Navy Moves To Put Women On Submarines

[Purveyor]

Source: Associated Press

(10-13) 15:18 PDT ST. MARYS, Ga. (AP) --

Submariners sleep nine to a bunk room. There are four showers and seven toilets for the roughly 140 enlisted men. The passageways on board the vessel are so narrow that crew members can barely squeeze by each other without touching.

And that's on the roomiest submarines.

The Navy is considering allowing women to serve aboard submarines for the first time, 16 years after bringing female sailors onto surface combat ships.

Some sailors and wives warn that putting men and women together in extremely close quarters underwater for weeks at a time is just asking for sexual harassment cases and wrecked marriages. But supporters of the idea say it is a matter of fairness and equal opportunity, and what worked on ships can work in subs.

"There's just a whole lot less privacy on board a submarine," said retired Navy Capt. Mike McKinnon, commanding officer of the Kings Bay sub base near St. Marys from 2004-07 and a former skipper of the submarine USS Kentucky. "But I think grown adults and professionally minded people can deal with those issues."



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/10/13/national/a123101D52.DTL#ixzz0TrU0VAx5

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. Sexist jokes to follow in 3...2...1...

...go.

[truthisfreedom]

3. Well, there's the old standby...

What's long and hard and full of seamen?

[Bigmack]

8. It sure would put a whole new slant...

on the old joke about a sub leaving port with 100 men and coming back into port with 50 couples.

[Submariner]

11. Oh Goody, so now we can play with the real thing

[TheCoxwain]

23. What is difference between a ship and a female sailor?

One cuts through the water and the other .......

[Ian David]

2. Would be better if they'd put the women IN the submarines. n/t

[Robb]

9. Dammit

...You're ripping off my lines before I say them a LOT lately. :D

[Ian David]

12. Only because I resisted the obvious joke about a submarine being long and hard & filled with seamen.

[PDJane]

4. Yeah, and putting women in Iraq and Afghanistan

Worked so well. Right.

Talk about stupid.

[mike_c]

5. what about segregated crews...?

I don't think that's ideal either, frankly, but I'd rather provide women who want to kill people from underwater as much opportunity as men with similar sociopathologies, but without creating sexually charged situations that-- professionalism or no-- will undoubtedly cause problems. Short of shutting down libido, the best way seems to be all male and all female crews.

[nolabear]

6. In other news, strange machine may replace horse and buggy!

Y'know, just when you start forgetting how royally f'ed up the supposedly enlightened world can be for us women, you get a little reminder that it's still really, really stupid out there.

Heck, if they were smart they'd have had subs mostly staffed by women long ago. We're smaller, we work with one another better, we're more bouyant and in crowds we tend to smell better. But we don't tend to like to shoot stuff so much so there's that.

[hunter]

25. You've got a point there.

And "don't tend to like to shoot stuff" is a very good thing when you've got the launch codes for the Mutually Assured Destruction.

We should probably make it a rule that women outnumber the men on submarines at all levels of command.

Any guys who couldn't handle that would be out of there.

[joshcryer]

7. The stuff that happens on our subs would blow your mind. I fear for these women.

Here's hoping that they can get it done right. It'll be an interesting experiment to say the least.

[Captain Hilts]

16. Huh? I don't. nt

[WriteDown]

18. My college roommate was a submariner and says...

they already tried this years ago. Says the hijinx that ensued caused them to end the test program.

[MellowDem]

10. All I can think of is "Down Periscope" nt

[Texano78704]

13. How is this breaking news...

if it was announced about three weeks ago?

http://www.military.com/news/article/navy-set-to-crew-subs-with-female-sailors.html?col=1186032325324&ESRC=navy.nl

[showpan]

14. I don't see many problems

with this on larger subs such as the Tridents which have ample room. It would not be much different than being below deck for extended periods of time on smaller surface ships. Our fast attacks are tight, that will be interesting.

[WriteDown]

15. Pregnant sumariners to follow. nt

[Xithras]

26. It's a fairly regular thing on Navy ships already.

Confining men and women to a small, enclosed space for weeks or months at a time has certain inevitable results. As one of my former Navy buddies once told me, he'd never went on a cruise where at least one of the women didn't end up pregnant. In fact, he said that many of the women often picked a "mate" for protection. They slept with one guy regularly, knowing that the other guys would then consider her "taken" and leave her alone. Even married women with kids at home did this.

[WriteDown]

27. Yep...

I have two good buddies. Both on subs. They both have similar stories. The worst are the ones where there is a big question mark as to who the father is.

[Xithras]

28. Part of the problem is the way the ships are built.

Unless you're an officer with a cabin, there is no privacy on a smaller Navy ship. You're changing in front of each other, sharing the same heads, and sleeping in the same bunkrooms. The carriers and some of the newer, larger ships allow some segregation by gender, but most Navy ships simply don't have the space for that kind of thing.

When you have men and women closed up in a small space together for months, regularly stripping (at least partially) nude and changing in front of each other, and sleeping only feet away from each other, the results are predictable. Human nature is what it is.

The real problem is the frequent unavailability of birth control and condoms on the ships.

[Captain Hilts]

17. The sub force officer corps has lost a talent pool to aviation through eye surgery. There are not

enough smart guys who are willing and smart enough to be submarine officers.

The kids in their first year at the Academy line up at Bethesda Naval to get eye surgery so they can go aviation. A LOT of those kids used to go into subs. They don't any more.

It's a supply/demand thing. The USN is short 400+ nook-trained officers and 900+ nook-trained enlisted. They need to widen the talent pool. It's that simple.

[WriteDown]

19. My father was denied his dream of being a fighter pilot...

due to the eye requirements a LONG time ago.

[Captain Hilts]

21. It's the 'relative speed' test many flunk. But you can't start out near-sighted. nt

[Regret My New Name]

29. Don't you also have to be under 25 to get in the nuke program?

Maybe they should raise that a bit higher.

[PinkOwl]

20. A big step for women

The glass ceiling keeps cracking.

[Regret My New Name]

30. Oh noes!!! Cracks in a sub????

[xc8mip]

22. Crazies take-over ?

"supporters of the idea say it is a matter of fairness and equal opportunity"

Yet it's against common sense .Studies show it's wrong and diminish battle readiness .Crew will fight with each other .I'd wish these crazies took some easier ideas to test , like cows on board for fresh milk or monkeys at hydrophones

[Regret My New Name]

31. You sure have a low opinion of the professionalism of navy personnel ...

[AlphaCentauri]

24. Those sailor will have trouble falling asleep n/t

[formercia]

32. Mile down club.

Quick, before we implode!