why are women excluded from national service?
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The following excerpt is taken from the link
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/BG836.cfm
and relates the experience of the IAF. I believe we have some women in a few combat vocations. Is there anybody who can relate their experience or knowledge on effectiveness of our women warriors during training or exercises?
"The only reliable record of women in combat is provided by Israel, a nation whose policy is widely misunderstood. The popular conception is that Israeli women fight alongside men as equals. The truth is that although Israel drafts both women and men for military service, Israel has excluded women from combat units since 1950.
To be sure, female soldiers fought alongside male colleagues in Israel's War of Liberation, which ended in 1948. Because of the problems that this created, Israeli women never again were sent into battle. Explains military historian Edward N. Luttwak of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has written a book about the Israeli military: "Men moved to protect the women members of the unit instead of carrying out the mission of the unit." (Telephone interview, June 10, 1991.) Luttwak adds that women are integrated into the Israeli military at many levels, and conduct most of the training. Women also serve in the Mossad, Israel's elite counter-terrorist force. But women are excluded, Luttwak notes, from infantry and other combat positions based on "the pragmatic experience of 40 years." (Ibid.)
The Israelis also bar women from combat for cultural reasons. After the War of Liberation, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said that placing women in combat violated the Jewish concept of womanhood and women's status as mothers. (Interview with senior Israeli military official, June 12, 1991, Washington, D.C.) At a Washington briefing this month, a senior Israeli military official said that even tentative experiments with women serving aboard missile-defense boats had failed miserably. Furthermore, he said, because of its cultural heritage, Israel "is not ready to pay the price of a woman being held hostage, a woman returning crippled." (Ibid.)
In hearings before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Committee on Armed Services in November 1979, Brigadier General Andrew J. Gatsis, USA (retired), testified that Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told him that during Israel's War of Liberation, "we had a constant fear of what the Arabs would do to our women if they captured them." The men, Dayan told Gatsis, "could not stand the psychological stress" of watching women being killed and captured. Gatsis also said that Dayan "felt that [having women in combat units] knocked down their combat effectiveness." ("Women in the Military," hearings before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, November 13-16, 1979 and February 11, 1980, pp. 281-282.)" -
John,
Thanks. But the essay's due on friday and i'm kinda far away on another continent, i don't think Mr Teo or his friends would have time to answer my questions. I'll do what i can to present a credible argument but i'm really fishing for opinions here and hopefully some of them come with documents to back them up. But i guess its unlikely since it is a FORUM.. haha nevertheless thank you for all your help.
I do have one more matter to discuss. What about Gays in the SAF? I have read that:
"The Ministry of Defence does not admit self-acknowledged gay men into the military, but they have to serve the army in the capacity of administrative or logistical clerks when serving their two and a half-year (yah i know its two years. i'm quoting can?) compulsory military service"
http://www.ilga.info/Information/Legal_survey/Asia_Pacific/singapore.htm
What do u guys think? Ever occur to you that gays are just men who like men and do not necessary cross dress or take on the role of transgenders? I'm sure plenty of you have seen men in the gym that are buff and well built but still appear really gay? (NO OFFENSE INTENDED TO THE GAY COMMUNITY.) Remember that dude, Kenny, in "Army Daze" that was supposed to be "different" -
haha for saf everything is not late de.... if girls have to be in army arh.. i think girls life is more xiong then guys liao.. they need to give birth and work.. guys leh need to work oni.. lol....Originally posted by SnowFlag:that time would be too late to train the girls liao. -
forgive me for i never weighs my fully packed field pack before. but i must say it's god damn heavy.Originally posted by baer:How's come your fullpack is only 5kg, if memory serves me well, it is 15kg w/o SOP items, sect items (like claymore, parang), or plat items (if unfortunate aircraft ID panels) etc..
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I tot women can join if they want to wat... It's just not compulsary.
its a dumb qn la. why not ask why guys cannot give birth -
who say gals cant go on 24km route march with fbo? i have done it and i weigh a mere 40kg and is about 1.5m tall. and the whole darn thing is heavy. about half my weight. its a matter of personal endurance. however i believe that progressive training helps as well. how many guys can just walk 24 km in fbo without the 8 and 16km march? just pick any guy who ord-ed for at least 2 years, i bet he can, but also not without difficulty.
it is belittling to say that woman cant. most woman can do it when it comes ot the crunch. just whether they wanna do it or not.
anyway i nvr thought that girls should be doing NS unless there is some kind of impending emergency, then it would be best to field the fit in the combat roles and the unfit in the non combat. however, it should be a last resort.
again there is the equality of sexes issue which is very hard to reconcile.
but honestly, if u had a sister, a gf or a daughter who undergoes it, u would feel the anxiety of them in there.
