Sniper Team

A marksman (left) and spotter (right).

They’re heading for a 2-night patrol on Loggerhead Key (just off Conch). The navy scatters small numbers of troops across its thousands of cays and islets, mostly to watch for smuggling and piracy. The job is to sit and watch. Any fish you can catch is just a bonus.

Women make up perhaps 10 per cent of the territorial services. With the high command still anxious about their role in frontline combat, it is common to train them as snipers and relegate them to general patrol. General peacetime only exacerbates this worry, since peacetime conflicts often involve security environments and asymmetric fighting that women soldiers may be at greater risk in. As such, they are trained for a peer conflict (a total war) that has yet to come.

This results in an odd situation in which female soldiers make up nearly half of sailors and the majority of combat pilots, but only a fraction of the territorial services.

In some sense, training women for a total war is a way for high command to dodge the question. Their equality is theoretical in the same sense that a peer conflict is theoretical. Until then, or until a shift in attitude in the territorial services changes things, women will mostly occupy defence postings in Vekllei.