> Much less valuable than women.

Because... they can have babies, right? If you send women to war then your population dies. This just reinforces what I'm trying to say that there are "roles" which are crucial to a civilization (or society?). I'm not saying they can't change or evolve.

I think there is underlying requirement (not necessarily just biological, but they are requirements of some kind) that allows you to be "valuable" to society, vs. "disposable".

Maybe that was true in the pre-firearm era. You'd have a hard time arguing that in today's world "if you send women to war your population dies." Israel, since its conception has proven that this antiquated viewpoint is no longer valid.

Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.).

The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries.

Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?

But also that many men have an inherent biological desire to "protect" Women. Many men don't "want" women to go to war, don't think it's right to hit a woman no matter the situation, etc.

We all are, after all, governed by our evolutionary journey; we're just simple animals at our core.

Well lets not forget the whole physically stronger and pumped more full of testosterone aspect of it too. But yes, this is also a good point. If you had a choice about sending people who could manufacture new humans to the slaughterfields or keep them out of harms way, you'd be better off keeping them out of harms way.