Women Marines still struggle with infantry course

NY Times:

A group of Marine second lieutenants, all men, stood before the ropes on an obstacle course. They looked exhausted, though the day was far from done. One by one, they took their shots at scaling the line. One by one, most of them dropped short of the top. They were already three hours behind the front-runners in their class.

Behind them, two more Marines, both women, prepared to start the course. One, a former enlisted Marine who was shivering in the 40-degree breeze, tried repeatedly to surmount the first bar, but failed. The second, a recent Naval Academy graduate, did better, meticulously, sometimes ingeniously, working her way through many of the obstacles.

But as she was determinedly attempting the ropes, a captain walked briskly up to deliver bad news: Neither woman had met a time limit. Silently, they shouldered their packs and trudged into the woods, their chances of becoming the first women to complete the Marine Corps’ demanding Infantry Officer Course summarily ended on its arduous first day on Thursday. (Twelve of the 108 men also were dropped that day.)

And that closed the latest chapter in the effort to integrate women into Marine Corps ground combat units, a sweeping change ordered by the former secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, in January when he lifted a 1994 ban on women serving in direct combat.

The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James F. Amos, has said he is confident that women can begin joining some combat jobs, including in tank and artillery units, by early next year. But with infantry — the foot warriors who since ancient times have been called upon to march across hills and deserts, carry heavy weight and bear the brunt of fighting and death — the corps is proceeding with much caution.

General Amos has said he will use the Infantry Officer Course to study how women handle the rigors of infantry training, hoping to observe 92 volunteers by 2016, when the corps must make recommendations on whether women can join the infantry. (Reaching 92 may be hard, however: the corps produces only 156 female officers a year, and only about one in 10 have volunteered to attend the course, so far, though Marine Corps officials say they expect the number to rise.)

Last fall, the first two female volunteers failed to complete the course. One, a distance runner, was dropped on the first day, known as the Combat Endurance Test. The second, a soccer player, endured for over a week before instructors pulled her out because of a stress fracture in her foot. Both are now training for non-infantry jobs.

In Quantico, concerns run deep among some staff members that pressure to accommodate women will lead to a softening of the Marine Corps’ tough standards. Col. Todd S. Desgrosseilliers, commander of the Basic School, which includes the Infantry Officer School and the Basic Officer Course, said that would not happen.

“They are gender-neutral now,” he said of the standards. “They aren’t hard to be hard. These are the things they need to be able to do to be infantry officers.”

The 86-day Infantry Officer Course, which was started in 1977 by Vietnam combat veterans, is viewed with special reverence within the corps, the most infantry-centric of the armed services. Though its students tend to be top performers in basic officer training, more than one in five are dropped during the infantry course. Some are allowed to try again, but most find other jobs in the corps.
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But more than anything, the event is intended to challenge a newly minted lieutenant’s ability to make decisions under sustained duress. Uncertainty and disorientation are prime features: students do not know their tasks beforehand, and are not told how long they will be given for each. Pacing oneself, thus, is virtually impossible.
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The women struggle with the upper body strength required for some of the obstacles.  Some of them require technique such as the rope climb while others are deceptively difficult and in some cases scary.  Some people excel in the exercises that put them under physical stress and require them to solve problems they might face in combat.  I thought it was the most interesting art of the training, but others did not handle it well, and some washed out before they even got to the problem solving.

One of the things I recall from this grueling training is that by the time you finish the instructors know you better than you knew yourself before you started.  They know your temperament, courage and endurance.  It is something they have to know before they let you lead Marines in combat.