Brendan Nelson, in his extended “I was right about everything” valedictory speech, included the much-debated Super Hornet purchase in the collection of things he was right about. Frankly, I remain unconvinced. If it was such a good piece of planning, why didn’t we make sure that the legacy Hornet and the Super Hornets fire the same missiles? That said, the cruise missile we are intending to fit to the legacy Hornets is suffering severe reliability problems, and some reports claiming that the missile might be cancelled (though it’s hard to know how credible those are).

But the big story doing the rounds at the moment is Greg Combet’s announcement of a plan to conduct a new study of performance requirements for various roles in the armed forces, with a view to removing outright gender bans and placing restrictions based on the physical demands of the role:

Mr Combet, a former ACTU national secretary, told parliament yesterday the Defence Science and Technology Organisation would develop a new set of physical employment standards for the army that would accurately measure a person’s ability to perform the broad variety of jobs in the modern defence force. “A priority of the government is to improve the recruitment and retention of women in the ADF,” he said. “My own view is that all categories should be open to women. The only exceptions should be where the physical demands cannot be met according to criteria that are determined on the basis of scientific analysis, rather than assumptions about gender.”

If you have the stomach for it, you can read this excreable piece opposing any possibility of women in “combat roles” by Greg Sheridan. Apart from anything else, I can’t recall the last time I read a column containing more examples of argument by assertion. Guy Rundle responds, arguing that women will be more reluctant to sign up for wars of choice.

Personally, I think it’s got less to do with the sensibilities of the soldiers themselves, and more the sensibilities of those at home, a point Rundle makes in the context of his critique of the Afghanistan war in his final paragraph. The real issue is that female soldiers, particularly mothers, coming home in body bags is likely to harm public support for war more than male soldiers coming home in body bags, something that the likes of Sheridan, who seemingly has never met a war he didn’t like, simply couldn’t cope with.

Whether this is true in an empirical sense or not, I find the logic behind it pretty troubling. If we’re not collectively prepared to send women off to die in a war of choice, we shouldn’t be prepared to send men off to do so.

UPDATE: Deborah has some fun with Sheridan’s logic.

Germaine Greer will also be a guest. Greer has just released a new essay in book form – On Rage, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I was interested to see her obvious frustration last night in a Lateline interview with Leigh Sales at the difficulty of articulating any position that goes beyond tired dichotomies on Indigenous Policy and the NT intervention (including those which claim to transcend tired dichotomies). Or perhaps it would be better to say the inability to hear any heterodox position. I suspect a lot of the rage directed at Greer herself comes from an inability to comprehend or recognise any thought that doesn’t follow the predictable grooves of a “debate”, and indeed any call for reflection on issues and stories a lot of us would rather not face. So it’ll be interesting to watch her in this format too.