but other than that, it takes a lot of personal courage, family support and understanding for girls to go through that. maybe thats why i haven got a bf, no guy so understanding to allow their gf to go chiong sua with so many men and not come home for days on end. -
eh thanks... i think your insight, esp at the last part.. helped a lot.... in short.. prevalent asian values that exist in our society are perpetuated in the military...Originally posted by wocc:who say gals cant go on 24km route march with fbo? i have done it and i weigh a mere 40kg and is about 1.5m tall. and the whole darn thing is heavy. about half my weight. its a matter of personal endurance. however i believe that progressive training helps as well. how many guys can just walk 24 km in fbo without the 8 and 16km march? just pick any guy who ord-ed for at least 2 years, i bet he can, but also not without difficulty.
it is belittling to say that woman cant. most woman can do it when it comes ot the crunch. just whether they wanna do it or not.
anyway i nvr thought that girls should be doing NS unless there is some kind of impending emergency, then it would be best to field the fit in the combat roles and the unfit in the non combat. however, it should be a last resort.
again there is the equality of sexes issue which is very hard to reconcile.
but honestly, if u had a sister, a gf or a daughter who undergoes it, u would feel the anxiety of them in there.
but other than that, it takes a lot of personal courage, family support and understanding for girls to go through that. maybe thats why i haven got a bf, no guy so understanding to allow their gf to go chiong sua with so many men and not come home for days on end. -
woah, what kind of killer paper you writing..............
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Originally posted by Farmer Brown
eh thanks... i think your insight, esp at the last part.. helped a lot.... in short.. prevalent asian values that exist in our society are perpetuated in the military...
Don't believe these values are particularly Asian, nor that American or European men like their wives and gf to go "chiong sua" either.
In fact, I've seen a documentary about a tribe in Yunnan where women are the heads of households and men are the wimps. Don't know what they do in times of war. -
Originally posted by dumbdumb!:I tot women can join if they want to wat... It's just not compulsary.
its a dumb qn la. why not ask why guys cannot give birth
I think the guys like to twist the equality issue and make it a NS issue.
if they don't want to do NS, just declare they are gays lah.
Scarly girls join NS and do better job at protecting S'pore... the guys can all move to the middle of the sea and marry foreign girls liao cause only foreign girls don't do NS.
As for the isreal where the women were no longer in front line cause the men can't take it... I suppose the men over there might be brought up with a different set of values. I don't know but in my opinion, asian men are not inculcated such values and often see women in a submissive, servitude position and its nothing to sacrifice their lives. I remember a long time ago, in Korea, there was this poor family who already had 4 girls age 3 to about 9. The parents wanted a boy so much that they had one as the 5th kid. the girls know the family is poor and would never be able to support everyone. So all 4 girls, 3-9 yrs old, you know what they did. They commited sucicide. In china, baby girls are murdered continuously. Same over in India, and many asian places. So in asia context, girl's lives are considered worthless. So don't count on the men crying if they see the females get their heads chopped off or raped. I think its no big a deal to the asian men. -
if women were eventually conscripted, who will be running singapore economy? the dwindling birth rates had already meant a smaller workforce and a growing aging population. to think we were actually blaming the skilled foreigner for snatching our job last year. haiz.
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My experience in NS has led me to believe that there are indeed better ways for our citizens to serve the nation. I certainly don't think there is a serious need to conscript women just because of "equality" issues, when they can be so much better utilized in keeping the country running in other areas. After all, wasting my time doing dumb things that risk my life knowing that I could do my job so much better if I wasn't hampered by all the assnine red tape of the SAF is better left to the part of the population that will not be missed much if we are gone.
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Girls do NS for wad sia???????? Those who agree, you want your gf to be BIG SIZE AND MUSCULAR??
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I was in the Army from 1992 to 1998, 6 years contract as a Woman Combat Instructor (the 8th Batch).
I remember back in 1995, there were already such discussions on women enlisting to NS. Discussions organised by all kinds of authority, Chief of Army, CMPB, Chief Infantry blah blah. They invited Women Specialists from previous batches who were holding combat appointments. What they wanted to find out was, what we thought of enlisting girls into NS. In fact, all of us there (yes! all!)were for the idea of enlisting girls, not really cos we had the noble idea of seeing girls fighting side by side with guys (after going through all the training shit, we knew this is impossible!), but cos with girls being enlisted, our jobs will have more 'value'. Having seeing such positive response from all of us, we really thought they would go ahead to implement NS girls scheme.
But later on after a few months, those bars and crabs got back to us again, and said most probably they won't push on with the idea, as their discussions with the men in the army showed that guys weren't willing to have girls in the forces. Simply because, there would be chances of a section of men being led by a woman Section Leader, and no matter how professional she is, they won't be able to accept her leadership.