Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has notified Congress of plans to allow women to serve aboard submarines, a Defense Department official said Tuesday.Had to happen someday. My major concern is not how it will work on the boat, but how the media attention will cause more work for already overtasked Submariners. There will probably be the same proportion of whiny female Submariners as there are male; the big difference will be that the whiny females will get a lot of press, resulting in more and more useless training and potentially causing a mission-degrading CYA mentality among the leadership. I would hope the Submarine Force bigwigs will be able to keep it in perspective when the first inevitable problems happen, but I doubt they will.
Letters of intent were sent Monday to Congress, which has requested briefings on the matter, said the official, who asked not to be identified. There will be no vote on the matter in Congress...
...A phased approach is being considered under which officers -- who already have separate living quarters -- would be the first to go co-ed, followed by crews, with the women bunking together, the official said. Crew space would have to be modified prior to that happening, the official added.
The submarines expected to carry women initially would be the larger ones -- nuclear-power, missile-carrying submarines known as SSBN and SSGN, the official said.
Update 1712 23 Feb: Here's the official DoD announcement.
Update 1017 26 Feb: Here's a paper from a retired ETCS(SS/SW) opposing the lifting of the ban. And here's a report from Newsy.com on the issue.
Update 1542 01 Mar: Closing comments. It looks like we've found the limit of the Blogger comment function; the stated number of comments keeps going up, but none are showing up since the 26th. For those concerned that I've been deleting your comments, I haven't been; it just looks like we've exceeded the allowable content.
