CONGRESS REPORTEDLY “AVOIDING THE ISSUE”
by Capt. Joseph R. John (Ret), Chairman, CombatVeteransForCongress
(Jan. 19, 2016) — [Edits taken from Special Operations Speaks Op Ed of January 15]
On December 3, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter relayed orders from Obama to the US Armed Forces to integrate women into tip-of-the-spear combat units (SEALs, Green Beret, Ranger, Delta Force, Marine Corps Infantry, Spec Ops Units, etc.) regardless of whether the current physical qualification requirements prevent the integration—this latest Obama order will negatively affect the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Armed Forces.
On January 1, 2016, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ordered the US Marine Corps to provide plans by January 15, 2016 for boot camp to go coed. That decision is destructive, and Mabus tried to shroud it in silence. ABC.com reported that “Mabus also warned US Marine Corps leaders not to openly express any concerns about integrating women into combat jobs as ways to delay the process.” The problems with integrating boot camp to go coed are much more serious than integrating the combat arms; the US Marine Corps has not been allowed to talk about it; Mabus is employing a Soviet-style leadership technique.
A decorated and endorsed Combat Veteran For Congress Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, Maj-USMCR (R-CA-52), who served combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, called Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus “a greater threat to the Marine Corps than ISIS”; he said he’s eyeing legislation to try to address women in combat but wasn’t sure yet what that would entail.
The US Congress has the authority and power in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 14 of the US Constitution “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the Land and Naval Forces” to stop Mabus dead in his tracks. Will the Republican leadership in Congress support Congressman Hunter and finally take a stand “for the first time in 7 years to prevent Obama’s Social Experiment On Diversity that has been destructive to the US Armed Forces”; will the Congress employ its Constitutional authority to put a stop to Obama’s intent to degrade the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Marine Corps?
Obama and Valerie Jarrett are driving this latest directive order right from the White House through Obama’s Secretary of Defense and his Secretary of the Navy; the order sounds like a vindictive action to punish the US Marine Corps for its reluctance over the last seven years to prevent the degrading of the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Marine Corps Infantry units.
Prior to December 3, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter employed the same Soviet-style leadership tactic as Mabus by ignoring a US Marine Corps nine-month exhaustive study ordered by DOD on the ability to “Integrate Women In Front Line Marine Corps Infantry Units.” It appears that Carter followed orders from the White House and ordered all services, including the US Marine Corps, to open all combat billets to women. Carter also issued a gag order to all Service Branch Flag and General Officers warning them not to discuss the order to open all combat billets to women. The US Marine Corps’ integration study showed that compared to males in combat tasks, female Marines were slower, couldn’t lift as much weight, were less accurate shooters and sustained more than twice the injuries.
Now the US Marine Corps must comply not only with integration of the combat arms but, suddenly, the integration of boot camp, posthaste. Any problems that develop with such “an impossible” order will be blamed on either military leadership or inadequate training. The failure of leadership to control the havoc that will result will result in the leadership being “purged and purged again” until everyone is singing the right tune. If you are wondering what a Communist-style dictatorship looks like, the US Marine Corps is about to be exposed to Obama’s version of it. Hundreds of military senior officers in the US Armed Forces, listed in the attachment have been purged because they opposed Obama’s inept and destructive “Social Experiment On Diversity” over the last seven years; their respectful and well-intentioned cautions resulted in their summary removal and the destruction of their once-successful military careers.
In an Op Ed published on Fox News on Friday, January 8th, Congressman Hunter said the Marine Corps findings, after nine months of intensive study with women Marine participants who agreed with the findings of the study, were ignored, and the study was summarily swept aside because its results did not fit in with Obama and Valerie Jarrett’s political agenda. Congressman Hunter charged that the Obama administration’s move to open all combat posts to women was “ripping apart” the fabric of the US Marine Corps and prompting some well-trained and experienced combat Marines that the Corps wanted to retain for their corporate knowledge to leave the service—-what congressman Hunter meant by “ripping apart” the fabric of the US Marine Corps.
