Posted on 04/13/2014 5:36:52 PM PDT by RoosterRedux
The military is taking steps to prepare women for combat roles in 2016.
The Marine Corps announced that it would give young female lieutenants who wash out of the grueling Infantry Officer Course a second shot, same as their male counterparts.
The Army is conducting a study to test just how fit a soldier has to be to engage in combat. The study involves 60 women and 100 men.
CBS News reported on both developments last week.
The Marine Corps announcement came after Marine 2nd Lt. Sage Santangelo took the Infantry Officer Court and wrote about her experience last month in an op-ed in The Washington Post. She didn’t make it past the first day and blamed the Marine Corps for a dual standard that sets up women to flunk the course.
Fifteen young women Marines have taken the course. All washed out and all but one washed out on the first day.
She wrote that male officers could retake the course if they failed, but that women could not.
The commandant of the Marine Corps ordered the change after he read her op-ed.
"I'm very humbled that he would consider my opinions and my thoughts," Santangelo, 24, told CBS. "I'm hopeful that it will help others, and I'm glad to see that he's doing that."
The Marines invited female officers to take the Infantry Officer Course in 2012. The 13-week course tests the mettle of potential infantry officers.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
That’s a man, Baaaby.
Good if they’re going to be fighting Americans. Bad if they’re going to be fighting America’s enemies.
If you could teach them to be expert combat hand gunners like the ones on the shooting channels. There would be some serious behind kicked.
Israel tried it years ago and found that having women in combat units reduced unit effectiveness by as high as 40%.
Sheesh, don’t bring this up or the game of football will be ruined forever.
That’s not a choice I should have to make, but I’d take the strongest fighter. I’ve never met a woman I couldn’t kill with my hands, and if you’re a Marine infantryman, you haven’t either. There are no handicaps in battle.
What average male has completed Quantico?
Your kettle bells are no match for elite officer training.
About sixty percent of women in marines couldn’t complete 3 pull ups the last go around.
Did Santangelo not train prior????
It's not that I am in favor of women in combat...I am just against fags in combat.
That said, there are many fine MOS's for gays...just not at the front.
That is bizarre since pullups are major part of the Crossfit regime and some women do over 100.
Makes me wonder if these women at the USMC weren't planted there by some FEMEN organization.
I’m old and getting blind — something I have refused to admit for years.
You hide it well.
Yes, many of the better women in the CrossFit world would be able to hold themselves in combat training, especially if they already held military backgrounds.
Quantico is tough and gets tougher as the training progresses. If someone can’t make it past day 1, then they don’t belong there.
Another thing, name another enemy we will ever face that has female front line combatants?
This is foolish and damn dangerous.
An 80 year old man, or a 10 year old boy can shoot, pulling a trigger isn’t what makes soldiering hard work.
Some women can certainly outperform many men in biking and running events, including triathlons. But, that’s the wrong metric for infantry combat because those events don’t include strength and carrying requirements that are the real measure of performance in a combat environment.
Women do not have the muscle and body mass to be able to perform as a fully functioning part of a team. If they are integrated into an infantry squad or platoon, someone else is going to be carrying part of their gear. These happens with men as well and they get weeded out, one way or another.
When the Chinese attacked across the Yalu, those soldiers and Marines who couldn’t keep up fell out along side the road where they were executed by the Chicoms. Our military hasn’t faced such a situation since, but if we do, women will not make it.
There are no "average males" in Marine Corps infantry, only well-tuned, strong, fast and aggressive killers. The weakest men among them can snap the strongest woman like a twig, especially after the long term rigors of life in the field has taken its toll on everyone's endurance. Infantry combat is not a courtroom or a social lab, but a merciless meat grinder.
Do I?
Or are you, as you often do, just looking for scabs to pick at?
What a wonderful legacy.
"Among all those Freepers who were trying to make a difference, he was a scab picker!"
There are women who could serve in combat infantry roles and succeed, but thats no reason to open direct combat roles to women. It’s not sexist, its math. I know there are women who could do serve in infantry units so and some who would even thrive. That is not the problem, the problem is that what an average 18 year old male can do, you need to locate a female in top 95th physical percentile. Finding females who are likely candidates for a college scholarship in sports and the fast track for success in life that they should skip college and instead live in the mud for months at a time for a social experiment is even harder.
What you end up with for willing candidates is a handful of college grad marathon runners who would like to punch their social justice ticket to say they did it for womenkind. They may make it through qualification courses, maybe even a deployment in carefully choreographed scenarios with a token number of outside the wire incidents to make everything look legit. Mor likely than not, this type of woman has no intention of living the life for an entire career, like John Kerry, they will get medals and get out, then turn on everyone who was stupid enough to trust them in order to build a political career.
Nah, that can't be.
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