Ellen Haring and Jim Crow basic training

Ellen Haring, a former Army colonel who famously sued the Pentagon because she wasn’t allowed to compete with her male peers by serving in combat arms units, wrote in Task & Purpose last month that the Marines are cheating female Marines out of good coombat training because they are conducting separate basic training classes for males and females. She compares the separation to Jim Crow laws of the Old South;

The problem with the notion of separate but equal is that we have a well-established history that documents the poor outcomes of such a practice. The military did it to Japanese Americans and African Americans, but eventually discarded the practice. We have only to look at the discredited Jim Crow-era laws that segregated people by color to know how this establishes structural inequalities and perpetuates bias and discrimination. The reality is that separate is never equal. In fact, “separate” creates a very negative two-class culture that disadvantages one group, but cloaks the disadvantage by claiming that it actually benefits the minority group.

Decades ago, the Marines experimented with mixed basic training and found that they were cheating their trainees and went back to the separate units. The men, the Marines most likely to end up in combat, were held back from their potential because a unit is only as good as it’s weakest member. Haring complains that the pipeline for female Marines is narrow because there is only one training battalion for women;

Because the Marine Corps maintains a narrow training pipeline, just one battalion for female recruits, they ensure that women make up less than 8% of the Marine Corps. This, in turn, causes the only battalion that trains women to be perpetually understaffed. The result is that there are negative training outcomes for the female recruits. They don’t receive as much instruction and the women graduate from boot camp with lower average training scores than their male colleagues.

Maybe there’s only one battalion because only 8% of the people who volunteer for the Marine Corps are women. Haring implies that there would be more female volunteers if training was de-segregated, but she offers no proof, just more words. I’m not aware of any females who can’t get into the Marines because of this narrow pipeline. Is there a line at the recruiters’ offices? There is also no evidence that Women Marines aren’t trained as well as their male counterparts because of segregation in basic training. The Marines have been forced to allow women into their combat units, but I guess that’s not good enough for the social justice warriors like Haring. Now she’s just making excuses, like when she sued the Pentagon for her own piss-poor performance as an officer in the Army.

Category: Marine Corps