The first group of female midshipmen have been accepted into the submarine training pipeline.
Two things are given: First off, these 13 young women will be under a microscope. A guy can get bilged out of the training pipeline and nobody will ever say "oh, he flunked out because guys can't hack it." That'll be different for these women.
Second, the selectees, no doubt, are as prepared for the challenge facing them as they can be. I know nothing about them, but I would bet heavily that these women are the best of the best in the current graduating class. 8 were already slated for the nuclear-training pipeline, which means that they are brainy gearheads.
The question is whether or not the submarine community will get it right. I would hope that the senior officers in the 1120 community have studied how the surface and aviation communities handled their first group of women in the 1970s.
The consensus was back then that the airdales pretty much fucked it up. The blackshoes did it pretty slowly, taking over ten years to go from having women on AD/ASs to the UNREP force and then to the NRF tin cans before women were allowed on active-duty warships.
The bubbleheads don't have the luxury of having different grades of ships to play with, like the skimmers did. They have got to get it right from day one.
I think they are up to the task.
(Yes, I know, I stepped outside of my normal Cold War beat for this one post. Sue me.)
Uncle Robert, Revisited
20 hours ago
1 comment:
Dear Miss Fit:
I concur with your assessment - the bubbleheads will get this done. Looking at some of the dolphin-centric blogs I was surprised (and pleased) at the low level of "end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it" rhetoric. Basically, the attitude seems to be, "Not what we'd have wanted, but we've sucked it up and accomplished the mission before, and we'll do it this time."
While they don't have a lot of different platforms to experiment with, that do have the SSGN's/SSBN's to start out on. That's much easier to deal with the joinerwork on than the SSN's. And I'd be willing to bet that this subject was discussed when the arrangements on the Virginia's were laid out.
Regards,
Frank
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