Among the memorable television commercials of the 1990s was the one where a couple of mechanics are attempting to force a too-large battery into a man’s car. The owner protests that the battery is too big, but the mechanics bring out a hammer and promise to “make it fit.”
The commercial does a flashback to when the two mechanics were children, and one was attempting to force a square peg into a round hole. One boy insists, “It’s not going in!”; but the other responds that the solution is to “Just keep hitting it.”
That sums up how the U.S. Marine Corps leadership and enlisted men must feel about the push of the Obama administration to force the Corps to include women into combat units — regardless of all reasons it will not work. “Just do it” is the order the military is expected to follow when it comes to this question — to cite the slogan of another famous commercial.
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“There’s no doubt we’re leading cultural change,” Brigadier General James Glynn said about the ongoing efforts to carry out President Obama’s orders. “But we like a challenge.”
Over the course of its history, the Marines have faced many challenges, including their battles with the Barbary pirates, the amphibious landings at Vera Cruz in the Mexican War, and the battles at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima during World War II. But those challenges were met with combat units trained to win battles, not selected to meet the demands of social engineering.
General Robert Neller, commandant of the Marine Corps, intends to implement “cultural change” so Marines will accept the inclusion of women into combat units. Obama has given the Corps until April 1 to impose his orders to include women in infantry, armor, and artillery combat units. As part of that process, the Marines will undergo a new curriculum of sensitivity training.
The Marine Corps Force Integration Campaign Plan approved by General Neller has as its purpose “gender integration education.” This is designed to “ensure the integration of female Marines into ground combat arms MOSs [military occupational specialties] and units [is] successful.”
Marines will be lectured in courses to change the Marine Corps culture, such as “Unconscious Bias,” and “Interpersonal Communication.”
The “Unconscious Bias” class is designed to provide “an understanding of the concept of cognitive bias, awareness of one’s own cognitive bias via a performance-based exam, and cognitive bias mitigation techniques.” In other words, the training will instruct the men that they are biased toward women and will lead them to overcome such bias.
The Marine Corps originally asked to keep units involved in close-in ground attacks on the enemy closed to females, but Obama Defense Secretary Ashton Carter refused.
After this request was denied, the Marines announced their intention to require equal standards of physical performance for both men and women. “[A]dherence to a merit-based system must continue to be paramount,” the Marine Corps has insisted. “Leaders must not use special preferences or undue pressure to increase numbers at the expense of merit. Integration provides equal opportunity for men and women who can perform the tasks required; it does not guarantee women will fill these roles in any specific number or at any set rate.”
So, while the Corps may be forced into integrating women into all combat units, their goal is that women will have to pass the same type of running, lifting, climbing, and marching tests as men.
But Elaine Donnelly, with the Center for Military Readiness, fears that the Corps will eventually be forced to lower its standards so women can be accommodated. “If the Marines try to maintain a merit-based system, it will not withstand political pressures to meet equal opportunity goals and gender diversity metrics and quotas,” she declared.
Indeed, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 2013, now-retired Army General Martin Dempsey warned that if women proved unable to meet a particular standard, the services had better have a good reason why it should not be lowered.
After the Corps performed some field experimentation and discovered that mixed-sex combat units were less effective than all-male ones, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus simply dismissed the validity of the studies.
Army Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters, a retired officer who is a military analyst for Fox News, said, “All the time squandered on this stuff [sensitivity training] is time you are not spending training for war.”
It is not just the Marines. In fact, the Army surrendered to this politicization sooner than the Marines. The latest evidence: 400 soldiers in the 67th Signal Battalion at Fort Gordon, Georgia, were told in a training session, “Our society attaches privileges to being white and male and heterosexual.” Soldiers were informed in a slideshow, “Race privilege gives whites little reason to pay a lot of attention to African Americans.”
Among the assertions foisted upon the soldiers forced to sit through the “training” session was this: “Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they’ve done or failed to do.”
This is not the first time the Defense Department has used taxpayer funds and its control over soldiers to attempt indoctrination in left-wing political views. Previously, so-called equal opportunity training materials have identified conservative organizations as “hate groups.” In these sessions, the soldiers are cautioned that “many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.” Interestingly, this is similar to the slogan of the constitutionalist conservative John Birch Society: “Less government, more responsibility, and with God’s help, a better world.”
How far will this leftist indoctrination go? It must be remembered that the military is expected to salute smartly and follow orders. Failure to do so leads to the termination of a career. Hundreds of high-ranking officers — from not only the Army, but all the services — have chosen to retire or have been forced into retirement during the Obama years.
Senator John McCain called General Dempsey’s testimony to Congress, when promoting such “politically correct” programs, “An echo chamber of the Obama adminstration.”
When Congressman Steve Russell (R-Okla.), a former Army Ranger, asked for the scores of women who had supposedly performed “just as well, and even, better, in some cases, than men,” he was told that the records supporting those assertions no longer existed.
General Douglas MacArthur, in his farewell address at West Point in 1964, told the graduating cadets that they held “the nation’s destiny in their hands, the moment the war tocsin sounds.” Sadly, it appears that today’s army is being trained for something other than defending the nation. This is an issue that the media should ask the presidential candidates about, since the winner of this year’s contest will become the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
Steve Byas is a professor of history at Hillsdale Free Will Baptist College in Moore, Oklahoma. His book History’s Greatest Libels is a refutation of falsehoods told about many personalities of history, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Joseph McCarthy.
