And, she exudes a whole lot of integrity. With her combat service, she's on the fast track for 05 or 06 in a very small lineal numbers pool (i.e. #1 Marine Officers, #2 Female Marine Officers, #3 COMBAT TESTED Female Marine Officers). She probably just screwed her career future, by opposing the progressive "assumed facts" meme.
Semper Fi, Marine.
Many moons ago, I was an instructor at The Basic School in Quantico, where all newly commissioned male and female Lts. go for 6 months of grunt-ish training before going off to be pilots, lawyers, engineers...or even grunts. So I probably observed 2-3000 Lts. go through that training first hand, everything from long marches, to tactical ops, live fire exercises...everything. Probably 120 or so women among them.
We
tried, even back them, to give them mostly the same training. Even when we weren't supposed to. But the differences were just huge. On the conditioning hikes, fully loaded, there wouldn't be a female still up with the guy after the first 2 miles. A few guys also would be drifting back, but it was
every single female. I vividly recall one company-level exercise where the female platoon was assigned a movement route (commonly used in this particular exercise) and some of them simply
refused because it required movement through some hip-deep, nasty water. They were ordered, and simply wouldn't do it. Listened to the whole argument over the radio between the major in charge. and this female captain helpless that some of her officers refused the movement.
The great thing, though, was that they
generally tried just as hard, and were just as dedicated as the guys. And the vast majority of them
knew they couldn't do the full-on grunt stuff up to standards, but they were mature enough to realize they could still be great, valuable officers in whatever MOS they eventually were assigned. Remind me a lot of this Captain of Engineers. She just
gets it, and understands that this push to force women into the infantry is actually insulting, because it implies that what they have done so far in their careers just isn't good enough. Heck, a lot of
guys aren't best suited to be infantry officers either -- it's just a matter of best fitting talents and abilities to the job.
I'm waiting for Trump in particular to be asked about that, and to hear his answer. It's a big deal for me.