PETE writes:

Regarding “More Fudging of Military Standards for Women,” the news story notes, “Starting Jan. 1, every woman in the Marines Corps (sic) was supposed to meet a new physical standard by performing three pull-ups,” but later goes on to state “Lance Cpl. Ally Beiswanger explained that the pullup test had been put off until sometime next year, to gather more data and ensure all female Marines are given the best opportunity to succeed.’”

It is important to note that the armed forces have never held women to the same standards of physical performance as men; the services falsely claim to have done so – but that intellectual sleight of hand is only possible via what the army and other services call “gender norming.” What is gender-norming, you ask? The answer, stripped of Pentagon obfuscation and jargon, is simple: it is a handicapping system for military women, designed to bring their largely-inferior physical performance into alignment with that of men.

In golf, the handicapping system allows a 25-handicap player (whose typical score for eighteen holes is twenty five strokes above par) to compete with an expert or “scratch” (zero handicap) golfer – by spotting the inferior player the difference between his normal score and that of the expert. Gender-norming does the same thing on measures of physical fitness.

If we examine the Marine Corps physical fitness tests for men and women, a number of things become apparent.

There is no single standard for male and female Marines; instead, personnel are split into groups by sex and then tested on that basis – against a different set of standards.

Male Marines are required to perform pull-ups, crunches (max. in two minutes time), and a timed 3-mile run. The maximum PFT (physical fitness test) score is attained by doing 20 or more pull-ups, 100 or more abdominal crunches, and by running three miles in eighteen (18:00) minutes or less.

Female Marines, on the other hand, do not perform pull-ups, but are permitted to do the easier “flexed arm hang,” i.e., static hanging from a pull-up bar. They also do abdominal crunches and a timed 3-mile run. To max the PFT, a female must hang for 70 seconds, do at least 100 crunches, and attain a three-mile run time of 21:00 minutes or better.

The minimum number of pull-ups permissible for male Marines is three; but relatively few women possess the upper-body strength to meet even that standard – hence, the postponement by the Corps to “gather more data,” etc. – and find a way of the illogical corner into which they’ve painted themselves.

It is interesting that push-ups are no longer part of the PFT – given that push-ups are a staple of boot camp. The hunch here is that they were stricken from the PFT since few women perform push-ups well. Leaving them in the PFT would highlight the degree to which male/female performance differs – and of course that can’t be allowed to happen in the “new” military.

The Marines are the most-stubborn of the armed forces; they have resisted efforts to water-down their training better than the Army, Navy and USAF. However, even the Marines have given in to political correctness by diluting the standards for women somewhat.

A number of concessions have been made to the feminists and so-called “reformers” over the years; these include the switch from doing PT in field gear to doing it in sweats and athletic shoes. In the old-breed Army and Marine Corps, recruits were expected to do runs – including timed runs – in their boots and fatigues (utilities). However, since women are already more-prone to training-induced stress fractures than men, it was decided some time ago to do PT in sweats and athletic shoes – not withstanding the fact that grunts go into combat in field gear and not their gym clothes!

Just as physical training and testing were altered to hide deficiencies in female personnel, other parts of basic military training have also been changed or eliminated.

Thirty years or so ago, it was discovered that nearly one-hundred percent of female U.S. Army recruits washed out of the grenade-throwing test – almost none of the female trainees was capable of throwing a grenade far- or accurately-enough to escape its blast cone. Rather than admit the obvious – that women could not perform to the same standards as their male counterparts – the army instead dumbed-down the test itself by reducing the distance the grenade was to be thrown, allowing recruits to throw underhanded, and also by allowing recruits to throw the grenade over a barrier or wall instead of doing a more-challenging throw in the open.

Soldiers and Marines used to be tested on their ability to serve as a stretcher bearers – carrying a “wounded” comrade in a liter – but when it was found that parties of four, five or more females were required for the task – but only two men – the requirement was scrapped in favor of the more-female friendly task of map reading.

