Details here:

http://freebeacon.com/female-marines-fail-infantry-officer-course/

Along with the gals, 12 guys boloed the initial Combat Endurance Test at the IOC (96 men passed).

We may have more to say about this anon.

Updated — link fixed. Sorry ’bout that.

Three Soldiers statue by Frederic Hart at the Vietnam Memorial.

Of course, none of them are among the payroll patriots that run things in Washington. But The Weekly Standard dug in to the story and found out where the neanderthals who resist this shiny progressive bauble of an idea hang out.

As it happens, they are, or were, in ground combat units. To be specific, in the infantry (although how you can be a tanker or artillery crew member — note our use of politically-correct, sex-neutral verbiage — without being able to toss 100-lb. shells around like footballs is beyond us, too).

One is Sergeant James Robert Webb, who served as an infantryman in Ramadi in 2006 and 2007. The 31-year-old son of former Democratic senator, secretary of the Navy, and Vietnam war hero Jim Webb took to his blog to describe how the change would harm combat effectiveness and unit cohesion. The Marine explained that a noninfantry convoy unit engaging in combat if attacked​—​returning fire and getting to safety​—​is different from the infantry fulfilling its mission to “close with and destroy hostile forces.” Furthermore, the infantry demands the utmost from Marines in terms of physical strength, endurance, attitude, and group loyalty and bonding. “More to the point, if the calculus is altered, our people, my peers, die,” wrote Webb.

“The major concern is with women in infantry units,” Webb tells me in an email. “This is a subject which comes up every time I get together with combat veterans​—​from any branch of service. The message is an unequivocal ‘No, this should not happen.’ I have yet to receive an email, comment, text message, etc. from anyone who has served in a combat unit who supports this decision by DoD.”

The public supports the change​—​66 percent, according to a Pew poll​—​but the view from inside the infantry is very different. “The overarching opinion is one of confusion and disillusionment with the decision, not just in my age group, but among those who fought wars before us in Vietnam as well,” Webb reports. “Guys just don’t understand the rationale behind it, and moreover, there’s a general feeling that those who have been fighting our wars weren’t consulted on the decision.”

via Congress Goes AWOL | The Weekly Standard.

We’ll go with Webb. The Standard goes on to show how the military is already gaming the supposedly “gender-neutral” standards so that the term is a Newspeak style self-refutation.

Another of the former servicemen (and some women) who are fighting this is California Rep. Duncan Hunter. Hunter fears that the standards will slip to meet the political mission, and plans to offer an amendment requiring such standards as may be set to be universally applicable:

“There’s going to be extreme pressure to lower the standards to make sure there’s a quota met in these combat units,” says Hunter. “I think that’s unavoidable. I think that pressure is going to exist, and our military leaders under this administration are going to acquiesce to that pressure.”

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has already suggested standards might be lowered if women can’t meet them. “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?” Dempsey said during a January 24 press conference.

No one who’s seen Dempsey in action over the last few years is under any illusion that he has the slightest reservoir of moral courage, or the least inclination to resist any brainstorm of his political lords and masters. He used his talents at toadying to rise to the top of his profession, where he finally had some authority but couldn’t exercise it, because the character of a toady was imprinted upon him, soul deep.

With the Army and Marines ordered to open every job, even infantry, to women, with a strong implication that standards will be dropped, it’s not surprising to see another glass ceiling shatter. Sort of.

The first woman to try out for the National Football League just gave it her best shot. Lauren Silberman did about as well as the two carefully selected Marine officers that took a run at the Infantry officer course late last year.

Unfortunately for the self-promoting Silberman, that was not very well at all. She was trying out for a very specialized position (kicker) which is often occupied by men much smaller and more lithe than the NFL median. Like the usual First Women to go through any particular military training evolution, whether the one-day-wonders of Marine grunt school, the Army’s litigious Katie Wilder, or the Navy’s fatally incompetent jet pilot Kara Hultgreen, she did it in the glare of publicity and political influence. And like those women, she didn’t meet the objective standard, or even come close.

Even more unfortunately for Silberman, she doesn’t have a coterie of political generals and a bunch of social engineers in suits running interference for her. Her two kick attempts went 16 and 14 yards respectively, with little loft, and that was the end of her tryout, as she reported she injured herself doing that. (The average high school kicker can routinely score a 30 plus yard field goal).

She claimed her kickoffs had gone farther in practice, but wasn’t willing to cite a number and appeared to the other kickers at the tryouts to be completely unfamiliar with kicking a football — so, more Katie Wilder than the two Marines, whom everybody says are good officers and gave infantry school their best shot.

