Four female Marines to graduate from infantry training
Stars & Stripes reports that four female Marines are set to graduate this week from the service’s infantry school for enlisted Marines. The course began with 15 females and were whittled down to four after their 20-kilometer road march. Seven began the march and three didn’t finish. 26 men out of the 246 didn’t finish either.
Throughout the infantry training, the women were held to the same standards as men, including performing full pull-ups instead of a flexed-arm hang during the physical fitness test, the Marine Corps Times said.
The four women are assigned to Delta Company, Infantry Training Battalion, a part of the Marine Corps School of Infantry-East.
To be fair, I don’t think anyone on this blog ever said that there were no women who could meet the male standard, our concern was that the number of graduates wouldn’t be significant enough to please the military’s political masters who would eventually push military leadership, such as it is, to adjust the the standard lower in order to accommodate the social scientists. Now that it’s been proven that there are indeed women who can meet or exceed the male standard, they should leave well-enough alone since the Pentagon is so set to integrate the sexes in the infantry.
There’s no evidence to support lowering the standard. Unless it’s for purely political reasons.
Category: Marine Corps, Military issues
@50 – I have no idea what you’re talking about. Straw men? What the hell are you talking about?
If a Master Gunnery Sergeant says it’s going to be hell for these women when they hit the bricks in real-time combat, I’d take his word for it with no argument. It’s no picnic and I know it. Those women volunteered for the basic infantry training class, they passed, so kudos to them.
Will they pan out in the field? Well, we won’t know until they get there, will we?
Meantime, all I see is grown men with weak egos verbalizing their own fears of being replaced, which happens in the real world in all walks of life. The fact that these are women who may or may not replace them makes it worse. It would make more sense to wait and see how they do than to attack them up front.
If they do succeed, how does that make it worse? Oh, yeah — you lose your place in line for reproduction. That’s what it’s all about. Those women could be 3-eyed Martians or trained boa constrictors, and there would be less complaining.
And for what it’s worth,I haven’t ‘attacked’ you or even once addressed you, until this post, so get over yourself.
Ohio Coastie. Not a fan of being called a squid. But that aside I disagree in part with your argument. The other parts will be extinguished in 2014 and 2016. Therefore KMRIA.
A straw man is a rhetorical technique in which, rather than address opponents you have no effective rebuttal to (field sustainability, unit cohesion, medical problems) you attack fictional, easily refuted opponents (as you have focused on in all your posts, including this last). I hope it’s obvious from the tenor of this discussion who needs to get over themselves.
#53 Where the hell are you getting this crap?
Fictional opponents? Name one.
“They also had to perform three pull ups, just as the men did.”
That doesn’t make them elite. Three effing pullups? Jump school you had to do 6! Not a “dick check”…but calling it as I see it! I was from from a different part of the military, and my outlook on elite is very, very different than most of these readers-typists.
I’m NOT going to even delve into Ranger/SF school.
For a little “edumication” for the unknowing-Years ago there was this thing called VOLAR. The draft had ended and VOLAR was to be implemented. There was going to be a shortage of men to fight the “first team.” Plan: “Lets open open jobs to women to free up the men to fight.” Low and behold…the “social engineers” and feminists have for years morphed the VOLAR concept and now drummed up the “Big lie.”
“What society in its right mind, sends their women into combat, when there are able body men?
Col. “AD” veteran of WWII,Korea, Vietnam
“The course began with 15 females and were whittled down to four.”
You can bet your bottom dollar that these females were hand picked for this experiment. They more than likely represent the top 20% of females from their platoon. 4 out of 15 from a group that represents the top 20%.
If you dont think standards will be lowered to ensure that this political stunt is succesfull, you are fooling yourself.
To add injury to insult, I think this time they will not just lower the standards for females, they will lower the standards for everyone.
In the name of pretend equality.
@ 51 Ex-PH2 Says:
No. What you’re seeing is the experiences of individuals who’ve actually dealt with the available approximations of the issue in the real world, who have a real world understanding of human nature, especially concerning the age groups involved, and who’ve got their heads out of their asses enough to pay attention to something other than degenerate PC bullshit.
You are both self deluded, Ex-PH2, and grossly ignorant. But, in normal lefard form, you demand that your fantasy version of reality is the only that can be allowed to exist.
All in all, Ex-PH2, you and your ilk are every bit the problem in this destructionism.
OK, they passed how are you going to integrate them into a Infantry Unit?
@59, They aren’t going to an Infantry unit. Putting females in an SOI class is part of a test going on to check the feasibility of opening up combat arms MOS’s to women. I think these Marines should be proud of making it through the school. The “select volunteer group” had about a 75% drop out rate.
The process, if done correctly ( IE no lowering of standards) will give us some good data if it’s even worth it to send females to Infantry training. From the results so far from Marine IOC and SOI the results are a resounding “hell no” in my opinion.
The attrition rate is simply too high to justify putting them through the school. The next step, assigning them to an FMF unit is another total different phase( if it gets that far) SOI is a cakewalk compared to 3 months in a grunt BN doing a work up to deploy.
Here’s a selfie of the four young women who passed the course.
http://gawker.com/the-first-four-women-to-pass-marine-infantry-training-t-1468141089
Oh, and Grimmy — I’m not a liberal or a leftard. I don’t live in a fantasy world. I live in the real world. I’m neither ignorant, nor uninformed, nor am I worried that my place in life is anything other than what I make it into.
But you? You’re an asshole.