Marine Corps' "Gender Integrated Infantry Unit" Finishes Assessment

The latest in the quest to integrate women fully into line infantry units is the United States Marine Corps' nine-month study, just concluded, of a "gender integrated" infantry unit performing simulated combat. As a scientific experiment ought, it ran a standing infantry unit (all male) through the same paces to see how they compared. The results are as predictable as anything could possibly be.
Women in a new Marine Corps unit created to assess how female service members perform in combat were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield, according to the results of a long-awaited study produced by the service....

Infantry squads comprising men only also had better accuracy than squads with women in them, with “a notable difference between genders for every individual weapons system” used by infantry rifleman units. They include the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle (IAR) and the M203, a single-shot grenade launcher mounted to rifles, the study found.

The research also found that male Marines who have not received infantry training were still more accurate using firearms than women who have. And in removing wounded troops from the battlefield, there “were notable differences in execution times between all-male and gender-integrated groups,” with the exception being when a single person—”most often a male Marine” — carried someone away, the study found.

The full study is more than a thousand pages long, Marine officials said....

Researchers hooked men and women alike up to a variety of monitors, and found that the top 25th percentile of women overlapped with the bottom 25th percentile of men when it came to anaerobic power, a measure of strength, Marine officials said....

The gender-integrated unit’s assessment also found that 40.5 percent of women participating suffered some form of musculoskeletal injury, while 18.8 percent of men did. Twenty-one women lost time in the unit due to injuries, 19 of whom suffered injuries to their lower extremities. Of those, 16 women were injured while while carrying heavy loads in an organized movement, like a march, the study found.
Naturally the results were immediately dismissed by the Secretary of the Navy. Some of the Marines involved in the study were so incensed by his refusal to take the results on board that they took the unusual -- and certain to be punished -- step of complaining openly to the press about the appointed civilian leadership.
Marines involved in a controversial experiment evaluating a gender-integrated infantry unit say they feel betrayed by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus after he criticized the results of a nine-month study that found women are injured more frequently and shoot less accurately in simulated combat conditions.

“Our secretary of the Navy completely rolled the Marine Corps and the entire staff that was involved in putting this [experiment] in place under the bus,” said Sgt. Danielle Beck, a female anti-armor gunner with the task force....

To Beck, a 30 year-old who was one of the strongest women in the company, Mabus’s remarks were insulting.

“Everyone that was involved did the job and completed the mission to the best of their abilities,” said Beck, adding that Mabus’s remarks about the type of women in the experiment were a “slap in the face.”

“The caliber of the women in Weapons Company are few and far between in the Marine Corps,” she added. “They are probably some of the most professional women that anybody will ever have chance to work with, and the heart and drive and determination that they had is incomparable to most women in the Marine Corps.”
The thing is, this study lines up perfectly with the results from the United Kingdom's tri-service longitudinal study of women in the military. They also found that, across the services and over time, women were less physically capable, less lethal because the strain on their bodies interfered with weapons accuracy, more likely to be injured, less capable of helping other soldiers who became wounded, and reduced the unit's ability to maneuver under fire.

The Marines haven't found anything new. The real question is whether we can accept the truth, or whether we just cannot. If we can't, in the end, Americans will die in some cornfield or ricefield or desert ditch because of it. Wars may be lost, the course of history may turn away from our vision of human liberty, but that's hard to get your head around. Just think of the kids you're leaving to die, Secretary Mabus. Think about the Marines you are personally condemning to death.

10 comments:

Ymar Sakar said...

The truth is that Democrats are selling promotions in combat to purge the military and replace them with loyalists.

The truth is that all women and all male military units have always worked better in the long run.

But that is not the truth people wish to see, so they make up rationalizations about non existent coincidences and justifications.

Ymar Sakar said...

Hussein and his subordinates get a big phat smile on their face when Americans die or are tortured.

That's also something people who thought the Democrat party were full of clowns like Ayers in the clown car that is the org itself, with little to no over arching strategic threat.

Ayers and Soros must have seemed like meaningless statistics to you, Grim, years ago, and you would have liked to downplay them as non entities.

Reality is a little bit different once those justifications and rationalizations are stripped off. Just as you did not see the threat of Ayers or his student, Hussein Obola, nor can you see what else is going on. But that is your special fault or trait, just look amongst your Leftist associates, their zombie gazes are manifold and manifest. Amongst every one is a proto Ayers or a potential Hussein O.

Dad29 said...

Think about the Marines you are personally condemning to death.

What?

The Left has NEVER concerned itself with life. Never.

Ymar Sakar said...

Correction: Insert "not" in front of special for last comment. Changes the meaning slightly, inverting it to "not a special trait of" x.

Cassandra said...

SCIENCE DENIERS!!!!!!!!!!!!11! :p

Cassandra said...

This was awfully good, even if it *was* written by an Army officer:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/women-in-the-infantry-no-thanks-1442271810

I was thrilled when Capt. Griest and First Lt. Haver earned their Ranger tabs. I was especially pleased when Army cadre and peers assured me that the Ranger School’s high standards were maintained. As a woman, I support equal rights to a sensible point. At the same time, women must acknowledge that equality does not mean selective equality. I wish it did. I want to see those hard-charging, superwomen sisters of mine pursue every career opportunity the military offers men. No doubt they can do it—and do it well. But Ranger School for these two exceptional individuals is not the same as allowing women to serve in the infantry.

First, opening the infantry to women necessitates revisiting Rostker v. Goldberg, the 1981 Supreme Court ruling that only men are required to register for the draft. If the infantry is compelled to include women, the argument against women registering for the draft will be invalidated. If women are to be treated “equally” and serve in the infantry, shouldn’t they be drafted into the infantry at an equal rate?

For some reason, I found myself thinking of the Princess Bride.

"You keep using that word (equality). I am not sure it means what you think it means." :p

Anonymous said...

Leaving aside the obvious inadvisability of mixed units. I was rather surprised accuracy is better along all weapons honestly. I wonder if weapon weight is a factor. I would have thought point and shoot being the one place where men and women were more or less equal.

Grim said...

What the British suggest about that is that fatigue is the main thing lowering weapons accuracy. Because they are less strong across the board (and the USMC study replicates that finding, with regard to the overlap between the 25% strongest women and the 25% weakest men), the same activity tires women more than men. That extra fatigue shows up in the ability to put steel on target during combat maneuvers.

Cassandra said...

Seems quite plausible to me, Grim. The upper body strength thing is a big deal.

I was very athletic in HS and my legs and abs were extremely strong. I could lift the same amount of weight on a bench press machine as guys much bigger than I was.

But in upper body strength... no contest whatsoever. When we had our first child, I couldn't carry him on the kiddy backpack (our kids were BIG) until I spent 3-4 weeks doing Army presses at Nautilus.

When the kids were small, I did odd jobs like house painting and windows, and again the upper body thing just killed me. I remember coming home once from a window job so tired that I just broke down and cried. I was shaking all over from sheer fatigue.

One of the more plausible criticisms I've seen of these trials is that women come into them less prepared. Well, that may be but the military doesn't control how people prepare for Infantry school, or life in general. Maybe if girls did all the same things boys did, we'd be still-less-strong but not as less strong.

Since I'm spamming Grim's comments today with links, this was hysterical if you haven't already seen it:

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/09/15/guantanamo-bay-prisoners-match-com-profile-detained-ready-mingle/

Cassandra said...

... I could lift the same amount of weight on a bench press machine as guys much bigger than I was.

Which, by the way, isn't the same as being able to do this day-in, day-out. I had the muscle strength, but suspect there are important differences in the joint area. That's a distinction that seems to get lost a lot.