It remains to be seen what the Army’s first women infantry officers and Ranger candidates are like. Both extremes are possible, as is every other point along every axis of human behavior. We’ll only see what they’re like when the publicity tsunami hits. But we’re left with a strong impression that the officials of the NFL would never put an unready, unsafe player on the gridiron — and that the hollow-cored, sold-out-soul generals of the Army might not be so responsible.

These are the same uniformed politicians who still deny that the soldiers wounded and killed by the traitorous Nidal Hasan merit the Purple Heart and VA benefits, and who think Stateside drone pilots deserve recognition beyond those engaged in, wounded in, and valorous in face-to-the-enemy combat.  While it would be nice to count on them to do the right thing, it wouldn’t be a reasonable expectation.

Plump Air Force chicks, the future of ground combat (l.); GEN Martin Dempsey (r.) . DOD photo

At a press conference introducing his opening of all combat positions to women, legislation be damned, lame-duck SecDef Leon Panetta also insisted, “[L]et me be clear, we’re not talking about reducing the qualifications for a job.” But at the same press conference, GEN Martin Dempsey, the painfully politically correct Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had a different take on it.

Importantly, though, if we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?

What do you think they’re going to decide when this question comes up? There are two ways of analyzing that.  One looks at logic and military culture, and one looks at history.

The logical/cultural view:  given today’s senior military officers, what’s their answer going to be to this question: Hey, what’s more important, winning wars or giving ambitious women the careers they want?

The historical view asks these questions: How is this going to come out differently than the Navy’s post-Tailhook standards-drop that gave the world Kara Hultgreen? (The issue was not whether some woman could fly an F-14. The issue became, thanks to the Navy’s standards-drop, whether anyone had the stones to tell a woman who couldn’t fly an F-14 that she’d washed out. Instead, she had to crash the jet to find out). How is this going to come out differently than the Katie Wilder fiasco (where a litigious and well-connected woman officer sued her way to an unearned qualification, after being caught cheating at the school in question)?

Remember, these questions are being answered by guys like Martin Dempsey. He is an Academy graduate, and came up in the “hollow army” of the 1970s, where officers in hopelessly unready armor units taught him the fine art of the phony readiness report, a lesson in ethics that still informs his performance today. He avidly sought ticket-punches, and sports the novice parachute wings of the “5-jump chump,” and a Combat Action Badge for being under fire — as a general. (The more prestigious CIB cannot be awarded to generals and their CSMs, to prevent “paper awards.” This is unfair to the occasional real fighting general. They’re extremely rare birds, though).

Dempsey writes (or claims authorship of, anyway) regular, and mostly worthless, columns in Joint Forces Quarterly. Here’s a taste of Dempsey’s ability to write (empty, content-free platitudes with a skill that even few of his fellow politicians can match, from one of his recent columns:

We must continue to trust our men and women at the edge of our formations, to challenge them, and to leverage their talents and experiences. We must make sure they continue to be the best led, best trained, and best equipped in the world.

Best equipped? Maybe, unless you’re measuring by day-glow safety belts, in which case we lead the world by furlongs. Best trained? You’d have to ask, on what? It would be nice to purge the training schedule of training-distractor time-wasting personnel bullshit, and concentrate on combat training, but that’s not how Big D rolls. Best led?

Well, that’s really a question of whether you think people like GEN Dempsey, GEN Casey, and COL  Johnson (all of whom we’ve covered in the past) are typical, or whether the many officers who stay out of the news are.

Note:

This post has been edited. It was initially posted without the links. Thanks to the commenter who provided the link we used, we initially read that same story on the non-mobile page but while we were writing this up had lost track of the original link!

We’ve mentioned Michael O’Hanlon’s report in the WSJ briefly in Wednesday’s report on the failure of the initial batch of two would-be infantrywomen in the USMC.

O’Hanlon is a respected analyst for the left-leaning, Democratic-Party-aligned think tank, the Brookings Institution.

In passing, O’Hanlon apparently reveals the specific events that the selected volunteer Amazons failed on:

Some might challenge the irreducible strength standards demanded of Marine Corps infantry officers. But being able to lift oneself—while wearing body armor and carrying a pack—up and over walls is essential in modern combat. So is being able to move a wounded fellow Marine across a field to safety, or to haul part of a dismantled mortar to an ambush site.

via Michael O’Hanlon: A Challenge for Female Marines – WSJ.com.

So we know they boloed the obstacle stuff. It is very, very hard, and requires a very, very committed ideologue, to argue that those kinds of strength don’t matter. But that’s the Chief of Staff’s argument.

O’Hanlon further says:

We would put Marines in danger and risk mission failure by lowering such requirements. Moreover, no female Marine officer would be able to command the respect of the enlisted Marines in her platoon without holding her own physically. She wouldn’t have to be the strongest among them, but a certain minimum level of strength is an essential prerequisite.

We know from long experience that women officers in the Army who cannot “command” respect by the strength of their character are not shy about “commanding” respect by explicitly pulling rank.

