08:08 – Women will be first to graduate from Marine Corps infantry training course
Three pull-ups? A 12.5-mile march with a 90-pound pack? No push-ups? Geez. I think they must have lowered the standards while no one was looking. When I was in high school, our gym teacher was a former DI. Every year, he had his classes do the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test. We didn’t do the 3-mile run; everything was indoors. But I’m pretty sure if we had done the run we’d have had to complete it within 18 minutes rather than 21 minutes to score 100%. We did do the push-ups, which are apparently no longer part of the test, and we did do a timed rope climb, which is also no longer part of the test. I remember the numbers necessary to get 100% on the test, because that’s what I scored. You needed to do 114 sit-ups within two minutes, 70 push-ups within two minutes, and 20 pull-ups, with no time limit. I think three pull-ups would have scored me about a D-, if not an F+.
I’m not slamming the young women mentioned in the article. I’m sure they’re in extraordinarily good shape. And I don’t doubt that they’re very, very strong. For women. In a relative sense, I’m sure these young women are in as good or better shape than the young men they’re competing with. But combat isn’t relative, it’s absolute. If you need to carry a heavy machine gun and ammunition cases, they don’t get any lighter just because it’s a woman carrying them. And if you need to pick up and carry a wounded buddy, he doesn’t get any lighter just because it’s a woman carrying him. For those and other reasons, women don’t belong in the infantry. Only men–and only young men, at that–belong in the infantry. Women and older men are suitable to be garrison and support troops, but not front-line infantry.
I agree, but it’s a done deal; those senior officers and NCOs who can’t or won’t get with the program, on this, and related social-engineering issues, are being purged. And many, if not most, spec ops troops are becoming increasingly pissed off and bitter about what is happening in the military services they work for and at this administration for repeatedly betraying them and putting their business out on the street. Like many in the U.S., they love the country and its people, but hate the government more and more each day.
35 today and sunny with blue skies and no wind.
That’s odd. I just found a ROTC link to the MC fitness test. It shows separate tests for men and women: 20 pullups for the men vs. 70 seconds “flexed arm hang” for the women. I wonder where the “3 pullups” comes from?
In any case, I certainly agree: combat is not relative. The test should be calibrated to what a combat soldier needs to be able to do, and left there regardless of race, gender or hair color. If you need to be able to do a fireman’s carry of an injured 120kg marine for 100 yards, then that’s what you had better be able to do. Reminds me of the test – it was either a fire-fighter or an EMT – where the women were excused from having to carry one end of a stretcher. Stupid.
I’m currently re-reading Daemon. The criticisms of the US government rang all too true the first time, and even more so now…
My gym teacher was a Marine DI and Gunney and we too had to pass the full Marine Physical Fitness Test, including the 6 mile run. We too did it all indoors, we had a huge indoor track. I forget how many laps the 6 mile run was. I remember some slackards thought they could skip a few laps by hiding under the basketball court bleechers. Well this was not Mr. R’s first rodeo, so he knew what was going on. Those fellows got a special 6 mile run, after school with Mr. R running right along with them for “encouragement”.
What is even sadder though is that all of the senior officers that we the citizens could depend on to protect our rights have been “retired”.
This doesn’t mean females will serve in Infantry units.
Yet.
Obummer has to expunge the cadre first and put in the commie pinko pussy bastards and bitches.
Just to be clear, I have other objections to women in combat. The first is fundamental biology. Women are more valuable than men, in the sense that it takes a woman 9 months to produce a baby. The male part takes a few minutes, and one man could successfully impregnate hundreds or thousands of women. The human race won’t die out from a shortage of good male breeders. The second is evolutionary instinct. A man will go a long way in combat to save one of his male buddies, but that pales compared to what any male soldier will do to save a female buddy. He’ll risk himself to an extent he wouldn’t for another man. He’ll risk the mission itself. He can’t help it. He has a couple million years of evolved instinct forcing him to protect the women.
