"the stream" is next, and check us out 24 hours aday by going to aljazeera.com. hi i'm lisa fletcher and you are in the "the stream." after 55% of female recruits in marine boot camps failed the pull-up test, are women ready for the physical demands of combat? ♪ our digital producer julio is here tonight. >> i like that. >> thank you. is filling in tonight. and man, twitter is exploding tonight. >> it is one of our more extreme

active communities that we have had in a long time. >> and that says a lot, because we have an active community. >> we have a active community. and we have our first ajamb stream promo from angel . . . >> so community keep tweeting at us at hashtag ajamstream. >> women make up 14% of the active duty military, but until recently they weren't allowed to

work in ground combat jobs, but a decision by leon panetta lifted that ban, and put a deadline of january 1st, 2016, to open all of the jobs or prove why women aren't fit. >> i think it's a great thing. i think it's a step forward to more equal opportunity for women. >> i think some females should be allowed in combat. i don't feel it is for every female. >> they should be able to do everything exactly to what the guys have to do, and if -- i'm just concerned that it would cause problems with the mission. >> for the women that have served in combat zones, i have not seen a huge number of women that wanteded this. >> with 55% of female marine recruits failing the pull-up test, the corps decided to delay this requirement for women, raising questions about combat readiness. in the debate about gender

equality in the military. how do gender realities come into play. joining sis a retired gunnery sergeant in the marine corps, a retired colonel in the air force, and president of grace after fire, and a former marine corps officer who served in iraq and afghanistan. and he has a new novel coming out about the complexities of surviving in war. thanks to all of you for being here. jesse since the start of the wars in iraq and afghanistan about 290,000 women have served. explain what jobs women are doing now, what they can't do, and what could change in 2016? >> being in combat is not the same as performing a combat mission. i am in a field that would

support combat operations in a wide variety of ways. a lot of the death toll is very high among motor death transport. so many women were experiencing death and injury in those roles. however, we are not in an offensive tactic position. we were in a defensive tactic position. big difference. defense if the enemy comes at you do i know how to fire a weapon and know basic hand to hand combat skills? yes, i do. but i was not trained in killing that would destroy and exploit the enemy as readily and quickly as possible. >> ken talk about that, these differences between an offensive and defensive position. >> well, i think lisa, if you are going to talk about that, you have to talk about the realities of today's battle space. in today's battle space, once

just she said once you are in the area of operations you are in combat. and the enemy doesn't care if you are offensive or defensive. anyone who enters that area and comes under fire should be trained to the best that they could be train to protect everyone in their squad or anywhere else. and that's one of the things that i think that training everyone in the military for combat ops will do it. and again, offensive and defensive, i get her point, but all members who enter today's battle state should be trained up to the max and for anything that they could encounter when they are in basically harm's way. >> well, which marines do. >> elliot when you are in combat on the ground is there a difference between being in an offensive position, and being able to set your rifle and take your shot at will, versus

somebody jumping you with a knife and now you are in a knife fight? you have been side by side with women, served in both cars, talk about whether or not you feel women are capable of doing both physically? >> i think -- you know, combat is -- it is an incredibly physical thing. you know, in my combat experience i served in situations where men were going down as heat casualties in the middle of combat, and these were physically fit guys, but i think there is a larger issue at play, which is if this is going to happen and the secretary of defense has put 2016 as a date on the wall, it is how is this going to be implemented? and i say it's a very dangerous thing to be playing around with standards, establishing one set of standards for men, and one set for women if we are integrating and that's for two reasons. the first is i think you would be doing the women coming into

what had previously been front line all male combat units, you would be putting them at a huge disadvantage where they couldn't be accepted because they were held to a different standard. so that's a real challenge. so we have got to look at not only should this be happening? but also what is the best way to implement it. and i think too little of the conversation is on the implementation. >> we actually asked our community about lowering standards and whether that -- standards for women and standards from men. mikey says . . . so -- >> yes. jesse what do you think about lowering standards or that women have one and men have another. >> people get very confused the physical fitness test is not a equality test. how are we going to grade males and females when we are looking

at stamm and age. females have 20% upper body strength, 20% less lung capacity. so if i'm going to grade a female to see if she is at the peak of her physical fitness, why would i do that? a combat fitness test is different. that should be the same. because this is not a combat fitness test. it is a physical fitness test. why is the 50 year old general not taking the same test as a 19 year old young man? because you are grading his level of fitness that's appropriate for his or her age. we have to be fair in the yayeding of fitness. when you are talking about combat fitness, that is a different grade, different standard, and yes, you need them both to be the same. the training in the marine has kept their standard the same. and what the concern has stated

we all need to be combat ready, united states marines are. i know how to handle myself in any combat situation. and that's why the enemy knows not to attack our patrols. however, we are not promoting the attack. we are in a defensive posture. the odds of us being in hand to hand combat are actually very slim. much of the population does not know the difference between a physical fitness test and a combat fitness test. they have to understand, don't tell me that pullups is going to grade my fitness, because it hon nisly is not. >> so is that pull-up test making more women eligible to essentially try out to be in the marines. >> they sent women to training without meeting the minimum standard. i was a recruiting for three years, and i would not ship a male to boot camp without passing the minimum standards.

