Two more female Marines dropped from infantry course
According to the Washington Free Beacon, two more female Marine officers failed to make it through the first day of training in the service’s Infantry Officer Course.
With the two most recent drops, there have been 29 attempts by female officers to pass the course since women have been allowed to volunteer, with none making it to graduation. (At least one woman has attempted the course more than once.) Only three female officers have made it beyond the initial day of training, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test, or CET. Male officers also regularly fail to pass the CET, and the overall course has a substantial attrition rate for males.
The Marine Corps spokesperson, Captain Maureen Krebs, told the Free Beacon that the two officers, “did not meet the standards required of them on day one in order to continue on with the course.” Fifteen male officers also did not meet the standards. Of the 118 officers who began the course, 101 proceeded to the second day.
Time is running short for the Marine Corps which has been directed to integrate women into all specialties, including the infantry and to make recommendations to the Pentagon about that integration. There have been some females graduate from the enlisted infantry course. They face the possibility of serving in the infantry with no female officers.
Of course, the social engineers, folks who won’t be serving in these specialties, folks who won’t be fighting in the next war are calling for changes to the training regimen, one that will allow more women to graduate from the course, but not necessarily make them competent officers;
Women Marines don’t want standards to be lowered or changed. They just want a fighting chance to become Marine infantry officers.
Women Marines don’t want the standards changed – but the social engineers want the standards changed. No one has explained to me how this helps us kill more of our country’s enemies, though.
Category: Marine Corps
I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.
THe GOlfer in Chief wants a Female Marine Infantry Officer and the Marines will have to by god deliver one to him.
of course they show some Good looking Army gal!! That course is hard as hell and made that way. I wanted only the hardest, meanest guy leading my son in Combat, bottom line. Just like the SEALS/Delta/SF/Recon etc…
S/F
Taco
ANd why Infantry? If they are so horny to have a combat arms female officer, send a couple to Armor Officer Basic.
Male LTs don’t break track, they don’t load ammo, and they don’t hump shit around the motor pool, Hell aside from a clipboard, LTs don’t carry ANYTHING in the motorpool, so a female should do just fine. A Woman could serve just as well as a turret plug as a man.
:/
You are wrong on that. While Armor Officers rarely do any of that in a FORSCOM unit, they do all of that and much more while going through ABOLC. As cadre here at Benning for ABOLC, we make them do it so they can feel what it is going to be like for their Soldiers/Marines.
What color are the sunsets on your home planet, propsguy? Things may have changed some since I was in, but I find it hard to believe they’ve changed that much. At the Tank Officers Basic Course that I attended, lieutenants did everything – drove, loaded, fired, broke track, humped ammo, you name it. And when we broke it, we fixed it. And we broke it a lot. And while we did spend a lot of time on the tank ramp, I don’t recall ever even going by the motor pool. No, I don’t think that the BAMs want to be Tank officers any more than they want to be Grunts.
Pressure will become tremendous to reduce those standards–something that the overwhelming majority of Marines, including those women who currently wish to serve in the infantry, believe would be damaging to the service.
1. The pressure is already there.
2. Damage to the service is seen as a feature instead of a bug.
I don’t get it. If even the female officers say the standards should not be lowered, what’s the issue? The social engineers will ram this square peg down the round hole of the military’s throat no matter what. It is a waste of time a dwindling military resources. Is the course fair? yes, in my mind, considering the wash out rate of males. Is it hard? Yes by God and it should be. My gear is this is going to happen. The only common sense way will not be to recruit the mythical Amazons but reduce the standards such that no males wash out and fewer than half the females. Do I want to serve under an infantry officer in combat when my and other lives are on the line with ANY officer who was rubber stamped, just to get their “X in Block 79” so to speak? NO, Hell NO!!!
The American military is still about breaking things and killing people, always has been always will be IF we want to truly defeat our enemies and bring them to their knees in submission and surrender. Never to threaten us again. However the lack of leadership in Washington from the Oval Office to the Pentagon is becoming more like a game of pick up sticks. Because we don’t want to seem harsh. We don’t want the “religion of peace” to think poorly of us in the long haul. I say screw them all and then screw them again. A dead, dead, dead enemy is one you don’t have to fear or negotiate with. The story and future the U.S. wants…is what we’ll have. Just takes the balls in the right places to do it. We have the means and capable forces. When oh when, will we decide to win this, all in or get all the way out and bomb our enemies mercilessly from a distance.
At this point , this has to happen. I actually hope they just hurry up and get on with the “experiment”.
Standards can be lowered, and they can be raised again.
The next major engagement down range will finally prove them wrong.