All of that said, it’s not combat per se that I object to. It’s placing women (or anyone else) in a situation where her (or his) physical limitations endanger herself/himself, her/his unit, and the mission. Other than per the above, I don’t have a problem putting a woman in harm’s way if she wants to be there and if her limitations won’t let down the side. Let her fly an A-10 or a helicopter gunship, assuming she’s physically capable of doing so. I don’t doubt that some women could excell in those roles, as good as any man and better than most. Let her command a tank or other AFV, or be a gunner (assuming mechanized ammunition handling).
My friend Mary Chervenak is a Marathon runner and frequently does heavy workouts at the gym. I do not doubt that Mary could run most Marines into the ground, if neither was carrying extra weight, like say a 90-pound (if not 120 pound) pack. I don’t doubt that Mary would score 100% on the MCPFT I took. I know she can do 70 pushups and 114 situps in two minutes each, and I’d be surprised if she couldn’t do 20 pullups. But Mary would be the first to tell you that she wouldn’t be able to keep up if she had to carry the loads expected to be carried by combat infantrymen. Things haven’t changed much in 2,000+ years. Back then, they called Legionaries “Marius’s Mules”. The only difference nowadays is that the Mules are carrying different stuff.
My son’s senior DI in boot camp had a 38″ inseam. My son has a 30″ inseam. Running, power walking with your favorite 65mm mortar barrel, or marching with him was an experience according to my son.
And remember, somebody else had that 50 lb mortar base. And other marines carried the tripod or 3 mortars each. If a woman cannot do that then she has no business being a Marine.
The wife and I did meet several female marines on our trips to 29 Palms. Very stout compact ladies, mostly in the MPs. One of them was six months pregnant but with her belly muscles had only a small bump. I felt sorry for the reduced space available to the kid.
The human race won’t die out from a shortage of good male breeders.
Obviously you never watched the “Sliders” series.
Let her command a tank or other AFV, or be a gunner (assuming mechanized ammunition handling).
Won’t work. Tankers have to be able fix the tracks on the tank which requires a extreme muscular effort from the crew.
I’d be surprised if she couldn’t do 20 pullups
I would be. Pullups are very hard for women to do. The power to weight ratio is all wrong. However, situps …
I’m sure they are, but I’ll bet you money Mary could do 20. I remember the time that Barbara’s friend Socialist Nancy (she has several friends named Nancy, so I named them Librarian Nancy, Socialist Nancy, and so on…) embarrassed a young Marine who told her that gurls couldn’t do pull-ups. So he did pull-ups until he couldn’t do any more and then yielded the bar to Socialist Nancy. She proceeded to do more pull-ups than he had, which no doubt deflated him significantly. Then, to add insult, she started doing *one-handed* pull-ups. The guy slunk away. Of course, Nancy hadn’t mentioned that she was a serious rock climber.
The male part takes a few minutes
Speak for yourself.
one man could successfully impregnate hundreds or thousands of women
Hopefully spread out over a few weeks.
Thanks, Ray, that made my day here! LOL.
I still agree with Bob but would also extend the reasoning, obviously, to police and firefighter jobs; a tiny minority of women can do the gigs but that’s it. I mean the street gigs, not sitting behind a desk answering phones and doing “analysis” or detective stuff. Wrestling with drunks in the gutter, breaking up biker bar brawls, or hauling a 300-pound woman out of a burning building. That 150-pound test needs to be updated drastically in today’s Murka; one look at the Walmart customers and the wallyhogs leaving the local creemee stands here in the summuh tells me that.
I saw the beginnings of the dumbass PC shit back in the early 80s and the writing on the wall and got out by 1986; never looked back. Guys I partnered with back then are all either retired or dead; my old DI from the MA State Police Academy, who’d been a phys ed instructor back then, is now the chief of the MIT PD and was the spokesman for their campus officer who was murdered by one of the hadji nitwits right after the Marathon bombing.
http://web.mit.edu/cp/www/chief_page.htm
Back in 1980 he was the Academy stud and nailed a series of classes’ young wimmenz.
