Published at Laura Ingraham’s Lifezette.com January 13, 2016
On January 1st Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ordered the Marines to provide plans by January 15th for boot camp to go coed. ABC.com reports that “Mabus also warned Marine Corps leaders not to use any concerns about integrating women into combat jobs as ways to delay the process.” The problems with integrating boot camp are the same as those of integrating the combat arms, so the Marines are not allowed to talk about it. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter used this tactic when, ahead of his Dec. 3 decision, he put a gag rule on discussing women in combat and the Marines’ 9 month integration study which showed that compared to males in combat tasks, female Marines were slower, couldn’t lift as much weight, were less accurate shooters and retained more than twice the injuries. Now the Marines must comply not only with integration of the combat arms but, suddenly, integration of boot camp, post-haste. Any problems with either will be blamed on leadership and training. That leadership will be purged and purged again until everyone is singing the right tune. If you were interested in what Soviet-style dictatorship looks like, this is it.
As a nation, we already compared separate-sex and coed boot camps and found the Marine Corps’ methods far superior. In the 1999 Congressional Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related Issues, the commission’s chairman, Anita Blair said, “gender-integrated training entails special problems that simply do not arise in gender-separate training. These problems revolve around the difficulties of providing appropriate privacy for both sexes, accommodating fundamental physiological differences, and controlling sexual conduct.”
Sexual Dynamics & a Myriad of (Expensive) Consequences
The Army knows intimately what can go wrong combining young end-of-teen-aged kids together in the formative period of boot camp. Remember Aberdeen? Multiple Army drill sergeants were abusing their authority and having sex with or raping females under their charge. Even when relationships are consensual the damage can be just as great. The expenses are high in time, money and effort to shuffle personnel due to relationships, fraternizing, pregnancy, misconduct and the litigation thereof, let alone the destructive impacts to the personnel themselves and their units. That we’ve come to tolerate this mess in the fleet and other branches’ boot camps hardly justifies doing more of it by forcing the Marines to follow suit.
If there’s one thing that’s primal and unchanging, it’s that men and women are distracted by each other. The second you throw them together they’re checking how they look and competing for each other’s attention. The fallout can run the spectrum from marriage and/or babies to serving in the brig for rape. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the east, and all the ripples created detract from the objective: training to become the nation’s enemy-killers. Advocates for total integration insist “we’re professionals,” as if professionals don’t hook up and mess up their lives and jobs. Regardless, new recruits are hardly professionals, and boot camp is not an office job. Harassment? That’s boot camp: you can’t train young kids to attack and defend without some touching. A drill instructor’s simple correction or instruction can be construed as harassment when done by the opposite sex.
Having separate boot camps allowed the Marines to postpone or at least greatly minimize the opportunity for all these problems until after recruits had finished their training and earned the title. (The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has worked to sexualize areas that were once neutral, worsening these negative impacts. Same-sex sexual assaults are on the rise since its repeal.)
Quotas & Lowered Standards
Double standards for women have been in place since their full integration into the military in 1948 because every time they tested against men’s standards, they didn’t perform as well as the men and retained more injuries. Also, men and women don’t like being treated the same. What’s neutral between men can be considered harassment to a woman and vice versa, and what’s tough for women tends not to be challenging enough for men.
When West Point was integrated and 61% of female plebes failed the men’s physical fitness test (PFT) compared to less than 5% of men, separate lower standards were created for women. It was the same in the Air Force’s Cadet Wing when they couldn’t perform the pull-ups or complete most of the men’s other standard tests. In every branch’s PFT, women have more time to run and don’t have to do as much or the same requirements as men. In 2013 the Marine Corps tried to get female recruits to achieve the men’s minimum three pull-ups and gave active duty females the option to do pull-ups instead of the arm-hang. They dropped the requirement when, in over a year of boot camp cycles training for the goal, less than half of female recruits (compared to 98% of males) could make the standard and only 15% of active duty females elected to do them at all.
