AHC: Majority Female Military

While certain roles could very easily be female majority, there is a long standing biological reason why the female majority military has not ever occurred except in rare instances. It really does not have to do with strength/muscle mass per se. Women get pregnant, women lactate - so in order to reproduce women would need to be out of active use for at least part of a pregnancy, and even with wet nurses before formula and refrigeration if you don't breast feed babies starve. Humans usually have one child at a time and more than one pregnancy every 12 months is not the norm - breast feeding does reduce fertility but is not perfect birth control, but it does reduce fertility. You can lose a high percentage of the males, but if you have enough fertile females your society survives - NOT the other way around. Don't forget that in the "good old days" infant and maternal mortality was an issue.

If pregnancy is shorter than 9 months, if multiple births are the norm, and other biological changes happen then the need to "preserve" females for continuation of the tribe/society is reduced. If some time in the future we have "artificial wombs" so embryos are created in the test tube (if you will) and transferred to such a device until birth, combined with the preservation of sperm and eggs (which we already have) then the biological reasons go away and society can rewire itself.
This is it. As a country sending your women to fight is a very bad longterm-strategy. Imagine WW1 fougth with mostly women in the armies. In OTL it virtually wiped out a male generation in France. If that would happen to a female generation, that is a major screw up for the country. Birthrates would plummet.

On the plusside: those kind of losses would bring the leaders much sooner to negotiations for peace, because they would knew it would take decades to recover.
 

Bison

Banned
Last I heard, multiple military forces around the world were doing it, whether based on land or at sea. I haven't any issues with the idea.

Creating separafe women's divisions or batallions seems better, the 1st Women's Division of Death in Revolutionary Russia comes to mind. Putting young, sexually deprived men in the proximity of young sexually deprived women certainly demands consideration when it comes to rape (be it by officers or soldiers), professional relationships, and unit morale/cohesiveness. There is always a sexual undertone inherent to interaction between men and women - I'm not saying men and women cant work together, I'm saying enacting changes that have the potential to harm national security and induce fatality warrant serious consideration free of feminist inspired presuppositions.
 

Bison

Banned
This is it. As a country sending your women to fight is a very bad longterm-strategy. Imagine WW1 fougth with mostly women in the armies. In OTL it virtually wiped out a male generation in France. If that would happen to a female generation, that is a major screw up for the country. Birthrates would plummet.

On the plusside: those kind of losses would bring the leaders much sooner to negotiations for peace, because they would knew it would take decades to recover.

Very important point, this is the reason.
 
Creating separafe women's divisions or batallions seems better, the 1st Women's Division of Death in Revolutionary Russia comes to mind. Putting young, sexually deprived men in the proximity of young sexually deprived women certainly demands consideration when it comes to rape (be it by officers or soldiers), professional relationships, and unit morale/cohesiveness. There is always a sexual undertone inherent to interaction between men and women - I'm not saying men and women cant work together, I'm saying enacting changes that have the potential to harm national security and induce fatality warrant serious consideration free of feminist inspired presuppositions.

This is getting into a separate discussion from the point of the thread - not saying because of you, I mentioned the subject - so might table discussion, but I would say in response to that, a couple of things. As to unit morale/cohesiveness, as a veteran friend of mine said to me every change to a military forces results in change, shake-ups and initial problems. But if, to pardon the pun, everyone concerned soldiers through it it eventually becomes 'the way things are done'. See letting black people into white units, etc. With professional relationships, well most Western militaries now trust LGBT soldiers to be professionals when on-duty with the same gender, same should hold true for the opposite gender. And the other point...unfortunately that's probably always going to be a danger* even if a military is staffed exclusively with straight men. Only thing that can be done is give it as little opportunity to happen as possible, come down like the Hammer of God on anyone who offends no matter their rank, make sure mechanisms are in place for reporting etc.

But yeah, that's off-topic now.

*EDIT: Just to clarify. Will always be a danger from a decided minority. I am aware that the vast majority of people who serve in any armed force don't do stuff like this ever.
 
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Ancient warfare, it was not at all unknown that an army would be based around the ability of its cavalry to rain down arrows on the opponents - the Parthans were good at this

There would be no physiological reason that this major arm of their military could not be female
 
Ancient warfare, it was not at all unknown that an army would be based around the ability of its cavalry to rain down arrows on the opponents - the Parthans were good at this

There would be no physiological reason that this major arm of their military could not be female

How much arm strength is needed to pull those strings? They hold a lot of tension to be able to provide enough force for the arrows to go fast and far. My question is just that, I don't know if that's an issue. But beyond that, women might even be a better choice for projectile weapons. Women seem to have better aim than men when it comes to shooting a gun. Don't know if that translates into archery, but if it does it makes an excellent case for female archers horseback or on foot in ancient times.
 
The powerful bows require a good deal of upper body strength. To handle an English longbow, for example, men starting practicing with bows as youths and had tremendous upper body strength. The new compound bows provide more power with less strength required, but the recurve bows of the Parthians also required a good bit of strength.
 
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