Smash the dash for gas!

Intrepid climber Ewa Jasiewicz is at the top of a chimney in a new gas-fired power station and wants us to know why:

The government and the big energy companies want to build as many as 20 new gas power stations, which would leave the UK dependent on this highly polluting and increasingly expensive fuel for decades to come.
[...]
We already rely on gas for 83% of our central heating and almost 50% of electricity. Increasing this dependence will cause household energy bills to rise even further, pushing those who live the most precarious lives deeper into fuel poverty.

Oh, well that's all right then. So gas is expensive, and if we stop the UK building more gas plants then we'll stop bills from rising because nuclear, solar and wind are so much cheaper, and coal is less polluting, than gas.

We ask ourselves: who is Ewa Jasiewicz and what does she want? Ewa's previous Guardian writings give us a clue:

• Ewa Jasiewicz spends a harrowing week in Gaza documenting life under attack;
• Primark answered critics over its use of child labour by closing factories in India. But its PR worries aren't over yet;
• Don't exclude those of us who want to see revolutionary change from the fight against global warming. We're all in this together;
• There can be no state solutions to climate change: governments won't give up the powers that leads to environmental ruin; and
• To the fury of ordinary Iraqis, the country's oilfields are being privatised. Unions must fight together to prevent it.

She's writing and video-ing all over the shop; back in July, for instance, she was telling Sainsbury's to pay a "living wage". I couldn't quite find the time to watch her speech on the united4justice YouTube channel. I think you get the picture. Find a trendy cause and you find Ms. Jasiewicz. She and her pals in Kampania Palestyna outdid themselves in 2010 by scrawling graffiti on the Warsaw Ghetto Monument saying "Free Gaza and Palestine":

"People here need to wake up and realise that occupations and ghettos did not end with the end of the second world war. These tactics and strategies of domination and control of other people and lands are present in Palestine today and are being perpetrated by the state of Israel. We have a responsibility to free all ghettos and end all occupations".

Way to win over the Polish Jewish vote, Ewa!

Without wishing to be uncharitable, I note that West Burton is forecast to have rain all week, and night-time temperatures (at ground level) hovering just above freezing. Personally I'd fence around the base of the chimney to prevent delivery of any additional clothing, food, or fuel, and leave Ms. Jasiewicz up there as long as she wants to stay.

Benghazi and White House Communications

Former US Army artillery ops officer Donald Sensing dissects the emerging controversy about what the White House was told about the attack on the Benghazi compound where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his colleagues were killed. The current White House story appears to be that the "flash" traffic from Tripoli about the attack was buried in the normal business of the White House Situation Room. Sensing, who has handled a good amount of "flash" traffic in his time, gives that argument short shrift:

Imagine you are giving a birthday party for a five year old who's invited his entire school class. All those little kids are running in out of the party room, yelling and juking around.
That's the normal message traffic of a message center.
Of a sudden, in runs Shaquille O'Neal to the middle of the room, waving his arms and yelling at the top of his lungs, "Hey! Look at me!"
Shaq is flash traffic.

He contends that it is simply not realistic for very senior White House personnel not to be aware that "flash" traffic had arrived, and that the timescale between the arrival and their being alerted would be measured in minutes, not hours.

The White House strategy at the moment seems to be to announce that there is an ongoing investigation into who knew what and when, and hope that they can make that investigation return its results no earlier than November 7th. I suspect, as Donald Sensing does, that the regular media isn't going to press him hard on this. I do wonder however what happens when the investigation does report, assuming it isn't a complete whitewash...

Why I Left Goldman Sachs - a review

Finally, dear readers, I can bring you my thoughts on Greg Smith's Why I Left Goldman Sachs (currently number 1 bestseller on Amazon in Finance.) Having followed the Greg Smith saga since his NYT op-ed, and having read a wide range of other Wall Street and City books from the sublime Liar's Poker to the ridiculous Cityboy - Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile, I will endeavour to tell you how Greg's book stacks up against the competition, whether it's worth a read and how it may be seen in the context of Goldman Sachs, the 2008 financial crisis and today's battle against the 1%.

Overview

The book plots the path of Jewish South African table-tennis star Greg Smith, joining Goldman Sachs as an intern in June 2000 then being accepted as a graduate into equity sales. It is mostly told in the first person.

