ted on April 19, 2016 by Ray Starmann
Smokescreen on the Potomac: Pentagon and Congress deliberately ignoring $36 million USMC study that shows women cannot survive in the combat arms
By Ray Starmann
http://usdefensewatch.com/2016/04/smokescreen-on-the-potomac-pentagon-and-congress-deliberately-ignoring-36-million-usmc-study-that-shows-women-cannot-survive-in-the-combat-arms/women_marines000001-4_3
The United States of America is in mortal jeopardy and most Americans, tucked away in their beds tonight don’t even understand why or who is responsible for their peril.
Those responsible are not from North Korea, China, Iran, Russia or ISIS. They are Department of Defense bureaucrats, members of Congress and senior leaders in the US military.
The US military is committing suicide. We are in the first stages of beginning a process that is going to decimate the speed, lethality and combat power of the Marines and the US Army combat arms and special operations. The US military is doing this because of policies directed by the White House and authorized by willing lackeys in the Pentagon and in Congress.
A Congress short on military veterans and long on wind and incompetence said nothing as the April 1, 2016, deadline passed for them to review Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s authorization which allows women to serve in direct ground combat units.
Yet, Congress had a plethora of information presented to them which clearly indicated that women cannot function and survive in US Army and US Marine Corps combat arms and special operations units; aka, infantry, armor, armored cavalry, artillery, the Marine Raiders, NAVY SEALs, Delta Force, the Rangers and the Green Berets.
Let’s be clear; women have served gallantly in harm’s way in all American conflicts and particularly in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
But, serving in a transportation unit that comes under fire is not the same as being in a direct ground combat unit with the sole mission of finding, fixing and killing the enemy. Returning fire when your convoy is shot at in Iraq is not the same as being in an armored cavalry unit conducting a movement to contact against an enemy force. Being a firefighter or a police officer is not the same as being a combat infantryman.
Included in the vast array of information available to the Pentagon and the Congress was the $36 million dollar, 9 month long Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force (GCEITF) Study the Marines conducted in 2014 that pitted all male units against coed units in a myriad of combat tasks that simulated what one faces in the combat arms and special ops.
The study was monitored by neutral researchers from the University of Pittsburgh.
Except for Senator John McCain and Congressman Duncan Hunter, who felt the Pentagon was deliberately dodging the results of the study, not one member of Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Army, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the former US Army Chief of Staff and the current US Army Chief of Staff, completely and unequivocally wanted nothing to do with the study and ensured that it was ignored.
In fairness to General Joe Dunford, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as Commandant of of the Marine Corps, he did request a waiver that would have stopped women from being included in the combat arms and special operations units of the Marines.
Dunford’s waiver wasn’t even considered by Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus. Since then, Dunford has hunkered down in his bunker, watching the implosion of the Marine Corps with field glasses.
Leading the charge for women to serve in direct ground combat units in the Pentagon and Congress were Ash Carter, Ray Mabus, former Chairman of the JCS, General Martin Dempsey and retired Air Force officer and A-10 pilot Congresswoman Martha McSally. An Air Force pilot’s knowledge of ground combat operations is zero at best, but she was accepted as an expert on the subject of women in ground combat. Flying a plane at 20,000 feet is not the same as humping a 100 pound ruck for two weeks on a sustained Marine infantry combat operation.
With a small, but powerful group of inexperienced advocates pushing for women in combat, why did the majority of Congress and the Pentagon completely ignore the study, which basically confirmed what everyone already knew and what 2,000 years of recorded military history substantiated?
The following are excerpts from the Marine Corps study, which was included in a 37 page statement presented by Elaine Donnelly, President of the Center for Military Readiness to the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator John McCain, on February 2, 2016:
If you click on the link above, you can read the whole 37 page report submitted to Congress. But, here are some important excerpts from it.