One of his fave exercises for us was to lie on our backs with our hands behind our heads and just keep our feet elevated with legs straight for as long as we could. Try it. And he’d do the pushups with alternate one hand at a time.
There’s another concern – if you have a military where a significant percentage of the non-direct-combat jobs are assigned to women, but men remain 100% of the combat forces, then what non-combat jobs will be open to those men that can no longer handle combat due to age or injuries? Is the result a two tier system where if you are in a combat MOS, your assignments will be combat until you can no longer continue and then you are out of the service because there are too few open non-combat positions? What effect will this have on recruiting men?
My old judo instructor used to get us to do that, only we had to have our arms extended, and keep our heels no less than 6″ and no more than 12″ of the floor. I hated that man.
Well, as I’ve said many times, I don’t believe we should have a standing military, and certainly not a large career military. I’d like to see a maximum of 100,000 career in all branches, with at most 3% to 5% officers of all ranks and most of the remainder non-coms.
Just to cheer things up, I thought you’d like to know President Obummer awarded the Medal of Freedom to Oprah “bear liver” Winfrey, Gloria Steinem and Bill “BJ” Clinton today. What any of those douche nozzles did for “freedom” is beyond me.
These criminal thugs and bullshit artists just give each other awards all the time; the Heroine of Triopli and Benghazi got one, too, not that long ago. And this is just after and DURING the insane chatter by the billionaire Oprah that white people just need to die. Which itself was stated in public after the decades during which white people made her a fucking billionaire. Steinem is an old Sixties retread hag who’s been whining a lot lately about being forgotten and not given her due, etc., etc. which as far as I’m concerned should have been a stint on a labor gang repairing national infrastructure with hardened convicts. Larry Klinton should be in a fluorescent orange jumpsuit in adjoining cells with Manuel Noriega and HILLARY! as a convicted war criminal.
Criminal parasite scum who by rights all belong against a firing squad wall.
Speaking of super-fine accomplishments, how about this? Steal the kill from 15 lions while they are eating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNeNTMmltyc
Geez, I’d have to be pretty damned hungry before I’d attempt that, even if my buddies and I were armed with heavy automatic rifles.
Robert, you hit the nail on the head. What the military is doing is turning combat operations into a female empowerment exercise. I was in the military for 24 years active and reserve, and from the very beginning, slots for the jobs that got people places were reserved for women and minorities, who were immediately put to the front of the line. It was very unfair to some of the people, because they weren’t always the best and they would sometimes fail, and other time perform poorly. Everybody knew, and it devalued the excellence of the people who earned those jobs, women, minority, or otherwise. The way I see it, the military should be a strict meritocracy in the officer ranks. There is no place for racial or sexual boosterism for its own sake, because people get killed by leaders that are not equipped by nature or otherwise to make the right decisions. As for the infantry (and by extrapolation police and firefighters in the civilian world) if you do not have the physical strength to do the job, and there are many MEN who don’t have it, then you don’t belong. Period. It’s a young man’s job. Which is why I am done.
FIFY
Ray beat me to it, though I was going to write “You’re doing it wrong.”
re physical standards for women, I agree the standards should not be relaxed just because the candidate is a giiiirl. I also agree entirely with RBT: I don’t like the idea of putting women in harm’s way, but it should be their choice … if they can do the job.
re different MOS options for women vs for men, when I was in (pretty much all of the 1980s and early 1990s, including my reserve time), there were complaints that promotions came faster for soldiers and officers who’d had the plum jobs, such as a year in an infantry unit on the Korean DMZ, or special training such as ranger school. And that wasn’t fair because women were not allowed to get those plum jobs or take the elite training. There was talk of no longer considering such qualifications in the promotions boards, or (even worse) treating all female promotion candidates as if they had the qualifications. I was out before I heard what came of that.
