The following excerpt is taken from the link
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/BG836.cfm
and relates the experience of the IAF. I believe we have some women
in a few combat vocations. Is there anybody who can relate their
experience or knowledge on effectiveness of our women warriors
during training or exercises?
"The only reliable record of women in combat is provided by Israel,
a nation whose policy is widely misunderstood. The popular
conception is that Israeli women fight alongside men as equals. The
truth is that although Israel drafts both women and men for
military service, Israel has excluded women from combat units since
1950.
To be sure, female soldiers fought alongside male colleagues in
Israel's War of Liberation, which ended in 1948. Because of the
problems that this created, Israeli women never again were sent
into battle. Explains military historian Edward N. Luttwak of the
Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International
Studies, who has written a book about the Israeli military: "Men
moved to protect the women members of the unit instead of carrying
out the mission of the unit." (Telephone interview, June 10, 1991.)
Luttwak adds that women are integrated into the Israeli military at
many levels, and conduct most of the training. Women also serve in
the Mossad, Israel's elite counter-terrorist force. But women are
excluded, Luttwak notes, from infantry and other combat positions
based on "the pragmatic experience of 40 years." (Ibid.)
The Israelis also bar women from combat for cultural reasons. After
the War of Liberation, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said that
placing women in combat violated the Jewish concept of womanhood
and women's status as mothers. (Interview with senior Israeli
military official, June 12, 1991, Washington, D.C.) At a Washington
briefing this month, a senior Israeli military official said that
even tentative experiments with women serving aboard
missile-defense boats had failed miserably. Furthermore, he said,
because of its cultural heritage, Israel "is not ready to pay the
price of a woman being held hostage, a woman returning crippled."
(Ibid.)
In hearings before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House
Committee on Armed Services in November 1979, Brigadier General
Andrew J. Gatsis, USA (retired), testified that Israeli Defense
Minister Moshe Dayan told him that during Israel's War of
Liberation, "we had a constant fear of what the Arabs would do to
our women if they captured them." The men, Dayan told Gatsis,
"could not stand the psychological stress" of watching women being
killed and captured. Gatsis also said that Dayan "felt that [having
women in combat units] knocked down their combat effectiveness."
("Women in the Military," hearings before the Military Personnel
Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, House of
Representatives, November 13-16, 1979 and February 11, 1980, pp.
281-282.)"