Comparisons with "Liar's Poker" are inevitable, and indeed apposite. Both Michael Lewis and Greg Smith entered their banks as fresh graduates, survived their gruelling graduate induction and steadily rose in the ranks of sales - Lewis in bonds, Smith in equities - to relative fame and fortune within the company. I would say that Smith has the edge in timeline; Lewis's book ends with Salomon Brothers undergoing upheaval and a hostile takeover battle even as he collects a large end-of-year bonus and decides to leave, whereas Smith takes us through the tumnult of 9/11, across the 2006 surge and through the 2008 financial crisis, then leaves in 2011 as the firm is still thriving but his doubts about the direction of the firm make him unable to continue in his role.

Lewis spends about half the book on charting the fortunes of and anecdotes about the mortgage department of Salomon; Smith spends very little of his time talking about matters other than him and the fortunes of those around and immediately above him, which may be less engaging than the characters described by Lewis (Lewie Ranieri, Mike Mortara, the Human Piranha, John Gutfreund) but makes one more willing to trust Smith's recounting.

Should Goldman Sachs be worried?

If I were Goldman PR, and had access to a draft of this book, I would be mostly positive about it. After all, although towards the end it is critical of Goldman Sachs' current direction (and of the culture in the London office in particular), Smith is very positive about the way the firm trained him, taught him to be a culture carrier, demonstrated concern for clients even at trading partner level -- see the anecdotes about Michael Daffey -- and how ex-Goldmanites like Hank Paulson more or less saved the American financial system in 2008.

Where Smith does nail Goldman to the wall is in its changing culture and reaction to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, when he sees the long-term concern for clients' welfare thrown out of the window in pursuit of fees. He is particularly critical of the fetish for selling structured products to clients with a lot of money but relatively little sophistication, such as firefighter and police pension fund managers; the more opaque the product, the higher the fees and margin for Goldman, and the greater the likelihood that the customer will get screwed down the line.

Smith identifies four main categories of Goldman clients, mirroring the tale in the Haggadah about the Four Sons:

1. The Wise Client: sophisticated investors with a lot of money and experience in dealing with Wall Street, such as many hedge funds. These guys get good rates out of Goldman.
2. The Wicked Client: smart clients who sail a little too close to the wind, and sometimes end up paying very large fines or even jail time.
3. The Simple Client: unsophisticated people in charge of a lot of money, "perfect prey for Wall Street." Can be obnoxious, often part of bureaucratic organisations like pension funds.
4. The Client Who Doesn't Know How To Ask Questions: like the Simple Client, but worse because they're trusting. Often get exotic products offloaded on them, pay through the nose for it and then get blown up further down the line.

Not terribly edifying for the Goldman Sachs client relations folks - or the clients, come to that - but educational.

Smith doesn't pull his punches on the regulators either. On the subject of the 2010 SEC lawsuit:

My immediate reaction: this must be a witch hunt. The SEC has been asleep at the wheel for the last two years and now it needs to show the public that it's doing something?

The famed "muppet" quote, when given context, explains why Goldman Sachs' email search for the term yielded nothing. Smith is talking about early 2011, when he moved to London to take on the equity derivatives business there, and finding any number of hapless (and moderately clueless) clients referred to as "muppets". But note that this is less than a year after the SEC prosecution where "Fabulous" Fabrice Tourre had his (personal) email displayed to all and sundry. Any banker with the sense that the good Lord gave gravel would know not to write anything even slightly demeaning in email. All major banks by now were using email snooping products like Orchestria to spot emails that contained confidential, suspicious, illegal or otherwise undesirable material.

Summary

It would be a lot to compare Greg Smith and "Why I Left Goldman Sachs" to the seminal Michael Lewis and "Liar's Poker". And yet, Smith does not fall as far short in the comparison as I had expected. The book is compelling, reasonably well-written, describes crucial times in the life of the author, the financial system and Goldman Sachs, and does so with good lucid explanations of the issues involved. An example is the 2007 August blow-up of quant trading algorithms:

The problems were twofold, and they were massive: First, the out-of-the-way securities that the computer models had chosen to unwind were illiquid. Second ,since everybody's model was saying the same thing, there were few buyers.
It was as though somebody had yelled, "Fire!" in a crowded theater and the exits were blocked.

