Friday, February 01, 2013

A quality problem I'm glad I don't have to solve

Perhaps this explains why engineers don't generally make it into positions of high political authority, but I've been thinking about the question of whether Obama's plan to integrate the infanry and cavalry by sex has any chance.

Why so?  Well, a quick look at statistics indicate that women are at least a standard deviation smaller than men, and at the same size, are at least a standard deviation weaker.  It parallels what we see in various sports; female Olympic athletes (300 individuals of about 30 million women, about 4 sigma) are competitive in non-contact sports with good high school boys.

So we would assume that maybe 1% of women in the military would make it through infantry school when a woman needs to be three  or more standard deviations above average in "infantry suitability" where a man needs to be only one standard deviation above the average for his age. 

So what we have is a situation where at least one of the following will happen: (a) reduced standards for women and perhaps men ("let's fill some body bags"), (b) amazing work in determining who the 1% of women are who might make it, (c) devotion of large numbers of infantry school slots to women who have no real chance of completion, and (d) lifelong injuries to women pushed into training they are not capable of completing.

If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on (a) and (c), and would expect (d) hospitals and body bags to be filled as soldiers discovered in combat that they were not physically capable for that task.

I'd love to be wrong here, but this is where the data points.  Those who claim to be "for" women are doing their best to get as many women as possible maimed or killed.

4 comments:

Ray D. said...

Yup, us engineers have no political skills, and that is why they come to us to solve the messes that would not have been created if they listened to us in the first place.

Bike Bubba said...

....and then ignore us again when we tell them, again, why it wouldn't work in the first place.

Sigh. Reality just isn't popular.

Mark said...

And, since some of the women may change their minds while "in country" and choose to become "accidentally pregnant", we'll have a set of genetically/militarily above-average children being raised by single mothers... Hmmm... That hasn't worked very well in the inner cities, has it? How will it work out for the suburbs?

Bike Bubba said...

Not to mention what happens to a platoon when critical soldiers need to leave "for medical reasons."