Of course, loweing such standards is key to the Army’s plan to push quantities of women through IOBC and Ranger School, for the sake of the shinies that careerist female Army officers think they need to let their inner Countney Massengales bloom. (All the proof you need that this is all about officer careers: it’s only officers they’re opening Ranger School to).

O’Hanlon concludes:

Where does this leave us? If only a few women want to serve as Marine infantry officers or prove that they can, it may not make sense to restructure core elements of the combat force to place women in positions of infantry command. The stakes are too high to take this matter lightly or to pretend it is a simple matter of civil rights ….There is no need to rush, or to let politics drive the decision-making. The stakes are too high for that.

And that’s the top national security guy at a left-wing Democrat think tank. There are groups further left and embedded deeper in the Democratic Party, like the Center for a New American Security, that support female combat quotas. Of course, CNAS’s “experts” tend to be never-served military-hostile journolosers (Ricks) or one-tour-wonder LTs speaking from the Sait Peter’s Chair of a year’s military experience (Exum).

Back this summer, when we had news about the Army’s attempt to cram women into Ranger School and IOBC (just pull up the “Rangers and Rangerettes” category for the backstory), we discovered that the reason the Army was doing it was… that the Marines, never slow at detecting any shift in political winds, were admitting women to their infantry officer course.

Women — especially the shrill voices of Organized Feminism, from the media to the bar to DACOWITS — insisted that combat commands were a shiny they needed to make general officer. The Army, which as an institution tends to see wars as regrettable interruptions in the orderly flow of officer careers, agreed. But still the Marines were first out of the gate, with two female volunteers entering Marine IOC with great fanfare. Sisters be stickin’ it to The Man!

But within two weeks the only ones stickin’ it out in IOC were men. One of the girls quit the first day, falling out of an endurance event. The second one was a drop in the second week for a medical reason. (Note: this post was drafted 3 November. A Wall Street Journal op-ed by the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon confirmed this result and provided some details — O’Hanlon observed some of the evolutions in question — on Nov. 13).

Katie Drummond, one of the media’s “you-go-girl” cheerleaders for this attempt, reported dispiritedly:

[T]he second of the female Lieutenants was pulled from the program last week because of unspecified medical problems. The other Lieutenant dropped out on September 28th, after failing to complete the first day of training. She was joined by 26 male participants, out of only 109 enrollees in the grueling course.

It’s a disappointing outcome, but by no means the end of the story for female personnel keen to partake in combat roles they’ve long been prohibited from. The infantry officer course (IOC) is notoriously challenging: Around 25 percent of participants — until this year, all of them male — drop out before completing the program. If you’re unfamiliar with the IOC, consider that participants (among other torturous proceedings) undergo a preliminary “indoctrination test” that consists of several miles of navigation in isolated terrain, often trek or run lugging heavy gear while subsisting on rations of food and water, and are required to complete written exams administered during periods of extreme fatigue.

OK, so it’s hard, and 1/4 of the attendees quit or fail. So far, 4/4 of the female attendees have done so, but we’ll grant that two green lieutenants is not a solid statistical base upon which to make policy.

It was kind of predictable, though. If IOC held to its standards, the girls weren’t going to pass, and if the girls passed, that’s a pretty good indicator that  the standards had, like so many other military standards, been clandestinely sex-normed.

So how hard is this course, actually?

“You’re running on a couple hours’ sleep and you’re running on one meal per day,” Greg Jacob, a former Marine infantry officer, told The Daily. “You’re having to apply all these things…in an environment that’s really a pressure cooker.”

via Female Lieutenants Flunk Marine Corps’ Fierce Infantry Training – Forbes.

And of course, the headline says that it’s “fierce.’

The second of two female infantry aspirants dropped by the wayside over three weeks ago, but we’re just hearing about it now (note: that was written on Nov. 3rd. Most people never heard of this ’til O’Hanlon wrote it up, because Drummond’s blog hasn’t the reach of the Wall Street Journal). The press loses interest when the dog turns out to have bitten the man after all; they’s so deeply invested in the man-bites-dog novelty angle that they’re happy to leave most of America thinking that that is what actually happened, rather than admit that they were wrong.

We’re sorry for the two unfortunate young ladies. Good luck in your Marine careers… we’re sure the Corps will find some way to make best use of your talent. We could have told you Infantry was not the place, but you had to find out for yourselves. Now you may be feeling low, but new doors will open for you.

In the meantime, of course, the Army, pushed by the Administration and the Democratic Party’s national security think tank of journalists and one-tour-wonder lieutenants, the Center for a New American Security, continues to drive on on a mission to lower Ranger School and Infantry Officer Basic Course standards low enough that all the ladies will pass.

When they do, headlines will call it “fierce.”