Have gun, will travel to a war zone to do the job y'all hired me to do in the first place

One of the reasons I love watching "Mad Men" is because it concerns the communications/marketing field several decades before I entered that field myself. It's amusing to me that at one point (not that long ago, either) women weren't considered capable of handling this work, only to go to any conference on PR/marketing/design, etc., and see that three-quarters of the professionals there are women.

That what this makes me think of. An advisory group has recommended that women in the armed forces be allowed to serve in combat roles (currently they're only allowed in "support" functions). Duh. Should've happened years ago. Why on earth would we not let people who are willing to serve on the front lines do so?

Oh, it's our good friend "unit cohesion"! "Unit cohesion" is what people say when they're too chicken to come right out and say what they mean. "Unit cohesion" was the reason that African American soldiers were once segregated, and one of the stated reasons for keeping DADT around. It's this deeply offensive idea that professional soldiers can't do their jobs unless they're serving with people who are exactly like themselves.

To me, that's terribly insulting to the people who have volunteered to protect our country. In any other job on the planet, you will have to work alongside people of the other gender, gay people, people with different religions than yours and people with different political opinions than yours. Are the "unit cohesion" people seriously suggesting that soldiers, sailors, coasties, airmen and marines are less capable of this than somebody who works at McDonald's? Damn, that's condescending.

No shit there are women who couldn't handle combat (me, for one). There are millions of men in this country who can't do it either, which is why they do not voluntarily accept a job where shooting is one of the required duties. But it's ridiculous to me that, when our country is fighting two wars, you're going to tell 14 percent of our fighting force that they can't help fight.