One of my former workmates sent this link from NPR which reports the the Marines are still going the motions of letting women into infantry jobs without lowering the standards.
“There’s going to be a rigorous set of standards, and a Marine, male or female, is going to have to meet those standards, so this will exclude some proportion of the population. There’s going to be some men who can’t meet these standards,” [Marine Lt. Col. Michael Samarov] said.
We already know that after 230-some years of eliminating weak men from the infantry. I was a 128-pound private when I went through the Army’s training nearly 40 years ago and it’s tough – tougher than your body will admit sometimes. I’ve booted privates that went through the training and arrived at my platoon thinking that the training was over.
“Females that are small in stature are at a huge disadvantage compared to males,” [Katelyn Allison of the Department of Sports Medicine and Nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh] added, “let’s say a male Marine who is 200 pounds or 180 pounds. So that’s a huge barrier, and if that’s something that’s required of everybody, then there’s no way around that.”
[…]
Allison says her researchers can also help the Marines identify common injuries to women, like sprained ankles and shin splints, and ways to prevent them. They’ve already done similar work with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
More stuff we already know. I hope you guys are getting paid well to learn all of the “no shit” stuff.
“We owe it to the American people to make sure that somebody who’s a Marine in a particular specialty can do the job, and we owe it to that Marine, to keep faith that young man or woman who has volunteered to serve their nation,” [Lt. Col. Samarov] said.
Don’t forget that you owe it the fella on her left and right, and the families of those on her left and right.
“I think the jury is still out on the propensity for women to join the ground combat arms,” [Col. Anne Weinberg] said. “My generation, you know, is a different breed from the young women who are coming into the Marine Corps now. They are very tough, very strong, and they have that mindset of ‘I want to go and do these types of jobs.’ “
So, we’re going to go through all of these studies and tests and eventually find one female who wants to do the job and actually can meet the standards? Yeah, I don’t see that happening. If this so bleeding important, why don’t they have whole units of female infantry? I mean if it’s imperative to the national security goals of this nation and feasible that we have women in the infantry and the red herring crowd are worried about the potential for inappropriate social interaction, segregating the women from the men during and after training seems to be a viable solution at least in the short term. That way they can also hide the fact that there are going to be separate standards.
