I Remember When Marines Were Brave
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 4 months ago
Glenn Reynolds posted this on the U.S. Marine Corps.
Marines Cancel Military Strategy Training Because the Instructor is a Christian.
The USMC scheduled an annual training for military lawyers earlier this month, at which the Battle of Gettysburg would be discussed. The instructor for one portion of that training was supposed to be Jay Lorenzen, an Air Force veteran who taught for 10 years at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Lorenzen’s biography, provided to the military lawyers in advance of the training, included references to Christianity, including his affiliation with Campus Crusade for Christ, now known as Cru, and a couple of religious-themed courses he teaches in his spare time. Several of those lawyers complained to Mikey Weinstein, who heads up a secular, anti-Christian group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, that Lorenzen was going to teach about religion.
That allegation was false. It didn’t matter.
Says Glenn, “I remember when Marines were brave.”
How shameful and humiliating. There is also this bit of nervous Nelly hand-wringing and self-righteous unction over the social acceptability of their practices.
Nearly 300 female Marines have moved into combat-arms jobs that were, up until less than five years ago, previously open only to men. But only one female officer has led a Marine infantry platoon so far.
Now, the Marine Corps is calling on female lieutenants and captains to consider making a lateral move into the infantry officer military occupational specialty. The decision would require women to attempt the arduous Infantry Officer Course, which prepares Marines to lead grunts in combat.
Two female Marines have passed the course so far. Women have been allowed to attempt it since 2012.
The Marine Corps put out a service-wide message this week soliciting female company-grade officers to volunteer to go infantry. The Infantry Officer Course is typically open to second lieutenants just out of The Basic School.
The push aligns with a priority Commandant Gen. David Berger set in February to get more women leading grunt units. Berger told Military.com earlier this year that he’s not only open to extending the opportunity to first lieutenants and captains, but also women who left active duty before the restrictions blocking them from serving in combat jobs were lifted.
Yes, let’s push this as hard as we can so we can see more women with broken pelvises, torn cartilage and dysfunctional lower extremities.
The Marine Corps Commandant, General David H. Berger, is a loser and an awful man. He is unfit for duty.
With this kind of leadership, they deserve to become redundant to the army.
On August 10, 2020 at 10:13 pm, George 1 said:
The entire government is mostly insane at this point. So why not the Marines as well? Late stage empire much.
On August 11, 2020 at 7:06 am, Bob M said:
I have 3 family members who served in the Marines..one said “When the Corps becomes pussified, it is over.”
And it gets worse..
US Naval Academy grants Satanists ‘study space’
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/satanism-at-the-us-naval-academy/
On August 11, 2020 at 8:00 am, John said:
BO fired all of the fighting generals and put in the political hacks. President Trump needs
to immediately reverse that abomination even if he has to pull the fighters out of retirement.
On August 11, 2020 at 9:02 am, Fred said:
Who is the commander in chief?
You’ve been had.
On August 11, 2020 at 12:32 pm, Jamesb said:
“Who is the commander in chief?
You’ve been had.” – Fred
This.
On August 12, 2020 at 12:43 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Herschel
Re: “Yes, let’s push this as hard as we can so we can see more women with broken pelvises, torn cartilage and dysfunctional lower extremities.”
The anatomical reasons for the combat arms exclusion are just the tip of the proverbial ice-berg, but they are important none-the-less.
The past several decades of relentless “You go girl!” propaganda notwithstanding, the biological reality is that even elite female athletes have a hard time competing with ordinary, run of the mill male ones of comparable age.
A couple of decades ago, the U.S. Women’s Olympic Soccer Team won gold and attained some notoriety. Some of the players, Mia Hamm for example, enjoyed a brief moment in the public limelight as celebrities, making the “Tonight Show” and the usual celeb stops. What folks forget is that the gold-medal winning women’s soccer team got their clocks cleaned in a pick-up game against a scratch team of local high-school and community college male soccer players. Just regular guys off the street.
I’ve been involved in training, teaching and participating in the martial arts for some twenty years spread across a number of styles. I have attained mid-level black-belt rank in the Korean martial art of hapkido, which is an extremely effective system – so much so that members of the South Korean Presidential security detail are required to be proficient in it.
Over the years, our organization has had many good female students, ranging from teenagers to moms training with their kids. We bend over backwards to make female students feel welcome, and do our best to create a welcoming environment. However, we will not dilute our content, nor will we compromise our standards.
In order for martial arts training to be useful in the real world, it must at times be difficult, demanding and arduous – because that is what force-on-force confrontations so often are. If you go to pieces under pressure, a vicious hardened street criminal isn’t going to hand you a box of tissues and ask if you need a time out.
Bluntly, having been a fed for years a steady diet of “You go girl!” propaganda by the media-entertainment complex, female students often come into the program with unreasonable expectations regarding how the martial arts and hand-to-hand fighting will be. Many – most – are stunned by the disparity in size, strength, speed and aggressiveness between the guys and the gals. The wake-up call only gets worse when they are asked to grapple, throw and use other methods on males who are often significantly larger, heavier and stronger than they are.
The guys welcome it when the training becomes more-realistic. However, it frightens many of the female students. An important watershed in training is reaching mid-level rank where weapons are introduced, i.e., gun and knife defense. Realistic rubber handguns and knives are used in place of the real items, but even these have proved to be too much for some of our younger female students. One high-school sophomore began to cry when the fake guns/knives were brought out for the first time. A very popular student liked by everyone, all of us did our best to comfort her, but she ended up quitting the program shortly thereafter. Later, we were glad to learn she had joined the lacrosse team and was doing well.