All-male task force teams outperformed mixed gender units in 69 percent (92 of 134) of ground combat tasks, particularly in specialties that carried the assault load plus the additional weight of crew served weapons and ammunition. Significant disparities in physical size, strength, endurance, injury rates, an early onset of fatigue that affected marksmanship were scrupulously recorded with scientific monitoring techniques. This research was definitive as possible, short of an actual war.
It is beyond dispute that in gender mixed units, physical deficiencies had negative effects on the unit’s speed and effectiveness in simulated battle tasks, including marching under heavy loads, casualty evacuation and marksmanship while fatigued. In some units, male volunteers compensated for the women’s difficulties by taking over strenuous tasks.
All male squads, teams and crews and gender integrated squads, teams and crews had a noticeable difference in their performance of the basic combat tasks of negotiating obstacles and evacuating casualties.
Female volunteers in the study were considered to be in above average physical condition. The male volunteers were only an average representation of their peers.
Females possess less lean body mass, slighter build that affects stride length and stride frequency as loads increase, less absolute VO2 max production and less power and anaerobic/aerobic capacity than males.
Physical differences were more pronounced in specialties that carried the assault load,, plus the weight of crew served weapons and ammunition.
All male units were faster on hikes, gorge crossings and cliff ascents.
All male units engaged targets faster and scored more hits with crew served weapons than gender integrated units.
Women had greater incidents of stress fractures.
Women suffered a higher rate of injuries during marches with heavy loads.
Women were injured at six times the rate of their male counterparts.
In the 120mm tank loading simulation, a gunnery skills test, participants were asked to lift a simulated round weighing 55 lbs,, 5 times in 35 seconds or less. Less than 1% of the men compared to 19% of the women could not complete the tank loading drill in the allotted time. The failure rates would increase inside a tank.
In the 155 mm Artillery Lift-and-Carry, a test simulating ordnance stowing, volunteers had to pick up a 95 lb. artillery round and carry it 50 meters in under 2 minutes. Noted the report, less than 1% of men, compared to 28.2% of women, could not complete the 155mm artillery round lift and carry in the allotted time.
Less than 1% of men could not negotiate a 7 foot wall, whereas 21% of the women could not.
Marine Corps Brigadier General George Smith wrote in Warfighting that combat power is generated through speed and focus. Speed over time is tempo, the consistent ability to operate quickly. Speed is a weapon.
Obviously, speed is no longer in the Marines’ toolkit of operational skills.
Women in the combat arms and special ops are now going to make the US military high drag and low speed.
Obviously all the facts in the world mean nothing to social engineers like Carter and Ray Mabus, who have called for gender diversity quotas that will order Marine and Army combat arms and special ops units to include up to 35% females in their rosters.
According to the CMR, this is to achieve what General Dempsey called a critical mass. Standards will be validated levels that are gender neutral but lower than before.
Dempsey added that if “a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?
Over time, this would become known as the Dempsey Rule, meaning that a standard too high for women will be deemed too high. These changes would destroy the military.
The facts are obviously being ignored to implement policies based on fantasies and delusions.
Our national defense is now predicated on lies. Sadly, the greatest victims from these monumental and devastating policies will be the people it’s apparently trying to help, women. While women shine in thousands of different jobs in the military, they simply cannot handle the physical hardships that are part of daily life in peacetime and in war in the combat arms and special operations.
This is unabashed insanity, implemented by moral cowards, minions, hard core feminists and leftist lunatics who care more about covering their own derrieres or the fantasy world they inhabit than about the security of the nation they have sworn to defend.
As for the Joint Chiefs and the military’s senior leadership, I wouldn’t follow them into water. I knew 18 year old privates who had more imagination, guts and moral fortitude than the rubber men of Arlington.
This vast social experiment will only end in one way, in disaster on the battlefields of distant lands.
When the flag draped coffins start arriving with American soldiers and Marines who died because they were in a force that was deliberately made weaker, when you are searching for those responsible, look no further than Carter, Mabus, Fanning, Dempsey, Odierno and Milley, names that will be as infamous 100 years from now as Benedict Arnold.