I will weep for the bodies of the men and women caught up in this mess, and their families, but it’s going to take letting the dumbasses with political agendas get their own way and then have it thrown back in their face by some of the nasty, non pc people out there in the world whose objective is, in fact, to kill people and break things. Not to socially engineer the human species, “nation build” and be a “good neighbor”
So I say, get on with it, lower the standards and do what you will. Just ensure that there is a bacup plan when it all goes horribly wrong.
The backup plan is to ignore the evidence that lower standards gets people killed and continue with the original plan.
The Marine Corps isn’t known for lowering standards. We raise them.
Period.
“No one has explained to me how this helps us kill more of our country’s enemies, though.”
Okay, lemme see if I can ‘splain this so it makes sense.
You’re NOT supposed to KILL our enemies.
You’re supposed to do the following things instead:
– negotiate terms with them.
– not offend their sensibilities.
– not shoot back if they shoot at you.
– invite them to a nice dinner.
– play with their kids and offer them candy and school supplies.
– allow yourself to be blown to bits, killed, whatever, but not shoot back, because guns are bad things.
I hope that was clear enough. I do try to be clear.
Don’t forget to “empathize” with them.
http://www.ijreview.com/2014/12/212850-hillary-remarks-beat-enemies-may-just-killed-chances-presidency/
After reading that, I noticed another article in the left margin about three Marines saving a woman from being robbed.
http://www.ijreview.com/2015/01/229852-4-three-marines-rush-stop-robbery-process-marines-run-toward-sound-chaos/
Way to go USMC!!
RIGHT margin …. I forgot which pocket my rock was in.
Sheesh.
Oh, yes! I read that brief bit of idiocracy and wondered what in the bloody hell is wrong with her. Then I realized I was looking at the biggest flimflam artist on the planet, worse than her old man – and she’s mad at HIM for whatever his latest sex scandal is?
Bitch, you married that asshole. You knew what your were getting. Deal with it. Shit, or get off the pot.
(Sorry for the rant.)
I’ve been to IOC. The first week is actually the easiest week. There’s no way a female would make it through the rest of the course if they’re having this much of a problem with Day 1.
Yeah, but Animal, 17 GUYS also failed the first day of CET.
‘Male officers also regularly fail to pass the CET, and the overall course has a substantial attrition rate for males.’ – article
Anything like this has a high attrition rate. At least they gave it a shot.
If you put only two samples into a test and both of them fail, instead of putting 50 samples through the same test, does that make it a valid test? No.
Since the women do not want lowered standards, the number of female candidates has to be increased or the standards will be lowered to ‘let’ them succeed.
I just think this is set up all wrong, because there is not a large enough demographic (of women) to create a valid statistic that will keep the standards at their current level.
I know it’s voluntary, but that isn’t going to satisfy the social engineers. Women will be sent to it whether they want it or not, the standards will be lowered to accommodate them, and that will be that.
Indeed. I’m sure the training has already been compromised by the distraction created for the instructors at IOC supporting this project of the social engineers. We had 5 captains as instructors and a lot of enlisted instructors to play aggressors and be guinea pigs for the new lieutenants if I remember correctly. They stayed very busy with the intense training schedule which ran night and day for days on end. I would think they’re probably feeling the extra taskings also. And that takes away from the overall training value and decreases overall performance on a bigger scale.
Looking at this from my agricultural science background, I would not be entirely surprised if the low sample size of females in the training program is deliberate on the part of the social ‘scientists’.
On the one hand, sure, it may be hard to get a sufficiently large number of interested parties at the specific time for both populations in this case to be even (female vs male), but on the other hand, a small sample like this allows them to fudge things to get the answers they want. (This is very bad science, not to mention unethical, but do I even need to say that?)
It may be that their bigger interest, endgoal-wise, on the part of the people pulling the strings is to dumb down the course so that in the long run they can get their on paper demographics to look the way they ‘think’ they should. Not a smart choice, and I don’t say that this is what all of the social scientist types ‘running’ the experiment want – but I can see the results being taken by those with a more populist axe to grind and put to this use, certainly.
I may be giving too much or too little credit to critters involved here. The gist of what I’m saying, Ex-PH2, is that I agree with you that the results currently are not valid but that I cynically suspect their answer to the flaws in this experiment won’t be to increase their sample size.
(I could go on and on picking out the flaws, but eh, you know, we can see ’em from here without field glasses!)
If I remember correctly when the program was first initiated several years ago, the sample size was to be 100 female graduates of each school.
At the current rate, the Marines can keep running the experiment for years before having to make a decision.