Marine General John Kelly is right in saying “There will be great pressure” to lower the standards to accommodate women and fulfill the Obama administration’s destructive policy. While claiming there will be no quotas, Mabus has already demanded an increase to 25% female representation in the ranks. The only way to satisfy that requirement is to lower those standards. They will call them gender-normed “new” standards, and “equal” will be equally lower for all.
Recruiters now have an impossible task to perform. Women are already five times harder and more expensive to recruit because very few women want to join the military and fewer are qualified. While having to pull in much greater numbers to reach that 25%, the young women who can make combat standards is a yet smaller pool even in the age of Crossfit. Now that women’s combat exemption is to be fully repealed, the potential for involuntary assignment to combat jobs and competing with men in those jobs are all deterrents for young women thinking of enlisting.
Conclusion
The Marines have been the last hold-outs on integrating training just as they have been for the combat arms because the Marines are in the business of killing. Gen. Kelly had it right when he said the question is whether or not this policy makes us more lethal: “If the answer to that is no, clearly don’t do it…”
Recruits graduating coed boot camp will be a lower-caliber breed of Marine, Guinea pigs required to follow orders and “prove” integration a success. Injuries and misconduct will increase even as standards are “gender-normed” lower, but as long as everyone delivers their lines correctly: “Women in combat is a great idea! Women are the same as men in the infantry!” that’s all that matters. That we’re supposed to be training them to fight and win against the likes of ISIS with the fewest casualties possible is irrelevant. Ain’t modernity grand? Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.
Spot on, Jude. I look forward to your next article.
LikeLike
Good article. Check out a comedic but true look at it: https://youtu.be/GqE0k2GSxOM
LikeLike
Hilarious! I can text this when I want to see feminist’s heads explode.
LikeLike
Men do violence better than women. Combat is violence. This is not rocket science.
LikeLike
Great work Jude. Real combat is no place for anyone’s daughter!! What are they thinking?
LikeLike
The US is not the first nation to employ females in warfighting. The Soviets used women in WWII as pilots and snipers, the Israelis employs women throughout their forces and their is rumored to be at least one combat ace in the IAF…why are we looking at this as something novel? Surely, the Israelis have figured this out, why aren’t we looking at these other nations to see what IS working? My other point is that we should not be giving women a different standard than the men…they should have to run, lift, push up, or whatever at the same standard as the men. I (a male) consider myself a feminist in that I believe women are capable of achieving whatever they want to achieve…but as far as the armed forces are concerned, has a woman achieved anything if she passes through a dumbed down version of boot camp or OTS?
LikeLike
The Israelis don’t use women in direct ground combat, they serve in 2 light battalions and are only stationed on borders with allied countries (Jordan & Egypt). Israel abandoned putting women in direct combat in 1948 because it was such a disaster. Pilots are irrelevant in the discussion of direct ground combat – they’re in the air, not fighting on the ground, and snipers similarly are by definition fighting from afar, not offensive attack missions to kill the enemy house to house and cave to cave. Israeli women only have to serve 2 years vs. 3 for men, and women get exemptions for marriage and other reasons. What Israel does is irrelevant – they’re tiny and need all hands on deck, but women are not assigned to combat like men there anyway. The Israelis have figured it out, that’s why they don’t do it. In fact, an IDF general who at first supported women in combat came out last month saying “No more” because women had “many dozens of percentage points” higher injuries than men. That’s not an equal opportunity for women, it’s a disadvantage to them, and an advantage to our enemies. It’s also anything but cost effective. You can believe whatever you want, that will never change that there are big differences between women and men’s physiology and physical abilities, and the gap gets wider at the level of the combat arms. Women are on a double standard because every time they’re tested they don’t perform as well as men and they get more injuries in the attempt. They already get more than twice the injuries on the lower standard, so obviously, it’s not mind over matter.
LikeLike
Young male Marines + young females = a whole lot of schtupping going on. From an old salt.
LikeLiked by 1 person