Cross posted from my main blog

the Korean ferry disaster.

 These things happen in the Philippines every couple of years.
But was this an "on/off" ferry, or was there a reef nearby??

 Not mentioned in the articles I read. all sorts of medical items, from the safety issues to hypothermia...the water was 54 degrees, so they wouldn't be alive long in the water.

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  StrategyPage has the good news from Afghanistan that you won't read in the paper:

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and this critique of women in combat at strategypage notes:

 

None of these proponents of women in the infantry have ever served in the infantry, but they understand that if they proceed without proof that women can handle the job, that decision could come back to hurt them (not to mention getting a lot of American soldiers and marines killed first). So far the tests, overseen by monitors reporting back to civilian officials in Congress and the White House, have failed to find the needed proof. The main problem the military has is their inability to make these politicians understand how combat operations actually work and what role sheer muscle plays in success, or simply survival... Yet women have often been exposed to a lot of indirect combat. As far back as World War II, 25 percent of all troops in the army found themselves under fire at one time or another, although only about 15 percent of soldiers had a "direct combat" job. In Iraq women made up about 14 percent of the military personnel but only two percent of the casualties (dead and wounded). Most women do not want to be in combat but those who do get the job have proven that they can handle it. Moreover many proponents of female infantry fail to appreciate the fact that all these women in combat incidents was not the same as women in the infantry or special operations.

 it's the physiology, stupid...or maybe the female hormones.

So next step: give them androgens and let them pump iron?

but the dirty little secret of women not being infantry but being on the front lines is one rarely mentioned in history.

The "campfollowers" did the cooking, washing, and nursing (and other comfort measures, hence the name being used to imply that was their main job).

Now the USArmy has had it's own cooks/washing etc. but now adays often subcontracts it out to cheaper folks. Hence the kerfuffle in Gitmo, when the Filipino cooks at the "mess" (kitchen/dining room) decorated it for christmas, and had to remove the decorations for not being PC in the "new" army.