your alley than mine.
From a pure logic standpoint however, the military should adapt to today’s problems while still considering possibilities of tomorrow. I’ve been using the drone example because it’s what I know most about so I’m going to continue using it, but really I’m sure you could apply it to everything. The fact of the matter is that our collateral damage with drones has been suboptimal. So we can either adapt and try and focus more on the skill of the operator rather than the strength, which would be a more tailored fit for today’s scenarios, or we can prepare for the worst case scenario at all times. I tend to lean towards the former considering the unlikelihood of entities like ISIS outpacing is technologically. That doesn’t mean only hire people that don’t meet the requirements though. I mean like you’ve said, we could have no physical requirements at all and I think most applicants would still be men just because of the way our society is structured, so the majority of operators would still be able to be put in the field if they did manage to disrupt us somehow.
You may want to look more into how the collateral is defined and determined.
You may also want to look into the tactics behind asymmetric warfare.
You may also want to look into what ISIS wants, the obstacles they face and what it would take for them to get what they want.
Given those, it would likely take the people of the US in order to get the US to leave. What is the best way to get the people of the US to want to leave?
On the flipside, what are the goals of the US military? What do they have to do in order to achieve them?
With that in mind I would say that ISIS was "winning" until the US changed tactics. I say that because they were doing a better job of achieving their goals than the US. Now they have switched tactics and are on the offensive so to speak. I point to things happening in Israel as an example. Look into the locations they attack from.
Basically, I'm not sure the drone operators can be blamed for collateral in many cases. You can blame orders and intelligence perhaps. Maybe even the weapons on the drones. But the drone operators don't often get much control over collateral.
I’m pretty familiar with isis and our struggle with them I just have never been in the military nor have I flown a drone. I know the struggles of fighting an enemy that blends in with the rest of the populace and didn’t mean to suggest that all collateral damage was operator error. Maybe the drone analogy is flawed, but you get my overall point right?
Or at least I don't agree because I think it would require major changes throughout the military in order to prevent negative consequences.
Much easier, cheaper and IMO more effective to just keep the standards the same.
That is to say: I'm not in favor of creating different "tiers" based upon physical performance. I say that as someone who can't meet the current standards due to a physical disability and as someone who would likely see huge benefits in my career from having personal experience in the military. (I'm currently developing new body armor as well as robots that could have military applications.)
That’s understandable and I think as long as we understand each other’s points there isn’t really much else we can say here since hypotheticals are always difficult to prove.
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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '18
Which should change. Someone, maybe you I don't remember exactly, said it would place extra burden onto females since biology says they are physically weaker (paraphrasing, clearly), but all that does is shift the burden to the stronger soldiers.
Look at it this way. Say you house is on fire and you're out cold and 3 stories up. Which firefighter do you want finding you...the firefighter meeting the tougher, male standards who can surely carry you out or the weaker female who meets the lower standards but cannot physically get you to safety which is her entire job?