Marines are made at a recruit depot located amid the swamps of Parris Island, tethered to the rest of the Carolina coast by a single causeway, and at another such depot in California, jammed onto a scrubby patch of ground between the San Diego International Airport and Interstate 5.
Grim as these locations might seem to the casual observer — or, let’s be honest, as grim as they in fact are — these installations are sacred to Marines. A great deal of ink has been devoted to the work that is done in these places, and as one who has witnessed busloads of frightened, disconcertingly normal-looking young Americans arrive, only to depart a few months later as bona fide Marines, I can attest that the drill instructors and their officers know what they are doing.
That’s what most Americans assume, too — but not what Ray Mabus, the secretary of the Navy, believes. For months now Marines have been at the vindictive mercies of Mabus, who was evidently greatly annoyed by the Corps’s stubborn resistance to integrating women into its ground combat arms jobs. (See “Ray Mabus Can’t Handle the Truth,” September 28, 2015, in these pages.) He all but called his own officers liars late last year, when Marines promoted a study that questioned the wisdom of making the infantry co-ed. Mabus then effectively won the day, as Secretary of Defense Ash Carter decided in favor of allowing women in ground combat units.
Then, taking a place in the Sore Winners Hall of Fame, on New Year’s Day Mabus issued a memo directing the Marines not only to open ground combat units to women, but to make recruit training (or “boot camp,” as it’s colloquially known) co-ed as well — not something that was at all required under Carter’s original order. The memo gave the Marines a grand total of 15 days to come up with a “detailed” plan to comply with this order, and to begin compliance no later than April 1. (Mabus also ordered the Marines, in a memo issued on the same day, to remove the word “man” from position titles — a directive that he sent to the Navy as well.)
Marines, who can’t speak in public about their service secretary, are seething over their treatment at the hands of a civilian appointee whose military experience consists of two years in the Navy during the seventies. On social media, former Marines and sailors have directed blistering volleys in the SecNav’s general direction. (“You are single-handedly crippling the Marine Corps more than any one single event or person has since 1775,” is a characteristic, if family friendly, example.)
But in Congress and among Republican presidential candidates, with few exceptions, the response is muted. Requests for comment on the matter from the presidential campaigns went unanswered. On Capitol Hill, a congressional aide with knowledge of the issue said, “The behavior of the Navy secretary has raised member concerns, beyond their substantive oversight concerns about this important integration issue.” These concerns have not yet resulted in hearings being scheduled. The only significant public responses have come from two former Marines in the House, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.). In a letter to the secretary of defense, Hunter said that Mabus “is destroying the martial fabric of the Marine Corps” by ignoring the advice of Marine leaders. Accusing Mabus of putting lives at risk, the congressman continued:
Moulton, for his part, said on Twitter, “ALL Marines must meet the same standards & 15-day deadline from @SECNAV is ridiculous. This is too critical to rush.”
Moulton’s remark highlighted something that is inarguable, whatever one’s opinion of the changes afoot for the Corps: This is a complicated issue that raises questions no one can easily answer. Aside from purely logistical difficulties (at present, all women Marines are trained separately in Parris Island by female drill instructors; no women are trained in San Diego), the question of standards looms. The Marines, like all the services, maintain two sets of books for men and women. Men have to meet a higher physical standard than women; if women were held to the male standard, many would fail even to graduate from boot camp— as the Marines verified when they experimented in 2013 with having female recruits meet the male graduation requirement of three pull-ups. With significant preparation and training, 55 percent of women failed to meet that minimum standard.
Now that some sort of co-ed integration at recruit training is to be imposed, will the standards be evened? That surely cannot be Mabus’s desire, as it would significantly shrink the number of women coming into the Corps. Of course, the standards could also be lowered, something that neither Mabus nor the proponents of military gender equality will openly admit is necessary to ensure significant female inclusion. Marine general John Kelly, until this month the leader of U.S. Southern Command, worried last week in front of reporters at the Pentagon, “They’re saying we are not going to change any standards. There will be great pressure, whether it’s 12 months from now, 4 years from now, because the question will be asked whether we’ve let women into these other roles, why aren’t they staying in those other roles? Why aren’t they advancing as infantry people?”
Even if these concerns, significant as they are, were somehow answered, they don’t address the issue of whether instructors get the best results by putting 18-year-old male and female recruits cheek by jowl. The other services do and face no end of problems; the Marines never have and have never wanted to. Now, with a single memo from a political appointee who doesn’t care about the opinion of the Marines who both live and die with the consequences, that’s over.
It is startling that such rough treatment of a major American institution at the hands of an Obama appointee faces spirited resistance only from a couple of former Marines in Congress — one of them a Massachusetts Democrat! — and not from the most prominent members of the Republican party, a party that flatters itself on being responsive to the concerns of the military.
Aaron MacLean, a former Marine Corps infantry officer, is managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon.