Smith is very clear on the modern attitudes at Goldman Sachs which eventually caused him to leave. The focus on large profitable trades, with little regard for the way they would benefit clients; transitioning from the traditional Goldman "long-term greedy" to "let me just get this year's bonus"; the firm promoting the big money pullers rather than the culture carriers. He's not keen on Lloyd Blankfein, or London co-heads Michael "Woody" Sherwood and Richard Gnodde whom he regards as being asleep at the wheel as Goldman veered off course, and his criticisms are well-argued even if you may not agree with some of the details.

If you want to know more about how modern banks work, how we got into the mess of 2008, and the problems that still exist in the banking system today, you could do a lot worse than "Why I Left Goldman Sachs". If you enjoyed "Liar's Poker", you should read this book as well.

But, dear Lord, couldn't Grand Central Publishing have come up with a snappier title?

Media bias? What media bias?

An editorial for the ages at The Grauniad today: the problem with the US media is that they're too even-handed:

To put it at its simplest, the election is so close that its outcome may be determined by whether the lies told during the campaign, above all by the Republican side, stick or not.

Wow, thank goodness we have the impartial UK media, exemplified by The Grauniad, to defend freedom, democracy and unbiased reporting.

Sure, Fox News is Republican-slanted, although its precise bias depends on the presenter - there's a large gap between Bill O'Reilly and Greta van Susteren, and commentators like Michelle Malkin can be pretty dismissive of mainstream Republican policies - but the belief that CBS, MSNBC and CNN have anything other than Democratic-leaning journalists is denial beyond reason:

Elements of the American media, like Fox News, are partisan to the point of outright distortion, while others are hampered by what Paul Krugman has called the "cult of balance",

Paul Krugman: you're talking through your arse. Every journalist and every news channel has a bias, even (gasp) the BBC. Candy Crowley from CNN did an appalling job of "moderating" the second presidential debate, backing up Obama and deflating Romney on the point of whether Obama acknowledged the Benghazi attack as an "act of terror" despite later admitting that her interjection was incorrect. There was nothing neutral about her moderation, and trying to claim otherwise is ludicrous. By contrast, I thought the other two presidential debate moderators were reasonably neutral in their actions, no matter what their private opinions.

The Guardian editorial does have a point when it notes:

Where the partisan press cannot be trusted to check the facts offered by the politicians they favour or accept the versions offered by those they do not, and the more independent or liberal press will not do so in either case, democracy is clearly in trouble.

Like Obama's claim about having fewer bayonets in the Army, perhaps? It seems that only the army of bloggers is willing to pick apart these claims, while the mainstream media revels in the "zinger" without examining the facts.

The editorial notes:

Emerson said that if you threw a fact out of the window you would come back later to find it sitting in the chimney corner. But that might well be after you had voted.

It is ironic that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a champion of Individualism and would have despised the group-think prevalent in today's media. If anything, I suspect he would have cheered the counter-mainstream opinions of Fox News.

Bayonets in modern warfare

Obama's quip last night about horses and bayonets in the US Armed Forces achieved a lot of positive press coverage:

"Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets," the president countered, "because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines."

Let me say first of all that it was a very good on-the-spot comeback by Obama; it achieved the necessary debate aim of deflating Romney and also gave his supporters a good line and clip to use post-debate.

However, was it accurate? The US armed forces may have fewer bayonets, but only because they have fewer service members (1.4mm today which is well under even the 2mm in 1990 at the end of the Cold War). Every infantryman has a bayonet. But are bayonets actually used anymore - perhaps Obama was pointing out that they are obsolescent?

Apparently not. The UK armed forces have been actively employing the bayonet, for instance in Basra in 2004:

When ammunition ran low among the British troops, the decision was made to fix bayonets for a direct assault.
The British soldiers charged across 600 feet of open ground toward enemy trenches. They engaged in intense hand-to-hand fighting with the militiamen. Despite being outnumbered and lacking ammunition, the Argylls and Princess of Wales troops routed the enemy.

If you're short on ammo and relatively close to your enemy, the bayonet is a near-endless killing resource. The additional reach imparted by the length of the rifle, and the mass of your rifle and shoulder behind it, means that in close quarter combat you can drive killing blows into your enemy without any need to pause and aim; the trauma of a single bayonet strike, twist and pull to the chest area should make it instantly incapacitating (never mind the instantly fatal results of any strike to the head). And just what can bayonet use do for the morale of the infantry using it?

