Marine experiment finds women get injured more frequently, shoot less accurately than men

[Valin]

Washington Post:

Dan Lamothe

September 10 2015

 

Women in a new Marine Corps unit created to assess how female service members perform in combat were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield, according to the results of a long-awaited study produced by the service.

 

The research was carried out by the service in a nine-month long experiment at both Camp Lejeune, N.C., and Twentynine Palms, Calif. About 400 Marines, including 100 women, volunteered to join the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force, the unit the Marine Corps created to compare how men and women do in a combat environment.

 

“This is unprecedented research across the services,” said Marine Col. Anne Weinberg, the deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office. “What we tried to get to is what is that individual’s contribution to the collective unit. We all fight as units… We’re more interested in how the Marine Corps fights as units and how that combat effectiveness is either advanced or degraded.”

 

The study, an executive summary of which was released Thursday, was carried out as all the services prepare to submit recommendations to Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter this fall on whether any jobs should be kept closed to women. In a landmark decision in January 2013, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta rescinded a decades-old ban on women serving in combat jobs like infantry, but gave the services until this fall to research how they wanted to better integrate women and if any jobs should be kept closed.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

More Shocking news...Not!

 

Navy Chief Rejects Marine Study Showing Units With Women Underperform
Fuzzy Slippers

Sunday, September 13, 2015

 

(Snip)

 

In an interview with NPR, Mabus states that the report is, if not flawed, then not in keeping with his broader view that a “more diverse force is a stronger force. A more diverse mindset makes you a stronger force. If you have the same outlook, if you have the same mindset, you don’t get much innovation.”

 

MABUS: It started out with a fairly large component of the men thinking this is not a good idea and women will never be able to do this. When you start out with that mindset you’re almost presupposing the outcome.

 

DAVID GREENE, HOST: Are you saying this was a flawed study?

 

MABUS: I’m saying that I think that when you call it empirical standards, that it depends on what you put in. And if you look at some of the analysis – some of the outside analysis of this – from Center for Naval Analyses, they’ve looked at these and they said there are ways to mitigate this so you can have the same combat effectiveness, the same lethality, which is crucial.

 

GREENE: Well, what’s a specific? I mean, what is a specific idea you might have that would ensure that a mixed-gender unit would have the same level of combat effectiveness?

 

MABUS: Well, for example, part of the study said women tend to not be able to carry as heavy a load for as long. But there were women that went through the study that could. And part of the study said we’re afraid because women get injured more frequently, that over time, women will break down more, that you’ll begin to lose your combat effectiveness over time. That was not shown in this study. That was an extrapolation based on injury rates. I’m not sure that’s right. But it is something that you can set a standard for. But to make that sort of generalization – there were individual women who could meet this standard.

 

(Snip)