Female USMC Infantry Study Results Are in.
WASHINGTON — A Marine Corps study that found all-male ground combat units more effective than teams that included women has raised new concerns about the Pentagon’s push to open all jobs to women next year.
A summary of results released Thursday from the unprecedented study showed that all-male ground combat squads were faster, stronger and more lethal in most cases than units that included women.The women also suffered higher injury rates during physically demanding training.
NO KIDDING. There’s a lot of good stuff in the article, so I’ve excerpted quite a bit of it. Still, you should go read the whole thing in order to appreciate the magnitude, depth, and details of this study, which was easily predictable for anyone who has a brain. I could barely get through each line without shouting to myself about something, so strap in and let’s go through it:
The Marine Corps and other services face a deadline the Pentagon has set for requiring military branches to open all specialties to women, including infantry and special operations forces, beginning next year
Administration officials have said their intent is to open all jobs to women and have set the bar high for waivers. “The department’s policy is that all ground combat positions will be open to women, unless rigorous analysis of factual data shows that the positions must remain closed,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said last month.
Let’s stop right there for a moment. Now, we have almost a whole year of FACTUAL DATA. This is what the advocates have been calling for, so they got it. But hey, maybe this was kind of a subjective test by guys who hate women. It probably wasn’t scientific at all, right?
The Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force turned training bases into laboratories, hooking Marines like Brown up to heart-rate monitors and GPS devices. Their rifles were rigged with devices that could determine the placement, accuracy and timing of every shot. Some 400 Marines, including about 100 women, signed up to be test subjects.
Huh. Now, we have had an exhaustive, lengthy examination of whether women could be integrated into the Marine Corps infantry. Millions were spent. Thousands of hours of data were pored over. Hundreds of females were screened.
So, I’m POSITIVE the military leadership would look at this exhaustive study with the cold, objective eyes of serious leaders who are sending young men and women into combat:
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who oversees the Marine Corps, said the study would not change his mind about opening all career fields to women.
There you go. I’ve been trying to tell you this. Whether women can perform the task is irrelevant. THE NARRATIVE is what is relevant. I told you this the other week:
Mark this down: I have a better chance of Stacy Keibler calling me out of the blue and professing her lust for me than Ash Carter saying “no” to females in ANY slot. Regardless of performance, or practicality, there is NO WAY that Carter grants an exemption to anyone. The narrative has been set, and the narrative must be followed through.
I know Secretary of Defense Ash Carter isn’t Ray Mabus, but they might as well be the same guy. They both serve at the whim of the president, and it’s pretty obvious that the orders handed down from on high have been crystal clear: Get some women in there or I’ll find someone else who can.
Let’s continue with the study results:
The Marine Corps went a step further, creating a task force that allowed commanders to compare all-male with gender-integrated units. That allowed the service to compare not just individual performance, but also how a team with women performs as a unit. The task force consisted of about 300 men and 100 women who trained together for nearly a year.
So this wasn’t just a case of seeing which women could, say, do enough pull-ups. This was a lengthy, exhaustive process mimicking the actual deployment of women to a line unit. Think of this as a mock pre-deployment spin-up.
“Anytime we did movement under load, all-male groups outperformed integrated groups,” said Paul Johnson, a Marine civilian official who helped develop and oversee the experiment.
Trivia question: How often are infantry Marines “under load” in combat? If you answered, “100 percent of the time,” congratulations. You are now officially more intelligent then the secretary of the Navy. Well, maybe the females can at least fire weapons accurately?
On marksmanship, men who had not been through infantry school hit targets 44% of the time with M4 rifles, besting infantry-trained women, who hit targets 28% of the time.
Even untrained men outperformed fully trained women. What does that tell you? Unlike in the movies, modern battle rifles with optics and IR lasers are kinda heavy. Maybe this has something to do with upper body strength. If only they had tested that. Oh, they did?
Women also struggled with obstacles designed to test upper body strength in simulated combat. “For example, when negotiating the wall obstacle, male Marines threw their packs to the top of the wall, whereas female Marines required regular assistance in getting their packs to the top,” the summary said.
Officials cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from the study. Better training and screening could boost female performance, for example. “We can get better on injuries,” Weinberg said. “We can get better on strength. We can get better on training.”
Let’s not draw too many conclusions from a study that lasted a year, cost tens of millions of dollars, and whose whole raison d’etre was to have conclusions drawn from it.
Sherry de Vries, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, said that once women have had more experience in the infantry their performance will rise. “The women don’t have the training that men had to begin with,” she said.
What in the Christ is that supposed to mean? The same freaking article JUST SAID that these women had completed infantry training, and were bested by men who hadn’t even gone though infantry training! If anything, dopey Sherry’s quote should read the exact opposite.