I started out as an Minuteman III ICBM launch officer in the Air Force in the early 90s, so my comments are relative to what I saw there and what followed later.
@Matthew; I assume the bases in the Dakotas, Montana, etc.? Just curious; what did you think of the AF security forces there? I was Air/Security Police at only one nuke site and that was in Bangor, Maine, 1971-72. Weapons storage area and armed fighter-interceptors. SAC base to our northeast, Loring, and two more SAC bases southeast at Plattsburgh, NY and further south at Westover in MA.
I was a ground-pounder enlisted man and then an intel officer. (Not exactly my first choice, but I was aiming at Special Forces, and Military Intelligence was one of the major SF feeders at the time.) I went from an infantry unit up on the Korean DMZ to a rear echelon job at Ft Monmouth, working on development of a next-generation surveillance aircraft, while I waited for my various training slots to open up. In my last year on active duty, I was privileged to hear lots of bitching about how unfair the promotion scheme was. Right. I’d done 13 months of 100-hour weeks and living in tents and temporary buildings followed by 15 months of spending most of my time on the road and living out of a suitcase, had a higher-than-the-President security clearance, and had volunteered for jump school and ranger school and green beret school. And it was unfair that I had more promotion points than, for instance, my short-duration girlfriend, who’d supervised a typing pool for 18 months at Ft Monmouth.
(That dispute wasn’t why she was short-duration girlfriend. The reason was that she wanted a boyfriend who was around more than a week a month, so she found one. While I was in California or Texas or somewhere, and without bothering to tell me. Kind of a dick move, pardon the expression.)
The expression is fine; it’s the pun that’s all cocked up. But thanks for your service and for being on the ball and not just a useless prick.
Venerable Winamp to disappear. Downloads will no longer be possible after 20 December.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/winamp_to_disappear/
They have actually spent loads of money advertising Winamp for Android. It goes away too, at the closure date. Too bad they will not open-source it. Music players have always received lots of support from home-grown developers.
This is ugly, because Winamp has been my main player since its inception. We also use it exclusively for playout at the radio project. Additionally, lots and lots of free or cheap DJ and playout automation software uses Winamp under the hood.
I was at F.E. Warren in Wyoming. Cops were good for the most part. They were the largest organization on base by far, a group with multiple squadrons. Put that together with youth, testosterone, and boredom in the field and you will always end up with shenanigans from time to time. I couldn’t imagine the boredom of being on a camper alert team on a launch facility with a security system problem. I never got into the WSA, that was a very high security operation, as you know.
Matthew, wasn’t it boring down the hole? Not that any of us wanted it to get exciting…
Chuck, would you recommend downloading Winamp and making a few backups? I’d forgotten about it. Is it better in some respects than other products?
When I was in the USAF, it was simply a known fact that getting to O6 or higher was unlikely for those of us who flew desks. Just a fact of life, and an understandable one.
The things that bothered me were mostly related to the huge bureaucracy that the DoD has built up. Most civilians are in it for the comfort and security: a decent salary, great retirement benefits, total job security – this translates into no need to push yourself, don’t stress, shuffle those papers one more time. Pretty much the opposite attitude from the military personnel, with our “up-or-out” promotions and short-term assignments.
The result: if you needed something done, you tried really hard to find a military person to do it. The worst were the times military people actually reported to civilian bosses, because the outlook on life is just fundamentally different.
It could get very boring on alert. Sometimes on the weekend literally nothing would happen from start to finish. We would all be on the squadron comm network (basically a party line phone system) keeping each other awake. On the other hand, there were moments when it could be very hectic, such as when there was maintenance going on at the launch facilities or in the capsule. The crew commander is responsible for everything that goes on in his or her flight, so if there is maintenance going on at multiple launch facilities it can get crazy. Add maintenance in the capsule and you don’t get to sleep. Fun fun.