A short video from
the USMC's mandatory gender-integrated training.
Some thoughts about this.
1) The cadre jump in angrily and immediately to pull the male off her. You can tell they are mad because he tried to hurt her, but in this context that's exactly what he is supposed to do. The whole point of pugil stick training is to teach aggression in killing with the rifle and/or bayonet.
2) Now he's being asked to train as if his opponent needs to be protected and treated somewhat gently. It is a basic principle of combat training that you will fight as you train (because you won't have time to think carefully while in contact with the enemy), so you should train as you intend to fight. He is being trained to be less aggressive in hand-to-hand combat. That creates the danger of failure in the field, when his life and his unit's will be on the line.
3) If training is altered so that she is on a more even footing, meanwhile, she will also be being trained wrong. She will be being led to believe in a fraud: that she has been given the right training and tools to succeed in a real war against a male opponent. Belief in this fraud can only hurt her if she is ever called to serve in combat. It will set up similar danger to her life and to the survival of her unit. She needs to be taught to realize that she is at an incredible disadvantage if circumstances like these ever occur in the field, because she is. Her survival, already unlikely, depends on her fully grasping how dangerous the situation is.
4) Anyone who might later attain command over women in an infantry unit also needs to understand this limitation of some of the Marines under their command, just as they understand other tactical limits. The future leaders who will emerge from this training also need to see what happens if they should order female Marines under their command into situations in which this kind of combat is likely to occur. The success and even the
survival of their units depends in large part on commanders fully understanding the limitations under which they and their units operate.
5) Thus, the cadre need to be trained out of their protectiveness if this is to continue. Pugil sticks are heavily padded, and combatants are in armor. Women Marines should be beaten as viciously as their opponents are able to beat them. That is the only way in which the training can teach the right lessons about how to survive and attain victory at war.
6) That fact alone ought to be reason to reconsider this whole enterprise. I don't think anything good will come of encouraging young men who excel in testosterone and strength to think of women as acceptable targets for their full strength. Such training will give us the most effective gender-integrated infantry units we could have, but they will still be less effective than all-male units -- and at the potentially substantial social cost of weakening our cultural norm against men using physical violence on women.
I cannot imagine the tradeoff is worth it, and
least of all as part of a strategy for making American society better and more decent for women. This is hugely counterproductive for both the military's ends and the social aims allegedly justifying it.
7) What is sometimes called the paradox of equality is on fullest display here. By creating a formal legal equality, we have created a massive actual inequality. You can repair the inequality of outcomes only by creating a new inequality -- for example, allowing the women paintball guns so that they can "win" against a pugil-stick wielding opponent by shooting him from a distance. That would potentially be decent training for both the man and the woman as it would teach the woman a workable way of surviving a situation like this one. It would also require the man to push even harder in order to succeed given the disability -- as he would have to if he were out of ammunition and facing someone with a rifle.