"I wanted to put the fear of God into the enemy. I could see some dead bodies and eight blokes, some scrambling for their weapons. I’ve never seen such a look of fear in anyone's eyes before. I'm over six feet; I was covered in sweat, angry, red in the face, charging in with a bayonet and screaming my head off. You would be scared, too."
Corporal Brian Wood, Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment

If I saw a bunch of huge heavily-armoured screaming red-faced Scots running at me with six-inch blades on the end of their rifles, I'd certainly leg it. Sounds like a Friday night in Glasgow.

The bayonet was also used recently in Afghanistan, again by a Scot:

In 2009, Lieutenant James Adamson, aged 24, of the Royal Regiment of Scotland was awarded the Military Cross for a bayonet charge whilst on a tour of duty in Afghanistan: after shooting one Taliban fighter dead Adamson had run out of ammunition when another enemy appeared. Adamson immediately charged the second Taliban fighter and bayoneted him.

The bayonet may be an old weapon, President Obama, but it's no less effective for that. When your troops are "Danger close" to the enemy and so beyond air support, there's no substitute for a weapon that terrifies and destroys the enemy with no limit on reuse.

Update: go read pastor and ex-US Army artillery officer Donald Sensing on why Obama was wrong about bayonets: he points out that the US has more bayonets now than in 1916. At less than $40 per item, it's remarkably cost-effective.

An experiment on Financial Transaction Taxes

This should be good. Ten European countries want to press ahead with a financial transactions tax (FTT) and intend to do so despite the other EU countries refusing to come along:

"I am delighted to see that 10 member states have indicated their willingness to participate in a common financial transaction tax (FTT)," said Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

Not as delighted as the city of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and similar entities in neighbouring non-FTT countries, I'll bet.

"This tax can [my italics] raise billions of euros of much-needed revenue for member states in these difficult times.
"This is about fairness - we need to ensure the costs of the crisis are shared by the financial sector instead of shouldered by ordinary citizens."

I will be fascinated to see how much tax is actually raised by this measure in France and Germany, who are the two most financially active nations in the group. It will also be interesting to see what the impact is on corporate tax takes - I would bet they'll drop significantly. And as for banking activity in those countries, I suspect this will finish the job in France that Hollande started with his tax hikes.

This is good, though. This is how democracy and nation states are supposed to work. Nations that want to press ahead with a demented idea can do so, those who don't want to be involved don't have to be, and when it all goes pear-shaped the voters can throw the relevant bunch of baboons out of office. I note that Greece, Portugal and Spain have all signed up, presumably on the basis that however this idea turns out it can't possibly make their situations any worse.

I give the idea 1-2 years of operation before it becomes manifestly clear that no extra net revenue is coming in, and indeed any financial activity that isn't nailed down has gone elsewhere.

Greg Smith on 60 Minutes

I just watched young Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs being grilled by Anderson Cooper on CBS's "60 Minutes". It was an entertaining 10 minute piece; I think Anderson Cooper was reasonably probing on Greg's motives. For my readers' entertainment, I present below my notes on the interview. Errors and omissions excepted, do not trade on the basis of these scribblings, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Goldman Sachs was characterised as "the smartest, most profitable place on Wall Street; the toughest place to get a job." So why did Greg end up leaving? He wanted to hit the board of directors round the head, and hoped that his NYT op-ed would be a wake-up call to them; forcing them to change the direction of the bank by saying something publicly.

Greg was 33 years old, had been at the firm for 12 years (in Securities). He was recruited as a summer intern from Economics major at Stanford. He was earning about $500K when he left, and he claimed "I loved the place, I put a lot of my heart and soul into it". Yes, bankers have souls. Apparently.

The idea of the NYT op-ed was apparently not to be destructive or a betrayal. Greg liked the Goldman Sachs Business Principles, particularly the one about reputation:

OUR ASSETS ARE OUR PEOPLE, CAPITAL AND REPUTATION.
If any of these is ever diminished, the last is the most difficult to restore. We are dedicated to complying fully with the letter and spirit of the laws, rules and ethical principles that govern us. Our continued success depends upon unswerving adherence to this standard.

So where did it all go wrong? "Goldman Sachs started to learn how to use information which they got from clients to bet with their own money, and sometimes against their own clients." That's going to be a pivotal point in the book, I'd bet. This won't be specific violation of the Chinese wall between buy-side and sell-side; rather, a more general picture of what clients are doing and what overpriced products Goldman might be able to sell to them (or their rivals) if they're in a tight spot.