As a nation and in extensive congressional studies, the US Armed Forces had already compared separate-sex and coed boot camps and found that the US Marine Corps’ methods of separate boot camps for male and female recruits was far superior to an integrated coed method of boot camp training. In the 1999 Congressional Commission on Military Training and Gender-Related Issues, the Commission’s Chairman, Anita Blair, said, “Gender-integrated training entails special problems that simply do not arise in gender-separate training. These problems revolve around the difficulties of providing appropriate privacy for both sexes, accommodating fundamental physiological differences, and controlling sexual conduct.”
“The reason the military is there is not to be a transgender, corporate organization,” Congressman Hunter said, referring to the Pentagon’s plans to allow transgender service members to serve openly. “The military is there to execute American policy overseas, protect our allies, and kill our enemies. It’s not a corporation. We’re not all treated equal.”
Having separate boot camps allowed the US Marine Corps to postpone or at least greatly minimize the opportunity for all the sexual harassment problems until after the recruits finished their training and earned the title of Private. The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has worked to sexualize areas that were once neutral, worsening their negative impacts. Same-sex sexual assaults have gone out of control since its repeal; 11,000 straight young 18-year-old males have been sexually assaulted by gays, resulting in poor retention, recruits going AWOL to get away from sexual predators, and in some cases military personnel committing suicide because they are required to live in their barracks with no privacy with multiple predators attacking them in showers, on liberty, etc.
The US Army knows intimately what can go wrong combining young end-of-teen-aged kids together in the formative period of boot camp. Remember Aberdeen? Multiple Army drill sergeants were abusing their authority and having sex with or raping females under their charge. Even when relationships were consensual, the damage was just as great. The expenses are high in time, money, and effort to shuffle personnel due to improper relationships, fraternizing, pregnancies, misconduct, and litigation, let alone the destructive impacts to the personnel themselves and their units.
For instance, coed manning of ships at sea has been creating havoc in the Navy Fleets resulting in rampant pregnancy, ships being unmanned due to intentional pregnancies just before deployment so female crew members can avoid deployment, sex in submarines, groups of gay female predators in ships driving straight females to leave the US Navy, Navy families being fractured because of married crew members having sex with single crew members, etc.; the destructive policies being created by having coed boot camps followed by other lax gender policies in the other services is a good reason to prevent the US Marine Corps from following those same destructive policies. Following “Common Sense” policies by Obama’s civilian appointees at DOD to manage military personnel in the US Armed Forces is not so common.
If there’s one thing that is primal and unchanging, it’s that men and women are distracted by each other. The second you throw them together, they’re checking how they look and competing for each other’s attention. The fallout can run the spectrum from marriage and/or babies to serving in the brig for rape. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the East, and all the ripples created detract from the objective: training military personnel to become the nation’s enemy-killers. Advocates for total integration insist “We’re professionals,” as if professionals don’t hook up and mess up their lives and jobs. Regardless, new recruits are hardly professionals, and boot camp is not an office job. Harassment? That’s what boot camp is: you can’t train young recruits to attack and defend without some touching in boot camp—it’s impossible. A drill instructor’s simple correction or instruction can be construed as sexual harassment when done by the opposite sex, creating major problems for drill instructors in boot camp.
Congressman Hunter said that many congressional colleagues — Republicans and Democrats alike — were avoiding the issue. “Other members of Congress don’t want to talk about this,” he said. Congressman Hunter has the courage to speak out and oppose Obama’s destructive personnel policies, will the Republican leadership in Congress follow suit? The Congress has the Constitutional authority to prevent Obama’s destructive personnel policies for the US Armed Forces that is destroying “Combat Effectiveness.”
Copyright 2016, Capt. Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. This material can only be posted on another website or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without permission from the author.
Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62
Capt USN(Ret)
Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC
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Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” -Isaiah 6:8