Pentagon discusses separate training for female soldiers
Bobo sends a link to the Washington Times in which they report that some “senior officers” hinted to Congress that they’re contemplating separate male & female training for combat arms positions. Just looking at the issue from that perspective it almost makes sense, until you read what members of the House Armed Services subcommittee said about the plan;
The idea was presented by Rep. Niki Tsongas.
“To put in place a training regimen that is ill-suited to maximizing the success of women is not really the outcome any of us want to see,” she said.
What does “maximizing the success of women” mean? Either she is saying that men are going to hold women back, like in “GI Jane”, or that they’re going to hold women to a different standard than men in order to make sure that more women qualify for combat arms jobs.
Army Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg, deputy chief of staff for personnel, agreed.
“We are looking at that, and we’re not looking at it just for the integration of women,” Gen. Bromberg testified. “We’re looking at it for the total soldier, because just as you have a 110-pound male who may lack some type of physiological capability or physical capability, he or she may both need to be trained differently. We’re trying to expand our understanding of how we train.”
Now, I was a 128-pound private and I’ll admit that training was probably more difficult for me than for, say, Tim Martin, who was built like a bull and went on to be one of the first Delta soldiers. But the standard remained the same for both of us because the standard doesn’t change for bullets.
Now, if the General means “trained differently” to reach the same standard of performance, well, that’s fine, but if they’re talking about defining the standard down to compensate for their size and ability, that’s just wrong. Combat has a single standard, irrespective of size and gender, and that’s how they should be trained.
[Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Milstead Jr. said] “They need to be nurtured different. They just need different steps as they go. They end up in the same place, the United States Marines.”
I didn’t know that the Marines knew how to use “nurture” in a complete sentence, and I’m sure that there are some DIs who would disagree with the General that “nurturing” is in their job descriptions. And it’s a disturbing trend in the language that indicates to me that the standards are going to plummet along with the combat effectiveness of the total force.
Category: Big Army
Wow, so they can look awesome in front of each other at training and then fall on their faces later?
I was/am a little guy too, but I have always been able to carry my weight and more, and serve as a contractor next to all the big guys. I see this female experiment as a set up for failure.
Nurtured Differently??
As I recall, being nurtured at Ft. Dix involved the occasional foot in my 4ss to keep me on point. I also recall some nurturing that involved questioning both the legitimacy of my birth and whether or not the best part of my DNA had trickled off somewhere….
Gee, we didn’t see this one coming or anything.
I went through basic training in the good old days of gender-separated basic training. I had no quarrels with it and wouldn’t object if the whole Army went back to this. Don’t most Combat Arms do OSUN anyway?
I say togeather or never. Screw this political crap
What in the beloved name of Chesty Puller and Audie Murphy are these fugging Idiots up to?
Sounds to me like they are trying to undermine both the accomplishments of women and the success of our military.
As it is now with women in most MOSs the commanders simply use them in the same capacity as they do male ones. ” Know your Marines and assign them according to their capabilities”.
If I run a supply unit and Susie ( or Bob) is only about 115 pounds I’m not going to have them trying to load folded GP Tents on a 5 ton. Im going to have Mike the Moose and his buddy Mark. Bob might be great at data entry, Susie might be the best forklift driver in the shop.
As long as they all have a basis understanding of how a rifle works, qualify with it and can man a defensive post its all good. That there are different PFT standards don’t mean shit. The unit can function with good leadership.
Now lets go to an Infantry unit. EVERBODY has to be able to hump a ruck with a basic load at least 10 miles without going into a coma. If Bob is a wimp he’s going to get worn out, there is no finding someone to pull his slack. Throw 10-15 Susies in the mix, all trained at the “Ladies School of Infantry and Social etiquette” Their training was based on gender ability and they get a rude awakening when they are expected to keep up with the guys.
What then? Do we change the entire Infantry standard? or do we just maintain an infantry regiment of females only, who keep their own standards?
[Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Milstead Jr. said] “They need to be nurtured different. They just need different steps as they go. They end up in the same place, the United States Marines.”
Has to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard a Marine General say! So lets have platoons of men and women who were “nurtured”, or is it neutered and spayed, through training. Keep them together through deployment and combat and let’s watch the failure. This is not only a disaster waiting for some unqualified combat troops it is am extra load on the qualified to the higher standards troops. When Charlie Sheen passes out in “Platoon” and Willem Defoe’s character says, “you’re humping too much shit troop, I’ll carry it for you”, I said bullshit. Until I learned what do and don’t carry in a rucksack, NO ONE offered to hump my shit for me. They had their own load to carry. Is that what it will be for the lowered standard troops along side the higher standard, qualified infantryman? I say not. Because they are creating an, in built resentment, between the two from AIT to the battlefield.
Whether they go through training together or separately – if they don’t meet identical standards through identical training how are they are equal? Or is someone saying “we can eventually get females to meet male standards if we take five times as long getting them there? (Which of course impacts readiness if recovery time from injuries would take proportionately longer as well.)
Or, to use Occam’s Razor – reduced separate standards, here we come.
@4, it’s OSUT, and this isn’t just about separate basic, it’s separate AITs for the SAME combat MOS. did you go to a MOS school separate from the other gender? didn’t think so.
I remember when I went to PLDC we had to conduct a “very long” 5 mile foot march out to our “very difficult” three day field problem. By mile 3 the SGL cross loaded the females gear to those of us that were Infantryman because they couldn’t keep up carrying the weight.
i think this is a great idea. lets train the sexes separately, and when they get to the units we can also keep them separate. we can have women only infantry regiments, and when they deploy, so they dont get mixed with the male infantry regiments, we can give them their own AOs. since they are smaller and cant ruck as much as far, lets keep their AOs closer to their own barracks, we can call this area “inside the wire” this “wire” can be the separating point between the male infantry units and the female infantry units. the wire must always be maintained to eliminate any accusations of sexual harassment. so these female infantry will operate in a smaller zone, it will be a more routine environment to get them acclimated to infantry life, with out having to cover all that ground, but they will still be a mobile force as they are actually infantry. i got it! we can call these female infantry (because to distinguish by gender is sexist) the Routine Environment Mobile Force infantry. that is a pretty long name, so we will shorten it to REMF infantry! their CIBs and EIBs will be pink instead of blue, we can give them a pink cord and discs for their dress uniforms, and everyone is equal!
Hell, even in the Navy my chief in Boot didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘nurture’ – unless of course his definition involved marching parties at 0100 and pushups with rifles.
This is just one more way for this administration to ruin our military. They don’t want a fighting force, they want a social experiment that turns out the way they want no matter what the reality of the situation is.
@11 Good points and LMAO at REMF!
im a pretty big guy, i stand 6’2″ and weigh in just under 220. there were more than a few times i had to pick up someone else’s slack because they couldnt hack it on a ruck. its what ya do when you are in a combat zone for over a year and your body is worn down. i am well above the average size soldier or even infantryman, my body can take a lot more. but if we were in the rear and it was a training march, you best be damn sure he was the top name heading to the S-4 detail.
@andy, i went to a gender separated AIT, they just forgot to make the female infantry school
@11 I like your REMF infantry better than my idea….I figured they would need special Effective For Female Infantry Nuturing General Platoon Operating Guide Systems
(EFFIN POGS)
I was 5’7 and 112 pounds when I joined the Army in 1992. It was an all male training company. Eleven weeks later, I was a napalm pissing 5’7 and 145 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal. And it sucked every day getting to that point. Did my DS take it easier on me because I was undersized? At the time I didn’t think so, but I look back on it now and think they scaled the training to your ability. Their goal was turn you into a the best combat engineer they could in the time they had, or to fail you out.