FWIW, I think there is a good possibility that the same thing will happen with Ranger School. While the Army is committed to a “test course” in the spring I’ve heard from good authority that as of two weeks before the application cut off the number of women who had volunteered for the course was paltry.
In a way, it’s good that they can draw it out this far; otherwise, what with politics being the way they are, they’re just going to be bombarded with complaints about why aren’t they looking into this, over and over again, as if somehow things have changed from the LAST test. By waiting until they’ve accumulated a ‘big enough’ sample size (even though the actual conditions are bs anyway), they can shut that down.
Really though, I remain unconvinced that they’re handling it ‘right’ all the same. There are a small number of women who can make the grade, and an even smaller number interested in pursuing this choice. Should they in a perfect world have the opportunity? Sure, maybe; that’s a different argument though from the one that’s currently being propounded. The current argument is about ‘equal rights’, neglecting that equal opportunities are still supposed to be based on _ability_.
Sorry, I got carried away there by the sound of my own voice (so to speak). Suffice to say, I’m not surprised that there’s not many volunteers; even among the male population, there’s the general population, the population that wants to, and then the population that CAN and wants to. It really should come as no surprise to the people pushing this stuff that the female population that fits into the latter two categories is exponentially smaller!
Exactly, Farmgirl. In 1967, I had the very naive idea that I could somehow get into a combat camera group. That was based on what I knew about Dickey Chappelle, but she was a civilian correspondent and was only required to get the story, not get directly involved in a combat zone.
I knew nothing about what the CC photojournalists had to go through in training then (aircrew, BUD/s with a SEAL class, photojournalism ‘C’ school), and I doubt that I’d have made it. I know better now, but I don’t think the current MCSes are expected to do that now. They just go to photo school.
This seems intentionally compromised to make an excuse to lower standards that have been in place for a long time, and for a very good reason. The foolishness that accompanies this kind of thing reflects blatant and dismissive ignorance on the part of the people who want to do this. Like Animal and others, I’m concerned that there will be more damage done by forcing this down the throats of combat instructors and teams, than anything else.
The sheer stupidity and braindead naivete displayed these PC social engineers are frightening. Since I see plenty of senior officers and enlisted women who never went into this, the argument itself – that it’s a better opportunity – is ludicrous.
Ex-PH2 – I admit Dickey Chappelle has been one of my heroes since I learned of her! I had a brief fling with the idea of joining the military (short version, my ears started our broken, which isn’t a desirable trait in the military, so the idea was a washout) but settled quickly enough into the role of ‘supporting from the outside’. This means that I’m not particularly knowledgeable about rules and procedures, be they Army, AF, Marines, Navy, Coast Guard, whathaveyou; I’m applying my own particular lens to the situation and couching it all in half-apologetic language to cover a multitude of sins of ignorance. I agree from my outside perspective that it seems like a fool’s choice. I can understand the desire to perform a role, but, as with my own hearing loss, I feel that recognizing that an inability to fulfill a given role is important. No amount of lowering of standards is going to make it DESIRABLE to put someone of less capability in that role. That it’s being perceived by the social scientists (or those hiring said social scientists, just as likely) as an equal rights issue, that women are being unfairly kept out of these roles on some basis of their reproductive equipment rather than on actual ability… it’s a conflation of two separate issues. One is the equal rights issue in the sense that people of equal ability should have equal access to jobs; I don’t think the military branches are denying that here. The other amounts to a form of affirmative action, or, as I think of it (particularly in this case), the illogical offshoot of equal opportunities for equal abilities, giving preference/precedence to people of lesser ability because of race or sex. And I’ll cut it here because as before, it looks too much like I’m falling in love with my own voice. ;P Suffice to say, I’m a farmer, my husband is a farmer; I can lug 40lb sacks of feed over my shoulder, two at a time, but I still can’t pick up half what he can. Equal opportunities:… Read more »
You have a superb perspective, Farmgirl. Would that others could “see” the same thing.
Why, thank you! Some of it definitely came with age. I accepted some of my limitations when I was in my teens and 20s but still with the stubbornness of not entirely seeing why it should matter. With time came greater understanding, and the dawning realization that a) it’s not ‘being weak’ to get assistance when it’s genuinely needed, and b) it’s okay to not be able to do absolutely everything that everybody else can do. My abilities may not all be equal; it doesn’t make me less of a person. Unfortunately, it does seem like a lot of the world hasn’t caught on to that, don’t it?
Which one is going to write an article and have it published in the WaPo or NY Times?
You mean maybe women aren’t as physically tough as men? Wow. Hard to believe.
