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The armed forces are considering whether (finally) allow women to serve on submarines - and in the melee unit

The real question, says Nicola, who left the Royal Navy a while ago but would rather we didn't print her name, is why anyone would want to go to sea in a submarine in the first place. "The frigates, the destroyers, the helicopters, they're fun â€" incredibly hard work, of course, but fun. You're in and out of different ports, the crew's always changing, the task's never the same. But submarines? They are just not very attractive places. And being locked up in one for six months at a time, it does something to people's minds. They're known as fishheads."

News of the week that the Royal Navy will soon allow women to serve as sailors on submarines - Including his 11-strong fleet of nuclear submarines - drew predictably colorful spectrum of reactions (\\ "On the FFS," wrote one sarcastic submariner in the online newsletter for sailors, "what 's the end of our reputation Silent service and then. ")

But the possibility that it could be accompanied by a separate, even more far-reaching move that might see women take up frontline combat roles in the army for the first time is likely to cause even greater consternation. "It's a possibility," a defence ministry official says. "You could see it playing either way. The arguments are strong on both sides."

More than 70% of all posts in Britain's army and navy, and more than 95% of posts in the RAF, are currently open to women, who in 2009 accounted for 3,830 of the 31,690 officers in Britain's three armed services, and 14,020 of the 156,680 other ranks: more than 9% of the total personnel, and rising steadily, according to the MoD, every year.

Women have been serving on surface ships, as aircrew and in a wide variety of army roles since the early 1990s; the forces are now integrated and the Wrens, Wracs and Wrafs are a distant memory. Since the arrival of the Blair government in 1997, women have also been appointed to frontline positions on board warships, as fighter jet pilots and in army combat support roles as artillery plotters, medics, intelligence specialists, logisticians and signallers. There's now even, in the shape of Flt Lt Kirsty Moore, a woman in the RAF's Red Arrows.

Women remain, however, barred from two main kinds of military activity. They may not currently serve on submarines, nor may they be part of any unit that is, in the words of the MoD, "required deliberately to close with and kill the enemy face-to-face". That means women are currently excluded from the Submarine Service, the Royal Marine Commandos, the Household Cavalry, the Royal Armoured Corps, the infantry and the Royal Air Force Regiment.

Submarines these days are "very different environments", he says, and there would be few practical problems adapting the submarines: "A nuclear submarine carries maybe 150 people. There are usually 15-man bunk spaces. What's to stop one or more of those being allocated to women? And one could relatively easily create a good career path for women in the submarine service. After that, as with any crew, it's getting the mix right."

But will women want to serve beneath the waves? Despite the "very direct" sexism she encountered on some navy frigates ("It all depends on the hierarchy; if the captain's a sexist, the whole boat can be a nightmare for women"), Nicola says she hugely enjoyed her years in the navy.

"But I'm just not sure who would be interested in submarines. There's not the same variety of work, there's the fact you don't see daylight for six months, that whole aspect of being cooped up, with no chance of getting off. It wouldn't be for me."

Ferguson, too, isn't sure how many would-be women submariners are out there. "We were a bit optimistic about the numbers in the frigates," he says. "A lot were converted to accommodate women, and a fair few then quietly converted back."

Nonetheless, Ferguson says, on surface vessels women sailors have "proved themselves across the board; their commitment, resolve and dedication have helped raise overall standards". In army combat roles, they haven't yet been given the chance.

That's principally, the MoD says, because the basic combat unit remains the small, four-person fire team â€" and introducing women to that may not prove "combat effective". "This environment poses extraordinary demands on the individuals, and success or failure â€" and survival â€" depend upon the cohesion of the team in extreme circumstances for which there are no direct comparisons," it concluded in a 2002 report justifying its decision not to allow women into close-combat roles (a report of this kind is required every eight years under EU equality law; the latest is due by the end of this year).

It points out that the only countries that have used women in close combat roles â€" the former Soviet Union, which deployed some 800,000 during the second world war, 70% of whom saw frontline action, and the Israeli Defence Force, which deployed women extensively in the 1948 war â€" both abandoned the practice as soon as each war had ended.

(In the Israeli case, as a respected US Lt Col, David Grossman, has noted in a book called On Killing, this was not because of any problems with women soldiers' performance, but because of the instinctual reaction of male infantrymen who witnessed women colleagues being wounded: they went, essentially, to pieces.)

The MoD does not delve into such murky psychological waters. It does, though, claim that the differences in sheer physical strength between men and women mean that only 0.1% of female applicants, and 1% of trained women soldiers, could meet the lifting, carrying, load marching and combat requirements that are the bread and butter of British infantry life.

Not that that is, in itself, reason enough to maintain a blanket ban on all women taking up close combat roles, the ministry stresses. Nor does it believe there are major psychological differences that might make women less capable of fixing a bayonet on a rifle, going over the top, and sticking it into someone.

But it does worry about the "critical cohesion" of a combat team made up of both sexes. No concrete work has ever been done on the effects of gender-mixing in combat situations, it points out (trials involving an experimental mixed infantry unit were dismissed by some male participants as "so unrealistic they amounted to aggressive camping").

That does not, of course, rule out a single-sex, all-woman combat team, an option the MoD does not appear to have considered. A respected Israeli woman general, Yehudit Ben-Natan, has long argued for this: "The heart and soul of the army is in combat, and if we are in the army we need to be at its heart," she says. "Let there be tanks with all-female crews, and all-woman missile batteries, because we can do it and we must stop allocating duties by gender."

But for the British army, the MoD concluded in 2002, the small size of the basic combat unit, the unrelenting mental and physical pressure it faces, and the fact that even a minute failure can lead to loss of life and mission failure all mean that, for the time being, admitting women to combat positions represents a risk with no compensating combat effectiveness benefit.

That, we can safely conclude, remains the position of many of its senior figures. But there is mounting criticism that such restrictions are largely irrelevant in 21st-century warfare. The fact is, says a mid-ranking army officer, that "these days, it's very difficult to talk of a frontline. The danger in Helmand isn't being on the frontline, it's simply being in Helmand. You're in danger as soon as you leave the base â€" even inside it."

And the ban has not stopped some of the 1,600 women currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan being killed. Second Lt Joanna Dyerdied in Basrah for 2007. The following year, Corporal Sarah Bryant became the only British woman soldier to die in Afghanistan. Other women have performed spectacular feats of bravery: in 2006, in Iraq, then Private Michelle Norris became the first woman to win Britain's top military award for gallantry, the Military Cross, after crawling through sniper fire to rescue her wounded sergeant, a man.

Captain Alli Shields insisted to the Observer last year that it "doesn't matter whether women are allowed to join the infantry or not. Girls are fighting the enemy, one way or another, every day. The fact that a girl dies alongside guys just shows she could do the same job." Commander Ferguson concurs: drawing a distinction between combat and non-combat roles these days, he says, amounts "largely to an exercise in semantics". We'll have to wait until the end of the year to see whether the MoD agrees.