When I went back to BCT in 2007, I was in a mixed training company and honestly I think the men got short changed. Badly, because the DS trained to the group minimum standard, not to the individual. We had guys who went down in their PT from the initial assesment and others who if they hadn’t done PT on their own wouldn’t have passed.
That said, I’ll admit that men and women do need to train differently to achive the same results, and I’m all for seperate training companies, as long as they are training to the same standard. Which to me should be the old World War II PT test (replacing the straight leg situps with bent leg situps) and call it good. Failing that, the 17-21 male age group, (42 pushups, 53 situps, and as much as I hate to say it 15:54 on the run) should be the standard that gets trained too.
But that isn’t going to happen for a long time, if ever and I’m pretty sure that they are talking about training to two different standards here. Which is also going be a huge morale issue.
I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago and it just stuck with me….
…it shows a battlefield littered with dead American military, both male and female. It showed two enemy soldiers standing in the middle of the chaos saying “They were a well diversified force but they couldn’t fight worth a damn”.
I wish I could remember where I saw that, it seems to have a particular use these days.
@14, I did too, damn my 11X contract!
The single best way for women to lose all credibility is to hold them to a different standard. Women should be fighting this tooth and nail.
I miss the Infantry but am glad I am out in a way.
i broke my back on a jump and was told i could reclass to a desk or go home. my 4 years were up, i left. i regretted it every day until the past year or so. my older brother is a DS at leonard wood and i get to hear about the hand cuffs they have when it comes to training and the piss poor standards that are enforced. i look at the social engineering that is being dont to the military and thank God i left when i had the chance. i still miss it, i was damned good at my job, but seeing what is being done now, i couldnt take it. im a grunt, a mean nasty no place in civilized society foul mouthed grunt. the army has no place for soldiers like me any more. you have to “nurture” your soldiers now, i wipped mine into shape. if they couldnt MAX, not just pass, their PT test, we did squad PT daily after work until they could. i never did article 15s, i smoked them. they learned through physical pain the standards and they met the standards. this is how i was taught, this is how i taught those under me. this softer gentler army is, both figuratively and literally, gay
VOV, i like your acronym too, but its a bit much to remember lol
@21 Thank you for the post. You are absolutely right and you were trained the way I was and the way it should be now and should stay…forever. The best trained, best prepared force on the field is the winner in the long run.
Howie Bromberg says, “We’re trying to expand our understanding of how we train.” How about training to win, Howie, to overcome all obstacles, to ensure that our troops are as physically and emotionally able to meet all expected challenges and rigors as they can be, without lowering standards for politically correct reasons that assure that people will not suffer avoidable harm? Damn fools.
I’ve known Howard Bromberg a long time, and I’m very glad he’s in that position, as we deal with this. He has high standards, insists that training be to high standards, and he’s got gobs of common sense. He’s a warrior, not a politician, and I’m very glad he’s still in.
The Army could always give the ladies a few shot glasses of steroids and testosterone and supply razors to shave their cleavage.
No kidding? Nurture? I did not know that anyone could use the word ‘nurture’ and Marines in the same sentence.
Oh, Hell — and that’s where it’s all going. And right in front of me, too.
@26 Do NOT post any pics of what you just described. There isn’t enough eye bleach IN THE WORLD to erase an image like that.
@25. Yeah, we had Dumpster’s manboy show up here and write something nice about him quite a while ago, before Benghazi. Then, zip. Howie is a general. Therefore, he is at least 50% asskisser and 25% politician. That’s just the way it is.
@28 LMAO I agree!
May I say here that I don’t want a ‘kinder, gentler’ military?
I want a military that’s as mean as a snake, spits bullets, and sleeps with its eyes open, standing up.
@28 Actually there are many sites devoted to muscular, drug enhanced female body types…don’t ask me how I know that, just trust that I do in fact know it to be true.