This nonsense reminds me of Kara Hultgreen (I think that was the name). The Navy and social engineers were dying to have a female aircraft carrier pilot. By many accounts she was held to lower standards than the men during the training, and did indeed end up as a fighter pilot on a carrier.
Didn’t take long before she miscalculated a deck landing, and now she and the multimillion dollar aircraft are no more.
LT Hultgreen was a cautionary tale in how not to integrate pilots into different air frames. Following her death, and the death of another F-14 crew the Navy changed its rules on transitioning individuals from one air frame to another as well as re-qualifying from NFO to Pilot.
Kara died because she was an inexperienced F-14 pilot (she was only type rated six months prior after transitioning from the EA-6, which she was also carrier qualified on) who got into a rapidly deteriorating situation that was difficult to recover from.
The Navy ran the accident sequence dozens of times in the simulator and only one very experience pilot was able to recover the aircraft.
It doesn’t matter if your a man or woman, flying combat aircraft is dangerous, and rapidly changing air frames (less than a year in her case) before you become proficient in any is just bad.
To the Air Force’s credit, they approached the integration of women into combat aircraft in a different manner than the Navy. The Air Force chose not to transition qualified female pilots from one air frame to another, except for a few who I believe were serving as instructors. As a result they avoided allot of the issues that the Navy inflicted upon itself.
Luddite, thanks for the “rest of the story” on the Lt. Hultgreen accident.
Puts things in a different light.
And you speak with credibility on that episode, and air ops in general.
Former pilot, perhaps?
No, not a pilot; but I spent a considerable amount of time where I was responsible for US aircraft supporting my organization’s OPS.
As it was my ass on the line, I thought it prudent to know as much as I could about the regulatory requirements for flying (I was also graduate of jumpmaster, pathfinder, and Air ground ops which provided a decent knowledge base). You can learn much by actually reading the applicable regs and manuals.
I also had met Kara on a few occasions before her accident, so her incident carries a certain reticence. She had the potential to go far (although we were younger then and all had unlimited potential).
When we were younger, we were also all invincible. 🙂
There is no doubt that Kara was exceptional, just to be a female EA-6 pilot, and then fighter pilot.
And you have a background to be proud of yourself.
Invincibility and inexperience is never a good combination.
I unfortunately have way to many examples to site.
Anybody else notice a pattern here?
Wow? Really? And this is news?
My issue with this whole thing is why do female Marine officers get to choose the infantry while their male counterparts had to compete for it?
They don’t. The marine corps asked for women to volunteer. These women went to this course but will not earn the specialty unless and until a decision is made about opening the infantry.
About 100 women have completed the enlisted course and several have completed the armor and artillery courses.
They will be going through an integrated evaluation: http://www.gceitf.marines.mil
Female marines don’t want lower seperate standards? O rly?
Before they even join they are reaping and taking advantage of lower seperate standards. Give me a fucking break.
…and everyone said, “Amen”.
Women have to jump out of planes to be equal…lo and behold Jump School is now just a three week confidence course. The standards were initially separate and now they are combined meaning: lowered.
How so? I’m just curious, I hadn’t heard anything about this.
Hold on there, big fella!
Women go skydiving regularly. Some compete in skydiving competitions. We also fly airplanes and gliders.
What you said isn’t even a valid statement; it’s just a snide remark.
If you say something about jumping out of airplanes and women, you need to be a LOT more specific than that.
Skydiving and military parachuting are two different things. You can teach someone to skydive in one day, but that does not mean that person could safely participate in a military mass tactical parachute jump.
Do NOT equate sky diving with military static line jumping. I’ve done both…apples and oranges. Not a snide remark, just a FACT.
No more 6 pull ups…women cannot pass that… So let’s just do away with that standard. Runs…integrateintegrate the women in the runs and slow them ALL down. And the basic parachute wing is tarnished because of the LOWER STANDARDS due to the feminization of the military.
Again…Not a snide comment but FACT.
“just a three week confidence course” – did they change something? It was only a three week course back in the late -70s I believe.
It is now just a “rah rah” school with very little physical challenges compared to yesterday. It is still three weeks but with no pullup standards (due to females) and the runs are co-mingled (females). It is no longer a “Gateway school but nowt simply a confidence course with hazardous duty pay.
There was a day when I could do pullups. They were part of my exercise program, and I did them because I knew I was weak in my upper body and needed them. I didn’t do a ton of them, but I could do more than six, and they were full, over the bar chin ups, not just elbow breaks.
Tell you a secret: women refuse to do pullups because they don’t want to gain mass in their arms and necks. It’s a vanity thing, nothing more. It takes training, but woman CAN do pullups.