If there were any remaining doubts that a grudge is motivating Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’s policies dictating gender integration in the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps Times has dispelled them, revealing that Mabus sent the Marines a memo on New Year’s Day ordering them to make their famously challenging entry-level training—popularly known as “boot camp”—coed. Now, you may be thinking that such a dictate is a natural consequence of the secretary of defense’s decision in December to open all ground combat jobs to women, and that may or may not be so.
But here’s where it gets personal—indeed, ugly and unprofessional: In his memo, Mabus gives the Marines only 15 days to come up with a plan for how to go about combining male and female training at boot camp, a plan they must implement by April 1.
Fifteen days. Military operations of far less significance and complexity take many multiples of this length of time to plan responsibly, let alone such an unprecedented shift that raises any number of complicated issues. Mabus, a civilian appointee of the Obama administration who served two years in the Navy during the 1970s, has been slinging mud at the Marine leaders who work under him for several months now (see Aaron MacLean’s “Ray Mabus Can’t Handle the Truth,” September 28, 2015), going so far as to suggest that Marine officers were being dishonest in their conduct of a study that raised serious questions about the wisdom of opening ground combat jobs to women.
It was no doubt infuriating to Mabus that the Marines stood their ground and went over his head to ask Secretary Ash Carter directly to allow them an exception. Carter denied the request, a decision the Marines swiftly accepted (the commandant’s message to Marines about gender integration concluded with him saying, “We have a decision: it’s time to move out”). It is impossible to interpret the decision to demand a “detailed” plan for making recruit training coed on such an absurdly accelerated timeline as anything other than petty retaliation.
But that’s not all! Mabus issued a second memo on New Year’s, dictating a review of job titles “throughout the Marine Corps” to “ensure that they are gender-integrated . . . removing ‘man’ from the titles and provide a report to me as soon as is practicable and no later than April 1, 2016.” In a confusing twist, the Marine Corps Times story that reported this news a few days later also quoted an anonymous “Navy official” who softened the apparent impact of this second memo: “The idea is not to go in there and change the name when ‘man’ is incorporated as part of the term,” the official said. “But when the word ‘man’ appears as a separate word . . . they want that name to be changed.”
So a job title like “reconnaissance man” is now exclusionary and must be changed, but “infantryman” is safe, even though the text of the original memo apparently makes no mention of such exquisite distinctions. Such confusion is surely evidence of haste in the decision-making process, and possibly of backtracking.
The boot-camp order leaves many questions to be answered by January 15. At what level will integration occur? Will Marines be trained to the same initial physical standard, regardless of gender? (Presumably this is not what Mabus wants, as an enormous number of female recruits would fail to meet the existing standards.) One thing is certain: Ray Mabus has been a one-man wrecking ball for relations between the Pentagon’s civilian politicos and the Marine Corps.
