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PT Standards in Question for Women in Combat
Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2013-11-18 00:42
Article here. Excerpt:
'The Marine Corps may have to change its physical standards in order to put females in positions to one day lead infantry platoons in combat.
Both the Marine Corps and the Army continue to wrestle with the mandate that former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued in January, directing the U.S. military to open hundreds of combat-arms jobs that have been closed to female servicemembers.
So far, the Marines have been out ahead.
The service has opened up infantry training to female officers and enlisted Marines as part of an effort to gather data on how females and males compare when performing infantry and other combat-arms-related skills, and how those findings relate to current male and female physical fitness standards.
The effort is scheduled to run until fall of 2014, but the results so far have drawn attention.
...
So far, the results have not been promising. Nine of the 10 females that volunteered out of The Basic Course failed to make it through the first day of IOC. The remaining female volunteer dropped because of an injury from the course a week later.
The Marine Corps will continue to allow female Marines to go through IOC and ITB until the research phase ends next fall. From there, the data will be compiled into a recommendation to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on how the Corps intends to open up certain combat-arms jobs to women by Jan. 1, 2016.
...
"And we will kind of see … if a Marine gets a 300 on the PFT and CFT; how well they do on the MOS tasks. So we are looking at that to see … whether or not these physical standards are applicable to these MOSs.
"Depending on what the data says, and what it shows, it will decide whether or not any of the standards for the MOSs need to change."
It's unclear if the Marine Corps will decide to require males and females to perform the same PFT standards, but officials said that the service has no plans to lower the physical requirements of Marine infantry training.
"Those physically-demanding tasks are performance-based standards that all Marines in that MOS must be able to perform," Krebs said. "So whether you are male or whether you are female, that's the standard and that is what we are going to hold it to."'
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Comments
Like clockwork!
Did not I, and 99.999999% of MANN regular readers, not call it?? :)
Nice thing about being involved in this MRA stuff is, you can tell with 99% certainty how any particular thing like this is going to turn out. If there's some way to give the women involved what they want, no matter how unfair it may be to any men involved, it will happen. In a word: Nymphotropism. It's your all-day, every-day, 24/7/365-including-that-extra-millisecond-that-needs-adding-from-time-to-time, GUAR-UN-DAMN-TEEEED cultural, legal, social, and psychological force that is as reliable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west!
Nice to know there's something you can be sure of other than death and taxes. But like those things, it also sucks. Well, for half the human population, anyway.
It's the man's behind on the line
The problem is that if this whole new women in combat thingy doesn't work out, it's the men's lives on the line. They will suffer the consequences if women can't do the job--which apparently they can't. It's not Leon Panetta's or some female politician's life being placed at risk. It's the lives of the men in combat.