Secretary of the Navy Mabus was presented with all of these facts. Black and white, no bullshit FACTS. So what was his reaction?
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has doubled down on his assertion that all combat jobs should be opened to women in the wake of a new study showing that all-male Marine control groups outperformed those with women in nearly every infantry task.
In his radio interview, Mabus suggested the Marines’ study was flawed due to the caliber and mindset of the volunteer participants.
“It started out with a fairly large component of the men thinking ‘this is not a good idea,’ and ‘women will never be able to do this,’” Mabus said. “When you start out with that mindset, you’re almost presupposing the outcome.”
I’m trying to process what an absurd, ridiculous, MORONIC statement this is, and I’m having difficulty. In other words, Mabus thinks that because people THOUGHT they’d have a hard time, GOSH DARN IT, that this mind-control somehow carried over into women not being able to lift a pack over their heads.
Mabus also said the Marines could have selected female volunteers who were better suited to the task of marching under heavy loads, which accounted for many of the injuries that were observed.
“For the women that volunteered, probably there should have been a higher bar to cross to get into the experiment,” he said.
Hmmm. Gee, maybe he has a point. It wasn’t fair to just pick women straight out of boot camp who had no intention of going into the infantry anyway. Oh, but wait:
Female volunteers, except for a small “provisional infantry” group, were required to graduate from the Marines’ entry-level enlisted infantry training course and specific combat job schools, if applicable. They also had to get at least a third-class score on the male version of the Marine Corps’ Physical Fitness Test, requiring three pullups, 50 crunches in one minute, and a 3-mile run in 28 minutes.
So all of the volunteers for this study had ALREADY been selected. They were the ones who had actually finished infantry school. Is this an indictment upon the Infantry Training School, whose cadre had graduated the females who attended the integration experiment? A lot of the male Marines seemed to think so:
Because everyone in the platoon had graduated from ITB, Bradshaw said the experience raised serious questions about whether existing standards were stringent enough to select Marines who were cut out for success as a grunt.
“When the commandant came to visit us out at the range one day, he asked how many Marines felt that [infantry training] is adequate,” he said. “Half raised their hands.”
So who are these mythical females that Mabus is talking about? Is he implying that there is actually an entire group of female Marine superwomen that could have passed the course that weren’t selected to attend it? Where are the Marines keeping these wonder women?
I suppose I should just be happy that Mabus kept an open mind until the research was completed. Oh, wait a minute:
Mabus said before the release of the research that he was in favor of full integration, causing some Marines to question why he didn’t stop them from carrying out the research, which cost $36 million (!!!), in the first place.
THIRTY-SIX MIL. This was the ultimate in Kabuki dance. Mabus obviously didn’t give a rat’s ass what the experiment was going to show. The outcome was guaranteed. This man is UNFIT to be Secretary of the Navy. Hell, he’s not fit to be secretary of cleaning pus-ridden geriatric assholes, in my opinion.
If he had one shred of honor, he would go to the SecDef with these results, and say, “I will NOT HAVE THIS in my Marine Corps. We are less effective in almost every way. If you want to fire me, then fire me.”
Now just because Ray Mabus is bureaucratic buffoon, and these test results were the inevitable result of biology, doesn’t meant that I don’t have a lot of respect for the women who gave the efforts.
This is not written out of malice. This is written out of contempt for the effort of social engineers to lessen the lethality of Marine infantry units in the name of some bizarre crusade. Infantry training is hard, dirty work, and I want to definitely congratulate the female Marines who tried as hard as they could. They were obviously motivated, determined, and brought the Devil Dog attitude in spades.
They’re just up against limits in the human female body. Now, once we all get the exoskeletons, maybe we can address it again.
As I’ve previously stated, in a perfect world I wouldn’t mind letting women who could hack it into the units. I just know that whether they admit it or not, the leadership would change all kinds of shit to make it possible. And once the physical problems are done being discussed, you’re STILL going to have all of the sociological problems that all of the leadership would prefer not to discuss.What am I referring to?:
Over time, (the marine) said, discipline broke down because some noncommissioned officers were hesitant to hurt the feelings of more junior female Marines with orders or correction. Romantic relationships and friendships between male and female unit members also became a distraction, he said.
In other words:
There’s going to be some serious banging going on in units filled with
20-year-old men and women. What about the SOF units, whose members tend to be a
little bit older? Are the SF guys going to go train in Germany for three weeks
with the three new hot Green Beret chicks? How’s that going to go over with the
wives at home?
Read more: http://sofrep.com/43113/news-roundup-female-usmc-infantry-study-results-germanys-slow-suicide-breastfeeding-army-moms/#ixzz3lkpXkfBb
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