What we need to do is drop all infantry training. Just appoint Infantrypersons and send them off to war. The survivors can be Infantrymen, the rest will get a flag from a Grateful Nation. The unfortunate part of my plan is that a lot of good men will die carrying the non-hackers load.
We’re equal and everyone is the same. But we need different training and “validated” (i.e different/lower but we just can’t say that out loud) standards. When has seperate but equal ever worked? Ever?
Now we are talking about training little males differently? This is insane! I cant believe I am reading this. One standard. Meet it or GTFO.
You can just see the delusional thought progression of how can we make the impossible possible. From same standards, then to “validated” standards, then to separate training.
How many females can we realistically expect to: a) want to be Infantry, and b) be able to meet even the lower normed standards? It’s simply more hand wringing to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. I am looking back at my life to try and identify at what point I slipped into this alternate universe.
“….. male who may lack some type of physiological capability or physical capability, he or she may both need to be trained differently.”
In ’63 I was rejected for infantry because of defective vision and I got trained differently as an automotive repairman. Always regretted that until my first VN tour.
I’m done. I’ve said my piece on this and if the powers that be don’t have the common sense g-d gave a dog, then there’s nothing more anyone can say to bring them around.
Drop and give me five if you don’t mind.
#11: Brilliant.
TopGoz, i feel i should take a bow
But seriously everyone, what is next? Remedial training programs for blind people who want to be Infantry? Remove the height and weight standards because it is unfair to fat asses, what about 3x longer OSUT for fatties? Do we send out reconstruction teams to build wheel chair ramps up the g-damn Hindu Kush to accommodate people born crippled but want to play soldier? Or what about the fact that we don’t let people with felonies serve? Let’s bring in guys straight out of prison to serve alongside our soldiers. Who cares if a few of our guys get killed by these criminals because it is what is fair!
Guess what the military discriminates. Its goal is to put the most effective bunch of killers on the battle field. The fact that a Marine general has the word “nurtured” in his vocabulary is absolutely disgraceful.
Before I retired, I weighed 155 pounds, I could bench press 250 pounds but installing the M242 receiver by myself for the gunnery test was still a bear of a task. Even putting the feeder on in those confined spaces of a Bradley turret took some work Are there women who can do it? Sure. Fewer if they get “nurtured”.
As a woman in the military I have to throw the BS flag. There are standards for all career fields, if you can’t meet those standards, you should not be in that field. They should not create special training for special people.
I have no interest in being nurtured, we do to much nurturing these days. No, I don’t want a damn hug.
Lt Col. Tom Kratman (an author at Baen Books) has had some things to say on this subject….
@42, John, all that was the easy part, getting the feed chutes reconnected to the feeder, that was the bear. I don’t miss BGST.
Jonn and Andy, i am glad i never had to ride in one of those boxes. ill jump out a c-130 any day of the week, but when i hit the ground, ill walk where i need to be.
i like maddie, sounds like my kind of woman
Smitty, I went in on a 11X contract and got made 11M at 30th AG. I thought it was the worst thing in the world, until I did my first NTC rotation right out of AIT. I saw some poor sap from the BN from the 25th that was augmenting our BDE for the rotation. It was after we assaulted a OPFOR def pos. He was wearing a pickle suit 2 sizes too small, had on a giant ruck, had a SAW and was wearing a Chia-pet on his Kevlar and looked whipped from humping all night long. I never questioned my place as a 11M again.
“Fundamental transformation” continues apace. And no senior military leaders, apparently, willing to stand up and say, “Stop.” This will not end well for many American warriots or for the country.
There is something wrong with General Milstead. He closes his official biography with a proclamation that he’s “happily married.” Who on earth would put that in an official bio, for military, business (OK, maybe politics, but that industry attracts bedwetters and bottom feeders anyway.) He’s compensating for and hiding a serious character defect. Par for the course.
Separate traing…it’s called WACs and WAVES…sure worked back then! Now we are talking!