On a sub currently, the people in charge having been running subs for years, typically competing for slots with other people, so they know what they are doing, an all female sub would start off with a crew who had not a single person who'd ever worked on a sub, this would sort of be like saying 'women can be historians too, so let's pick a few incoming freshmen and make them history professors at our new school' Obviously an all female crew isn't an option, what with how all our subs have nuclear reactor son them and sit around for months at a time under pressure that crushes things. This is the sort of case where you want a healthy amount of experience involved. We raised this same point about all female combat units, pointing out that by definition all the experienced people (and experience is everything) would by definition not be there. So you'd have to go coed to train them, initially, if we wanted all-female units we could do some coed stuff, select those women who show very top lines profiles and will commit to extended contracts so we're not losing lots of them and maybe after a decade we might have enough to risk composing the leadership of a billion dollar nuclear-driven vessel crewed only by women, after that it's self-sustaining, but that's a major investment in time and effort to be PC. Unlike combat units, there's really no question that women are mentally and physically capable of running a sub, although the conditions on one I think represent a harder psychological impact on the average woman from our culture than for men. It's the coed problem, not the woman-problem, for subs.

If the Navy thinks the cost to refit a few subs for coed to try it out is okay, won't risk performance much, etc, then it's fine by me, I doubt there are enough female sailors who want to do this that we need to do more than try it on a few subs as a pilot program, which might in itself provide the necessary experienced crew to make up the leadership if we start running an all female sub crew down the line if that's considered the better option after experimentation. It's their call, I just suspect they are being pressured by the current administration since this is a major reversal in their stance and is coming right after talk of DADT being lifted.