To return to the issue of physical fitness testing, your readers should know that – even though male and female tests differ in difficulty – the scores attained are still used in an identical manner. That is, even though a female Marine’s objective physical fitness will probably be inferior to that of an equivalent male Marine, i.e., he may have done 15 pull-ups on his test, while she did none at all – she may still get a higher “grade” on her PFT – and therefore better fitness reports and evaluations. Not surprisingly, since physical fitness plays such an important part in the operational readiness of a Marine or soldier, PFT results are heavily-weighted in evaluations, consideration for awards, promotions, and assignments. Thus, it can easily be seen that “gender norming” artificially boosts female attainment in these areas, and dampens corresponding male attainment as well.

Even the chosen small arms of the military services reflect, in part, compromises  designed to accommodate female personnel – although no one will state that for the record. The M-16/AR-15 family of rifles and carbines fire the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge – which has a very mixed record as a military round. It possesses adequate performance inside 250 meters, but is marginal as a “man-stopper” due to the light weight of its bullets and poor terminal ballistics performance compared to larger and heavier rounds fired by traditional .30-caliber battle rifles. The same is true of the standard NATO 9mm Beretta pistol, which also has inferior terminal ballistics and stopping power compared to the M1911 Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol it replaced. It isn’t cut-and-dried (there are good arguments in favor of both schools of thought, old and new), but I am convinced one reason these lighter arms are retained is that they can be handled and fired reasonably well by female personnel – whereas very few women are capable of handling, maintaining or firing the more-powerful arms of the past. These weapons, such as the M-14, were fight-stoppers but they did possess significantly more recoil than their modern-day counterparts and required a good deal more upper-body strength to carry, maintain and use properly in the field. They were, in short, weapons designed by men to be used by men.

— Comments —

Diana writes:

There is no point in trying to figure out the logic behind the military’s insane attempt to integrate women into the deadly business of war, other than it is part of a decaying society that thinks money is for burning, not earning.

Another perfect example of this would be the equality by fiat in the schools, the most notorious of which is the Kansas City, MO debacle.

In these United States, there is no problem so intractable that wads of cash can’t solve it. I am positive that right now some contractor is being paid a lot of money to create a whizbang high-tech grenade thrower, to equalize the results between the male shoulder (designed for throwing efficiently) and the female shoulder (designed to curve inward gracefully, to hold a baby). A waste of money, spent by a bankrupt country, decaying into madness.

However, once you get into the loony bin, people do have their reasons for doing this or that. My guess is that the powers that be in both the military and the state apparatuses that work hand in hand with the military to ruin us, think that we are so technologically ahead of any possible enemy that none of this matters. And for the most part that’s probably true.

Well, I am no military expert, but I know that the world is nothing more than one surprise after another. And in military history, bad surprises outnumber the good.

Diana writes:

 Pete wrote:

“They were, in short, weapons designed by men to be used by men.”

In 1988, I was friends with a Romanian woman immigrant. She was in her 20s during during the dictatorship of the mad Ceaucescu.  I don’t know whether crazy Nicolai ordered female conscription, but she served for a time in the Romanian army. During that time women were forced to undergo weapons training with assault rifles.

This lady told me that the training was curtailed because too many women suffered broken shoulders due to rifle recoil.

I’ve always wondered what kind of rifle that was. Was it an AK-47? In any case, even in a dictatorship run by a loon, a bad idea was abandoned.

In the US, we won’t abandon this bad idea. You’ll pry these female warriors out of our cold, dead fingers.

Henry McCulloch writes:

Your correspondent Pete makes excellent points about the many changes Defense Department bureaucrats, in their perfervid pursuit of the Great Goddess Equality, have dictated to the U.S. armed forces in order to accommodate women.  Although he may not mean to, Pete leaves his readers with the impression that these changes are quite new.  Some may be.  Many, alas, are not.  Nonetheless, the gist of what Pete writes is borne out by my experiences as a Marine and Air Force Reserve officer.