i think it was horrible on the marine corps's part for us to look at these women as if they did something wrong. we are the only branch of service that is doing pullups so nobody tell me the female marines are not tough enough, because i don't see the air force, soldiers doing it. these women were not set up for success. they were set up for failure. you don't put in a test that has not been evaluated or graded fairly to make sure the women are able to test their physical fitness, not an equality test. it's not an equality test. >> all right. coming up, is the military an equal opportunity employer? aaron alexis should its definition be different than the civilian definition? keep sending your thoughts.

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>> a jazeera america is the only news channel that brings you live news at the top of every hour >> here are the headlines at this hour breaking news... sports... business... weather... live news...every hour, on the hour only on al jazeera america ♪ i definitely would have been pretty angry if we were to be separated. because there's no reason for us to be. we're just soldiers, and everybody is the same. we're all green, male or female, regardless of what your race is, there's no reason for us not to be able to do the job if we're capable to do it. >> welcome back. we're talking about women's combat readiness. we asked the community to weigh in on the idea of whether or not the military is an equal

opportunity employer. >> they are weighing in on it, and jessica says . . . and also with have a former marine who says . . . so lisa, a lot of questions about equality, about equal opportunity, and so the debate is continuing. >> yeah, kim, you were part of the first group of women to ever have a combat job in the air force. what does equal opportunity really mean when it comes to the military and is it different from job to job and branch to branch? >> i think the military does a really good job of adapting to the social changes. number 1, no matter what your gender is, you hold a rank, you have equal pay and parity, and that is not seen in any other corporation or business in this country. so i think the military does a

really good job as far as, like i said, adapting to that. my experience of course was in the aviation field, and if of these argues that i hear in 2013, we heard back in 1994 when we brought women into the combat aircraft, and like that time in our country's history, we proved that women could fly the high-performance fighters, pull the weapon and blow up stuff, and i think we have to look back and what that person was tweeting about, is women have been contributing to the success of this military for many, many decades. and it's important that we continue to do that, because diverse teams make for better teams, and i think that's an important thing to capitalize on are these tremendous talents that women can bring to the pool. and one more point, i think the audience needs to remember that

only 1% of this nation's population will serve in uniform. 1%. so if you want the best and the brightest to put on the uniform and do the really difficult task of waging america's war, you want the best talent that america can bring to bare, and some of that talent is going to reside in our female population. >> jesse when we're talking about gender equality, versus gender reality here, physically what is the reality that very many women can ever perform physically the same as their male counterparts? >> exactly. first of all i want to clarify. the military has never been an equal opportunity employer. we have a lot of equality. of course. too tall you are not joining. two fat, you are not joining, you are not joining, flat feet, you are not joining, none of

those characteristics that would get you a job in the civilian war can you have in active duty. so we have very critical with physical standards all the way from the point you enter the recruiting office to boot camp. the second thing is there are physical limitations that women do have, and i don't understand where there is a lack of understanding of this. women are serving in combat. we have clarified that. but we're talking about infantry units where you are talking about carrying 125-pound packs, women have higher rates of discharge in the marine corps. why is that? lots of physical disability. so what i'm going to take a step back and say i'm all for women being in the infantry, but if you're going to have an 80% attrition rate you are doing an injustice to all of those women who want to serve. only 23 women have volunteered for infantry officer's course

since 2012 -- >> and how many have succeeded? >> none have. they have a high attrition rate among men too, but a quarter of the males are not making it, only a quarter of the feel mails should not be making it. >>el lot there was the question do women have equal opportunity to survive or help fellow soldiers do the same? how confident are you that if women were in the officers training or special ops to have equal opportunities. can she pull you off of the battlefield or out from under an overturned vehicle -- >> sure. i'm a graduate of the infantry