Episodes like this one are unfortunately all-too-common. The fact of the matter is this: I have never seen a female – a women or teenaged girl – beat any teenaged or older male in hand-to-hand combat. The gals occasionally best a pre-pubescent boy, but that’s about it.
Contrast this to the behavior of the male practitioners of hapkido. A few years back, one student’s black-belt test got so realistic that he was – briefly -knocked cold during the execution of a throw. And that’s landing on a mat. When a friend and I tested for black-belt, doing knife disarms, our instructor stopped us to remind us that it was “only a test,” apparently worried we’d hurt one another, we were contesting one another so hard.
What does this have to do with the Marine Corps and females therein?
Answer: Everything.
Enlisted men fight alongside other men only when certain specific conditions are met. The same is true of their officers and NCOs. Everyone must be perceived to have met the same standards of training and preparation. “Weak steppers” aren’t tolerated, guys who can’t or won’t cut the mustard. Unit cohesion is based on trust and shared hardship and experience, but above all upon competency and performance when the chips are down, in training and in action.
If individual members of the unit are treated differently, or are perceived to be treated differently, then negative consequences will come from it, as surely as the sun rises. Without exception, the best combat leaders are proven to be superior soldiers, fighters and leaders of men. They lead by example, and suffer the same hardships, privations and dangers as their men. The responsible platoon leader or company commander doesn’t eat until every EM under his command has had chow. And if the men are living in the field and relieving their bowels in a slit trench, then the old man had better do so as well. Otherwise, he’ll lose the men and they’ll start to consider him an REMF and pogue.
It isn’t simply that women can’t handle the anatomical stresses imposed by the ground combat arms, it is that they can’t measure up to the men in all of the ways so critical to maintaining unit cohesion, esprit de corps, and trust. And even if a woman can “hang” with the guys physically, it doesn’t matter – because her mere presence is disruptive to the heretofore all-male bonding of that unit. As author Kingsley Browne noted in his excellent book, “Coed Combat: The New Evidence that Women Shouldn’t Fight the Nation’s Wars” (2007), “The strength of the wolf is the pack – and that pack must be male.”
Women have an important contribution to make to the nation’s defense, but it isn’t serving alongside men in the combat arms. The rough men who stand ready to defend us neither need nor want them there.
It is significant to note that every major nation of the 20th century who tried women in combat in significant numbers later rescinded their practice and reverted to the largely male force structure.
Under the existential threat of annihilation by Nazi Germany, the USSR allowed women in large numbers to enter its armed forces, including women who drove lorries, tanks, planes and became snipers and radio operators. Russian women attained some lasting success in these roles, including one female sniper who amassed over three-hundred kills, and a number of female pilots who became aces flying night fighters. However, once the danger was past and the war over, the Soviet armed forces reverted to their former malecentric structure. Why? Because the presence of women, measured on a cost-benefit basis, was found not to be worth it.
The Israelis – early in their existence as a nation during the early 1950s – were rather socialist in their cultural outlook. Consequently, women were allowed to join the paramilitary Haganah light infantry, and many saw combat against the Arabs during that time period. When the Sunni Muslim Arabs learned that they were fighting women, their resistance stiffened to fanatical levels, and when they captured a hapless female Haganah soldier, she was raped, tortured mercilessly, killed and then her corpse dismembered and mutilated. After a number of incidents of this kind, the IDF reversed itself, banning women from combat roles, a practice which continues today. Women may serve as trainers in combat roles, but are not allowed to go into combat themselves.
Fueled by nearly a half-century of political-correctness and a Department of Defense/Pentagon determined not to portray women in the services in any negative light whatsoever, the American public now believes that “women in combat” is a success and that everything is A-OK.
That perception exists only because it has been a career-ending offense for serving males in the officer, NCO and enlisted ranks to speak truthfully about the reality of women in today’s military. Lies heaped upon lies, for years and years – everything from rigged and falsified physical fitness tests and scores, to diluted standards to falsified fit-reps (fitness reports), i.e., reports done in such a manner as to paper over or hide female performance deficiencies. You name it.
In reality, the U.S. military is now divided into roughly two parts, one large and one relatively small, according to the “tooth to tail” ratio. The combatants, the parts of the military which actually get their boots dirty and fight, are small in number and overwhelmingly male. And amongst the troops doing the heaviest fighting, such as special ops, and Army and Marine ground combat arms, the guys doing the bleeding and dying are not only almost all men, they are almost all white men. In recent years, that disbalance has changed somewhat, but I guess that’s what passes for “white privilege” in today’s armed forces, am I right?
The other, much larger portion of the military, the logistical/administrative tail, is much more diverse, and contains many more women. Did you know that the military has gone to great lengths to make itself attractive to single moms? Yep, it is true – and it is also equally true that the largest institutional provider of childcare in the nation is the U.S. Army! Back in the day, the saying went: “If the Army (Marines, Navy, etc.) had wanted you to have a kid, they’d have issued you one!,” but we’re a long ways from that these days! Oh, and thanks to the “generosity” of the U.S. taxpayer, GI Jane can have her breasts augmented free-of-charge via plastic surgery.
The Left views the military as a vast social welfare program, and thanks to the fecklessness, moral cowardice, and irresponsibility of the GOP establishment all these years, they’ve gotten their wish. Well, if mil.gov can’t or won’t fight, then maybe they can provoke the Chinese into laughing themselves to death at what idiots we’ve become!