Greg sold pretty vanilla derivatives, but the promotions and big money went to people selling complex products with big fees. They were selling these to pension funds, educational institutions who weren't well suited for the products, or indeed well enough educated to understand how steep the GS fees were. Within the firm, an unsophisticated client was the golden product; they aimed to sell them the most sophisticated product and "kerching!". An example quoted was Abacus which generated an SEC case, Senate subcommittee hearing and record fine in 2010.

Greg seems to be making the conjecture that many institutional investors are not as sophisticated as the customer suitability guidelines think they are. So what about the bank's ethics? An economics + Law professor opined "I think Goldman Sachs is one of the most ethical banks out there - not sure that says much though." Talk about damning with faint praise.

Anderson Cooper wanted to know why haven't we heard from Goldman Sachs leavers before. "People who work at GS don't talk about working at GS" - the inevitable comparisons to Fight Club, Mafia arose, and the point was made that people making the money don't want to kill the golden goose.

Greg recounted a discussion with a major Asian investor who said "We don't trust you at all; but that's OK, we're going to keep doing business with you as you're one of the biggest banks out there." Greg was shocked but the senior partner he was with was jubilant after the meeting, and didn't seem at all concerned at the lack of trust displayed. Now I'm not surprised by this attitude of the major investor - you don't get rich by trusting people - but I'd bet this causes a few ulcers in the GS ethics committee.

Muppets had to feature in the interview, and sure enough Greg confirmed that London co-workers repeatedly refer to clients as muppets. (The first time I saw the term in a non-Kermit sense was in a dictionary of prison slang, and sure enough the Muppet Wiki confirms this use.) He gave an example of junior guy (24 years old) selling a product to a client who was a muppet and getting them to pay GS $1mm over the odds; his managing director just laughed at the news. If true, I'd imagine that such behaviour would cause another round of antacids for the ethics committee.

Anderson Cooper pressed Greg: why not raise the issues confidentially internally, rather than publicly? Greg says that he talked to 9 senior partners at the firm so it shouldn't be a surprise - he wasn't specific about the timeline, I have no idea whether this was before or after his resignation, but I suspect it was after submitting the resignation but before the op-ed. Goldman Sachs said he wanted $1mm and promotion - so Anderson asked "if you had got those, would you still have quit?" "Absolutely," he claims, "I didn't go to Wall Street purely to make money. I definitely wanted to make money but I left because things had veered so far from what I think is right." Well, to be honest, the money he's likely to make from the book would only cover 3-4 more years at Goldman Sachs, so if he wanted money he should have kept his mouth shut.

According to the professor, there are no significant allegations of fraud are in the book; I'm not surprised, as they'd have to be cast-iron to get past the lawyers. What he does note is that the current environment of very low interest rates cause pension funds, educational institutions to call up banks and ask for riskier products to make better returns, so that they're vulnerable to the predations of banks. So there's another reason why prolonged low interest rates are a bad idea - Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King please take note.

It will be interesting to see the balance in the book between criticism of Goldman Sachs' external actions (client dealings) and internal (promoting psychopaths). I await my copy with eagerness...

Camelia Botnar Foundation - less charity, more staff

[ New! An analysis of the 2012 accounts of the Marcela Trust. ]

Hurrah! The long-awaited 2011 accounts of the Camelia Botnar Foundation have appeared on the Charity Commission website. After our analysis of the 2011 accounts of Camelia Botnar Ltd., their commercial partner to which they give a whole load of manpower and loan a whole load of money, let's see what the charity was doing last year.

Main points of the accounts:

• they got 9 trainees to complete their placement and move into employment, down from 15 in 2010;
• the estate continues to suck up a fair amount of money in maintenance;
• they note that "Camelia Botnar Ltd [the subsidiary undertaking] sells horticultural products and crafts generated by the Trainees on the estate as well as other stock items purchased from third parties [...] The undertaking showed an increase in turnover this year on the previous year of 3.65% to £788,447 and a resulting gross profit of £103,109 (2010: £122,819). The profit was not as substantial as the previous year due to an increase in Administrative Expenses." which interests me - they add 30K of sales but lose 20K of profit, so that implies CBL admin expenses went up by around 50K. Which is a whole person's salary.
• Sarasin and partners continue to ensure that the investments underperform: they lost 10% on the investments over the year, compared with a FTSE All-Share Index performance of a 6.69% loss. Nice one, guys. They still trousered £101K in fees for this performance. I'll definitely consider you for my future investment management needs, assuming Dick Fuld isn't available.
• CBF is buying a "leisure investment in a market town" for £1,760,000, aiming to get a yield of 5.12% compared to the 1% that the cash is currently generating. Um. I can't see this going any direction other than horribly wrong. CBF is going way out of their core area in this activity. I wonder if Dawn Pamela Lawson has been advising them on this activity, what this "leisure investment" is and what "market town" is involved. Who sold them this entity and why do CBF think that a leisure investment in the middle of a UK recession is going to pay off?
• CBF took in £3.230mm and spent £3.233mm, a very carefully balanced year, in contrast to 2010 where they spent about 8% more than they brought in.
• They have managed to accumulate an extra £800K of cash, from £4.3mm to £5.1mm, which looks to be from spending £300K less on operating activities and receiving £500K of capital expenditure. I wonder what they're planning to do with this - more investment property acquisition?
• Most charitable activity costs were more or less static (+5%), though "support costs" more than doubled from £45K to £101K.
• Employees rose from 79 to 84, but that masked charitable activities staff jumping from 33 to 48, while actual manufacturing staff dropped from 45 to 35. So they're doing less, with more people.
• They're letting plant and machinery assets drop from £725K to £555K, which implies to me (along with the drop in manufacturing staff) that they're letting the manufacturing side run down.
• They had £7.4mm in investment properties at the start of the year and added the aforementioned £1.7mm leisure investment. After last year's near-£3mm loss on revaluation, one wonders how well this will continue to perform...

I find it significant that this year both CBF and CBL decided to ensure their income and expenditure were balanced within a fraction of a percent, in contrast to previous years. CBF is ramping up on charity staff but apparently letting apprentice numbers and manufacturing staff and plant drop. It seems to be undergoing an attack of bureaucracy, doing less with more. It's putting more money into property investment despite losing substantial amounts of money in past years. Its main investment fund lost 10% courtesy of Sarasin Partners.

The figures suggest that CBF is turning into a business of busily spending what remains of the investment fund on the estate and staffing, and doing less and less of its core work of preparing trainees for the world of employment.

Goldman Sachs really is worried about Greg Smith's book

In advance of Greg Smith's "60 Minutes" interview on CBS this Sunday, Goldman Sachs has been circulating a briefing note putting their side of the story:

However, to better understand Greg's criticisms, we examined his performance reviews for 2009-2011 to determine if we had failed to appropriately address issues which he may have raised about the conduct of his colleagues, and, more generally, about our culture. Our review showed that Greg did not provide any negative feedback on any of his reviewees in any of those years. In fact, he scored all of his colleagues’ performance at the top of the range, including in the areas of Culture and Values, Leadership and People Management, Client Focus and Reputational Excellence.

It sounds like young Greg understood very well that a prerequisite to getting ahead is to avoid rocking the boat...

Goldman Sachs' PR people are clearly taking this adverse publicity seriously, although I do wonder whether the best approach would be to shrug, let it wash over them and drain away, making use of the chronic short attention span of the global media. But hey, it's a fruitful source of blogging for all and sundry.

Is the infantry role out of reach for women?

US Marines Captain Katie Petronio provides some much-needed hard data about how tough combat is on a woman's body:

"By the fifth month into the deployment, I had muscle atrophy in my thighs that was causing me to constantly trip and my legs to buckle with the slightest grade change," she wrote. "My agility during firefights and mobility on and off vehicles and perimeter walls was seriously hindering my response time and overall capability."

Note that this is not just some fainting flower - she's a Marine officer and a standout athlete. But her body just couldn't handle the prolonged physical stress of combat.

This is not to say that women don't have a place in combat. Leigh Ann Hester, Michelle Norris MC and Kate Nesbitt MC all prove that courage and good physical reactions under fire are not the exclusive preserve of men. Sgt. Hester in particular demonstrated an ability to fire, manoeuvre and bring the fight to the enemy with the best of them. However, Captain Petronio's point is a harder one. No matter what our fighting instinct and transient physical reactions show, it seems that even the toughest woman's body degrades over time faster than men in a comparable position.

Is this a good enough reason to keep women out of front-line infantry roles? Beats me. I certainly can't see it as a good argument for keeping women out of armoured fighting vehicles, for instance - but for any role involving extreme physical endurance, it seems that a woman's body can't tolerate prolonged abuse as much as a man's.