officer's course, and succeeded. right now you have all of the services playing with the standards a little bit, and not to disparage if of the services but i think a lot of it they are dragging their feet. our policy makers determined that by 2016 we will be a fully integrated military. >> what is the good way to do it? >> i think the worst thing you can do, right? is start lowering standards and playing with standards. i think the best way to do it is keep the standards exactly the same, and just say anybody can apply, male, female, we don't care. some day one of those women are going to pass. i went through the infantry officer's course as i mentioned. and they are just guying who make it through this. they are your next door neighbor, they are in good

shape, and same thing with special operations. i think eventually you will see some women make it through this. and if our policy is if the the military is going to be fully integrated, the standards have to be the same. now if a woman makes it through the exact same course as the men made it through, then i think you could see culturally this is going to work. but at the end of the day the united states has a military that represents its values to the country. and we have gone through changes, so if we as a nation have decided through elections and other such means that we want the policy makers into office who believe there should be a fully integrated military that military should reflect the fact that men and women

everywhere should have the exact same opportunities, again, i think there's a smart way to implement and a dumb way to implement. >> elliot, there is a specific question i want to bring up . . . he basically says that gender equality is happening because will is a sharp decrease in signups by men. kim is that true? >> i'm not a recruiter, so i'm not going to speak to that, but let's just pull back for a second and look at where the military has been for the last 12 years. it has been engrossed in two wars in which if you signed up, you were going to see either iraq or afghanistan and for very long periods of time. so militaries that come out of post war environments, you usually do see a dip in the recruiting for certain services. that is sort of a natural

evolution of a post war military. >> back to elliot's point about the implementation of this, we got a comment from the public affairs department. if we can pull that up . . . jesse is there a lot more data to collect -- >> i think that should have been done before this was implemented and elliot made an excellent point. these are our policy makers that we elected. so people against this, think about who you are vote going office. we have seen no combat readiness need to do this. first of all, second of all, i love one of our wonderful ganales and he -- m&aed dog mat dtis, he said when the enemy

gets their females in combat, maybe we can consider this. i'm not going to go into a hand to hand knife fight with an taliban who happened to be female, and they typically are on methamphetamine. so what are we looking at here to prove a point for equality? this is about us winning a war. it's not about equality. it's about having the more efficient readiness team available. what are the odds of the female's attrition that got through? most of my peers when i joined did not go past four years because they suffered so much physically. i have a girlfriend of mine, 29 years old who needs two hips replaced because of the combat load that she carried in her 20s. that's how hard it has been on her physically.

>> coming up how realistic is the 2016 goal? and is that the right course in the stage for the military? clearly jesse thinks no. keep sending us your thoughts. julio will get them in two minutes. >> no doubt about it, innovation changes our lives.

♪nnovation changes our lives. welcome back, we're talking about women's combat readiness as the military gears up to open up all combat jobs by 2016. >> the community is giving input . . . >> so you can see it's all over the place as well. >> elliot we're still looking ahead to 2016, two years away. i know you have been talking a little bit during the show about the implementation needing to be the focus, but is getting women into the infantry the right goal

at this stage in the game? we're pulling out of afghanistan right now? >> i don't think the two are mutually exclusive. i think at the end of the day if the vision our elected leaders have is to have a fully integrated military, what is appropriate is study after study -- there needs to be a vision of what does a fully integrated military look like and that should be articulated. i think central to what that would need to have would be a single set of standards that -- that exist regardless whether you are man or a women. so we have been talking about these three pullups that the women should have to do. if it's going to be three pullups it should be three pull ups for all marines, man or woman. but maybe it also means that

fewer female marines would have access to the jobs that exist in the marine corps. so these are issues that aren't being discussed as widely, and they need to do some sort of analysis on women, i think what is lacking is a complete vision. >> i think if a female is going to do hand to hand combat with a doped up opponent, you are going to need to have massive training. >> is there anything that can make it a level playing field. >> a lot of advancements have been made. yes, women are in submarines and on ships, and yes, there were

murmurings about that, however, i didn't see the level of controversy that we are seeing now, because we have seen no proven need to do this. it is going to come at the cost of a lot of good women who do go into combat. i know it is like to support the infa try, and that is a hard, long, difficult job, and the women do suffer more at trophy and spinal compression from the heavily loads that they carry, and they have not looked at the attrition rates. they make this same standard, how many make it to retirement? am i the last generation? few men make it but even fewer women will. >> all right. i want to thank our guests, and until next time we will see you online at aljazeera.com/ajam stream.

sen al jazeera.his is this is al jazeera. >> a warm welcome from me to this al jazeera news hour. coming up, in the next 60 minutes egyptians vote on a new constitution, a referendum seen as the biggest test of the military backed government's hold on power. >> there has been violence, eight people have been killed in protest so far across egypt. diplomatic dis,