The Military and Veterans' Room
Norway's "Hunter Troop"
The World's First All-Female Special Forces
You need to read the entire thing. I am not sure they need a separate unit to gain the capability they say they need.
Norway, along with Israel (this experiment didn't last long), opened combat positions to women in 1985, but only 10 percent of its soldiers are female. Before 1985, women served only in support functions such as medics and engineers. For special operations, the number of female members is still zero: the country’s Special Forces is open to women, but few had applied and none had passed the admissions test. The lack of women has limited the Special Forces’ effectiveness in international operations. “In Afghanistan, one of our big challenges was that we would enter houses and not be able to speak to the women,” explained Captain Ole Vidar Krogsaeter, an officer with Norway’s Special Forces Operations. “In urban warfare, you have to be able to interact with women as well. Adding female soldiers was an operational need.”
Technological advances in weaponry are partly to blame for the low participation rate among women. “Soldiers carry more weight now than during the Vietnam War, primarily because their protective gear is heavier,” Colonel Linda Sheimo, the chief of the U.S. Army Command Policy Division and the former chair of the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives, told me. In Afghanistan, for example, U.S. infantry soldiers typically carry 70 to 100 pounds of gear and equipment, much of which is lifesaving body armor. A decade ago, the U.S. Marine Corps, after noticing the large number of pelvic fractures suffered by women in its officer candidate school, calculated that the average female officer cadetwas being asked to carry 58 percent of her body weight, compared with 40 percent for the average male cadet. And a study released by the Marine Corps last year reported that when negotiating over walls, “male Marines threw their packs to the top of the wall, whereas female Marines required regular assistance in getting their packs to the top.”
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Only 13 trainees made it to the end of Jegertroppen’s yearlong course, with most of them having failed or left voluntarily. But the high dropout rate is not unusual. According to the armed forces, the male Special Forces units have a similar attrition rate.
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