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USMC vs. Human Nature

Grunts to get brains washed for the sake of egalitarianism
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It has come to this:

Marines across the Corps will be challenged on their unconscious prejudices and presuppositions as women get the opportunity to become grunts for the first time.

The Marine Corps is rolling out mandatory training for all Marines before the first future female rifleman hits boot camp, aiming to set conditions for a smooth transition and head off cultural resistance.

Mobile training teams will be dispatched to installations across the Corps throughout May and June to offer a two-day seminar to majors and lieutenant colonels, Col. Anne Weinberg, deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office, told reporters Thursday. Those officers will then train the Marines under them.

Topics include unconscious bias, which focuses on how people prejudge others based on factors such as race and gender, and principles of institutional change. The seminar will also walk officers through the elements of the Corps’ plan for opening ground combat jobs to women and include vignettes featuring challenges units might encounter.

“You’re in the field, you only have this certain amount of space for billeting and you’ve got three women and six guys. How are you going to billet?” Weinberg said, describing a potential vignette. “Just some of these common sense things that these units probably haven’t had to deal with so that ground combat units haven’t had to deal with, but we’ve been dealing with in the rest of the Marine Corps for generations.”

Get this:

A Center for Naval Analyses survey of 54,000 Marines recently obtained by The Washington Post gives context to the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance as female Marines go infantry. The report found that a significant majority of male Marines at every rank opposed the decision to have women serve in ground combat jobs. The resistance was strongest among male junior officers in the ranks of captain and below, who opposed women in ground combat jobs at a rate of more than 72 percent. At least a third of female Marines at every rank were also opposed to the idea.

Notice that the objection is not to women in the Marines. It’s to female Marines serving in combat rolesRead the whole thing at Military.com. 

And yet, the US military is going ahead with this deeply unpopular policy anyway, because hey, we’re going to re-engineer human nature according to egalitarian ideals. Note that the story says the survey reveals “the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance” — not that it reveals “that the decision to put women in ground combat positions was unwise and at least premature.”

Back in February, Military Times reported:

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa — a retired Army Guard lieutenant colonel and the only female veteran serving in the Senate — said she supports opening all jobs but said it could take a generation before real integration occurs.

“This has been pushed quite rapidly by the administration, by the secretary of defense,” she said. “Not having well-thought-through implementation plans that have been thoroughly vetted could end up setting women back even further, instead of advancing them.”

“We need to make sure we have thought through this,” Ernst said.

Ernst emphasizes that she “fully supports” opening all combat jobs to women. Her 22 years in the military included a deployment to Kuwait and Iraq in 2003, and she says she wishes she had a wider range of opportunities during her career.

But she also said the top concern she hears from men and women in the ranks is the potential for watering down standards to help women qualify for combat jobs, a move that could risk readiness and safety.

Military leaders have repeatedly promised that won’t happen.

Right. Because standards are never lowered for politically correct reasons, anywhere. What this mandatory training is going to do is teach male grunts how to avert their eyes and keep their mouths shut. And boy, what a great idea it is to throw men and women into combat situations together. Hard to imagine sexual assault or misconduct anything going wrong.

There is nothing we won’t destroy for the sake of egalitarianism.

UPDATE: Reader Charles Curtis writes:

The problem with women in the military isn’t primarily about physical standards. I mean, that’s an issue – I’ve spent quite a bit of time tossing girls over ten foot walls on obstacle courses, walls that none of them would have been able to get over alone without the guys helping them, but hey, we can knock a couple few feet off the walls? Problem solved, right? And they can’t run anywhere as fast on average, and can’t carry anywhere near as much weight, but they can do sit ups a little better than guys. That’s big.

The problem isn’t even that women’s rate of attrition is several times greater than men’s, that they get hurt (“broken” as we used to say) far more often than men. It’s not that they also can get pregnant, which is a free ride home that men can never take, but hey, that’s cool.

No. The problem with women – and open homosexuals – serving is that sex subverts the chain of command, and wrecks unit cohesion. I was an Army 98G/C – Arabic linguist/voice intercept analyst/cryptographer – an intelligence job, one that was fully integrated. People who served in combat MOS’s probably don’t yet appreciate how much sex can pervert things – how it leads to abuse of power, coercion and fraternization. I’ve been impacted by this personally. My drill sergeant in AIT had an affair with a girl in our platoon, and it was a total disaster. Thank God no one was shooting at us as it all unwound..

18 to 35 year old men deploy for months at a time, and live in extremely intimate conditions while engaged in massive acts of systemic violence. Sex has absolutely no place in the middle of that, and when you add women and gays to the mix sex will be everywhere. Not to forget what the enemy is going to do to captured female soldiers. Rape is going to be used as psychological warfare.

And you can’t just quit the military when you’re being threatened and harassed like you can a civilian job. Your chain of command has life and death authority over you, and your commanding officers also have the primary judicial role under the UCMJ. *The same people who will be adjudicating your sexual harassment case could also be – and probably will be – directly complicit in the situation, either as the abuser, or else supporting the abuser.*

Fraternization, adultery, and until recently open homosexuality, have all been outlawed under the UCMJ to prevent people like General Petreaus doing what he did – using his massive power to coerce sex with a subordinate’s wife and then protect himself. Think David sending Bethsheba’s husband Uriah to his death so he could sleep with her.

This stuff – open homosexuality, coed combat units – is going to get people killed. It’s going to degrade our readiness and capacity to fight. These idiots in Washington are going to have a lot of blood on their hands.

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