Category: Marine Corps

Ellen Haring, a former Army colonel who famously sued the Pentagon because she wasn’t allowed to compete with her male peers by serving in combat arms units, wrote in Task & Purpose last month that the Marines are cheating female Marines out of good coombat training because they are conducting separate basic training classes for males and females. She compares the separation to Jim Crow laws of the Old South;

The problem with the notion of separate but equal is that we have a well-established history that documents the poor outcomes of such a practice. The military did it to Japanese Americans and African Americans, but eventually discarded the practice. We have only to look at the discredited Jim Crow-era laws that segregated people by color to know how this establishes structural inequalities and perpetuates bias and discrimination. The reality is that separate is never equal. In fact, “separate” creates a very negative two-class culture that disadvantages one group, but cloaks the disadvantage by claiming that it actually benefits the minority group.

Decades ago, the Marines experimented with mixed basic training and found that they were cheating their trainees and went back to the separate units. The men, the Marines most likely to end up in combat, were held back from their potential because a unit is only as good as it’s weakest member. Haring complains that the pipeline for female Marines is narrow because there is only one training battalion for women;

Because the Marine Corps maintains a narrow training pipeline, just one battalion for female recruits, they ensure that women make up less than 8% of the Marine Corps. This, in turn, causes the only battalion that trains women to be perpetually understaffed. The result is that there are negative training outcomes for the female recruits. They don’t receive as much instruction and the women graduate from boot camp with lower average training scores than their male colleagues.

Maybe there’s only one battalion because only 8% of the people who volunteer for the Marine Corps are women. Haring implies that there would be more female volunteers if training was de-segregated, but she offers no proof, just more words. I’m not aware of any females who can’t get into the Marines because of this narrow pipeline. Is there a line at the recruiters’ offices? There is also no evidence that Women Marines aren’t trained as well as their male counterparts because of segregation in basic training. The Marines have been forced to allow women into their combat units, but I guess that’s not good enough for the social justice warriors like Haring. Now she’s just making excuses, like when she sued the Pentagon for her own piss-poor performance as an officer in the Army.

Devtun sends us a link to Military.com which reports that another battalion commander of a training battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina has been relieved of his command. Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Kissoon, the commander of the 3rd Recruit Training Battalion, was fired by his boss, Colonel Paul D. Cucinotta, after an investigation which made Cucinotta lose confidence in Kissoon’s ability to command.

The decision to relieve Kissoon came just a day before Marines announced the death of a Marine recruit, 20-year-old Raheel Siddiqui, of Taylor, Michigan, which remains under investigation.

However, Carroll said the relief was connected to an investigation that wrapped up in late February and was tied to specific acts of alleged misconduct by Kissoon and not connected to the battalion or Siddiqui’s death.

The last commander to be fired was Lieutenant Colonel Kate Germano who was fired for being “overly aggressive” with women recruits.

You might remember Ethan Arguello. He was the fellow who got Sergeant Major Archie to resign from the Marine Corps when he accused the sergeant major of head-butting him – it really wasn’t a head butt at all, but the sergeant major resigned anyway. Arguello was protesting the fact that this administration had traded five terrorists for Bowe Bergdahl while wearing his drill instructor’s campaign cover at the Parris Island MCRD main gate.

Last month, he confronted Bill Clinton about Hillary Clinton’s involvement with the four murders of the Americans at Benghazi. In that reportage, he was anonymous, and identified as “a Marine veteran”.

With the crowd booing him, the former Marine drill sergeant continued to ask the tough questions. That’s right, American Patriot the III% will ask the hard questions if the soft media won’t. The Clinton fan base was so against the truth that even the ex-president was quoted as to saying “You listen to me, I’m not your Commander in Chief anymore, but if I was I’d tell you to be more polite”

He is indeed a Marine veteran;

From an article at WTOC;

Arguello was stationed in Iraq from 2004-2006 with the Marine Corps. He said he lost seven of his 31 fellow Marines in combat.

The group says it’s anti-American what Obama did, exchanging five terrorists for one traitor, and they won’t tolerate it.

“I hold every member of Al Qaeda directly responsible for the death of each of my brothers and the injuries also,” said Arguello. “Therefore, the release of those five is essentially the release of these five murderers of my brothers.”

He’s fond of making the claim that seven people were killed in his platoon;

“A lot of troops and Marines in general were wounded in combat,” said Arguello, 31. “I was in a platoon of 30 where seven were killed and six were wounded beyond return. Not all of them have the ability to run. Fortunately, I am able to. I wanted to raise awareness to support our amputees, our combat-wounded veterans.”

I’d like for him to explain that “six were wounded beyond return” statement, though.

Arguello was a Light Armored Vehicle mechanic in the 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion which battled the insurgents in Fallujah twice, and he was probably there both times. As a mechanic. In 2008, he became a drill instructor at Parris island and he served in that position for about three years. He had eight total years of service, but then he left as a Lance Corporal (E-3). As near as I can tell, he hasn’t exactly lied about his service in the Marines, but I’m thinking that Arguello and the Marine Corps didn’t part on amicable terms. That’s probably why the sergeant major confronted him at the front gate of Parris Island that day. Now we know the rest of the story.