Do Women Belong In Combat Situations: One Ceremonial Cannon Just Settled the Argument

A viral clip making the rounds this week is the kind of thing that ends a debate in under a minute, whether you want it to or not. On Rome’s Janiculum Hill, they fire a ceremonial cannon every day at noon, a tradition that goes back to the 1800s. It’s not a battlefield. Nobody’s getting shot at. It’s a tourist-friendly time check with a big boom at the end. And still, the video of a female soldier trying to get that thing ready while a male counterpart casually strolls underneath the barrel has people arguing about whether women belong in combat roles.

The footage is pure slapstick if you ignore the context. The woman is yanking on the lanyard like she’s trying to start a lawnmower that hates her. She’s digging in, adjusting her stance, putting her whole body into it. The guy next to her isn’t even looking at her half the time. At one point, he walks right under the barrel with the string still in her hand, like he’s grabbing a beer from the fridge. The contrast is so stark it’s almost mean. One person is treating the job like a normal Tuesday. The other is fighting the equipment itself.

This isn’t some obscure edge case. Combat roles, the ones people are arguing about putting more women into, involve carrying heavy loads for long periods, dragging wounded teammates, operating heavy weapons systems, and doing all of it while someone is actively trying to kill you. Average male upper-body strength is roughly 50-60% greater than average female upper-body strength. Grip strength, the ability to generate force quickly, bone density, and oxygen-carrying capacity all tilt the same direction. These aren’t opinions. They’re measurable differences that show up in every large study that’s ever been done on the subject. When the military has lowered standards so more women can pass, injury rates have gone up and performance has gone down. When they’ve kept standards the same, very few women qualify. Both outcomes tell you something.

The “but some women can do it” argument is technically true and also mostly irrelevant. Some women can outlift some men. Some women run faster than some men. The military doesn’t select for the statistical outliers who happen to be exceptional; it selects for people who can reliably do the job at a high level under stress, day after day. The cannon in Rome isn’t even a combat weapon. It’s a ceremonial howitzer that requires one person to pull a rope with consistent force. If that basic physical task is already a visible struggle, it’s reasonable to ask how the same person is supposed to handle a machine gun, a wounded soldier, or a heavy pack while taking fire.

Barstool has never pretended biology is a social construct. Men and women are different in ways that matter for certain jobs. That’s not an insult. It’s the reason we have weight classes in fighting sports, different standards in powerlifting, and separate categories in almost every physical competition on earth. Pretending those differences disappear the moment someone puts on a uniform doesn’t make anyone safer. It just makes the people who have to rely on each other less honest about what they’re looking at.

The video doesn’t “prove” that no woman should ever be in the military. Plenty of women serve effectively in support roles, intelligence, aviation, and other positions where raw strength is less decisive. What it does is illustrate, in the simplest possible terms, why combat arms have always been male-dominated across every culture that has ever fielded an army. The job is hard on the body. On average, the people best at it are the ones whose bodies are built for it. Watching someone struggle with a rope while another person treats the same equipment like background furniture is funny until you remember that the real version of this job has consequences.