Looks like a member of the top Naval brass is pushing for allowing women for submarine duty again.

The nation’s top military officer has called for lifting the ban on women serving aboard submarines, in a significant step toward reducing the barriers to women in combat.

Navy Seeks to Allow Women to Serve on Submarines – washingtonpost.com

Now anyone who knows me personally knows damn well that I’m hardly the type of person to class women as inferior in any way, shape or from however, as an ex-Cold War submariner I have to say that this is a bad idea all around. And if women were allowed in the submarine force, it should be limited to female officers only. Unless things have drastically changed since my time in the service, allowing women to serve on submarines as officers only at least would allow them some semblance of privacy and separation by rank from the enlisted crew members.

Anyway…

The first reason is privacy. The average age of enlisted on any given boat is around 20 with new “non-quals” (newly reported crew members who are not “qualified in submarines”) running as young as 19. These individuals are can be isolated for up to months at a time from the outside world. Now consider what might happen with a submarine crew of male and female 20-some year olds on a long term operation. As one who used to “be there” all I can say is that it would most likely result in some rather nightmarish conditions.

Officers and enlisted alike literally rub elbows but it’s especially true with the enlisted members. American subs are designed first with it’s equipment in mind and crew comfort coming second. There is no “privacy” on a submarine in the true sense of the word, the only privacy any crew member is allotted is by other crew members being good enough to leave you “alone” from time to time. Even then your still “rubbing elbows” with them.

Secondly, serving on a submarine is f***ing hard and unbelievably stressful. So much so in fact that it can only be qualified as “you had to be there”. If you weren’t there you could never understand. It’s as simple as that.

It takes an entire year just to get through the basic submarine qualifications and until you’re “qualified” you’re worse than useless (and dangerous) and you’re treated that way. The treatment isn’t done out of sheer meanness though. Being mean doesn’t enter into it at all. It’s just part and parcel of what it means to serve on a submarine. They, meaning the qualified members of the crew, have to know where your breaking point is, it’s absolutely vital to find this out and female crew members would be no exception to the rule. Every new crew member goes through this—no exception. There would be no room for anyone citing “abuse” or sexism on a active submarine. You either deal with it or be booted off. That’s one of the reasons that the serving on a submarine is strictly voluntary in nature.

And third. It’s going to cost too much.

Uh, what?

I mean it. Converting a submarine to accommodate women’s special needs was approximated at close to a billion dollars per already existing submarine and that was during my time.

I’m not pulling this out of the air mind you. There was a in depth study already done on the possibility of women serving on a submarine that was included in a larger study done by the Navy to ascertain if the best possible use of submarine crew combinations were  being utilized. They even sent out a nuclear sub with an all female crew that had been specially trained for this study.

They didn’t last long.

Suffice it to say that locking up 90 or so women in a 290’ by 36’ equivalent of an underwater sewer tube became a recipe for disaster despite their training. They just simply could not get along. The other anomaly which no one expected was that the boat came back with the sanitary system that deals exclusively with the “heads” (bathrooms) completely bound up (not a good thing in regards to a submarine). The system simply wasn’t designed to deal with non-degradable items the size of a sanitary napkin. The entire system would have to be redesigned to accommodate these type of items. Perhaps they’ve found a cost effective way around this problem by now.

As a final note, a submarine environment by it’s very nature tends to be rather unhealthy. Cuts and scrapes don’t heal, colds and flu’s tend to last until the next port of call, occasional long periods of high CO2, toxic gas (never, ever deep fry scallops in anything but fresh oil) and other such atmospheric wonders that can occur despite the best in environmental controls can severely degrade the health of any submariner during their tour of sea duty unless things have drastically changed since my time—which I doubt.

I could go on but I won’t. There’s just too much—even to sum up.

So in risk of being labeled a male chauvinist, which I’m not, mixing genders on a nuclear powered submarine is not, in my experienced opinion, in the best interests of the US Navy.

Any dissenting opinions welcome.

Edit 01/02/09: Okay, I know, where’s the citations, references, etc to the above statements? I  finally had the time to sit down and do some serious searching and I’m posting the links to two PDF documents I’ve uploaded. One is a 2001 study of the medical implications of women serving on submarines and the other is a smaller report covering the late 90′s to early 2000′s of women serving on Victoria class submarines (diesel/electric) which are even smaller than our current fast attack subs at least in size and accommodations. Apparently they have a few female enlisted serving aboard subs already. These are obviously more recent documents than the one I mentioned and tends to contradict my own opinions in some ways and validates them in another but I’ve always believed in keeping an open mind about things. I haven’t had the time to everything these reports have to say of course but what I did see makes for some interesting reading.

US report–”Medical implications of women serving on submarines”

Canadian report of women serving on Victoria class submarines