Pete writes:

It is interesting that push-ups are no longer part of the [Marine Corps] PFT – given that push-ups are a staple of boot camp. The hunch here is that they were stricken from the PFT since few women perform push-ups well. Leaving them in the PFT would highlight the degree to which male/female performance differs – and of course that can’t be allowed to happen in the “new” military.

The Marines are the most-stubborn of the armed forces; they have resisted efforts to water-down their training better than the Army, Navy and USAF. However, even the Marines have given in to political correctness by diluting the standards for women somewhat.

A number of concessions have been made to the feminists and so-called “reformers” over the years; these include the switch from doing PT in field gear to doing it in sweats and athletic shoes. In the old-breed Army and Marine Corps, recruits were expected to do runs – including timed runs – in their boots and fatigues (utilities). However, since women are already more-prone to training-induced stress fractures than men, it was decided some time ago to do PT in sweats and athletic shoes – not withstanding the fact that grunts go into combat in field gear and not their gym clothes!

I graduated from Marine Corps Officer Candidate School and was commissioned in April 1980.  As Pete notes, we had to drop and give our sergeant-instructors 20 (push-ups, that is) constantly for the most picayune of infractions, real and imagined.  Still, by 1980 push-ups were no longer an event in the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test.  From Pete’s description the only thing in the PFT for men that has changed since 1980 is that a maximum of 100 crunches within two minutes has replaced 80 sit-ups.  That’s probably a good thing, as full sit-ups are very bad for one’s back if overindulged in.

While we performed obstacle courses, training exercises and some field runs in utilities (on runs usually utility trousers and sweatshirts, actually) and boots, again already by 1980 we did almost all formal PT, including all timed runs, in sweats and sneakers – which is indeed much easier on feet and ankles.  That was true in the fleet as well, not just in boot camp and OCS.  My point is that these particular concessions are nothing new.  I suspect they may have been driven by opening the service academies to women, which took place in 1976.  What a way to celebrate the Bicentennial!  I think I can even remember President Gerald Ford, himself a Navy WWII veteran, making some stupid and insipid remarks to that effect at the time – but perhaps I’m just being uncharitable.

Pete makes an excellent point about the effective discrimination in the Marine Corps against men that results from the PFT double-standard.  Again referring to my time in the Marine Corps, the PFT was an institutional fetish and there was also a running-mania then – even though track and field-style distance running has precious little to do with the kind of strength and stamina needed for ground combat and is actively counter-productive for aviators who must endure sustained high G-forces in flight without passing out.  (When I flew F-16s in the Air Force Reserve later, we were discouraged from distance running for that very reason.)  A Marine officer or staff NCO who did not have perfect PFT scores on his fitness reports was at serious risk of being passed over – effectively ending his career – on that basis alone.  That risk, however, was greater for commissioned officers than for warrant officers and staff NCOs.  I knew several very strong officers who nevertheless because of their builds – former college footbal players, mostly – could not reach 20 pull-ups, although they got pretty close.  And of course not every one of The Few Good Men the Marine Corps used to say it was looking for could run three miles in under 18 minutes, despite their being very fit and tough.

I also second Pete about U.S. military small arms.  The older M-14 rifle and Colt .45 pistol, properly maintained, are superior to the newer and lighter M-16 and 9mm weapons in every respect.  It was no coincidence that the Marine Corps, which also (properly) made a fetish of marksmanship while I was in, had competitors in the annual Marine Corps Matches shoot M-14s for the record rather than the M-16 — which by then was the universal U.S. service rifle.  I’m not sure we can blame the girls for being stuck with the M-16: blame for that falls on Robert McNamara and his efforts to “rationalize and standardize” the U.S. armed forces during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.  The AR-15 had been designed as a light carbine for the Army’s Special Forces, if I remember correctly, but McNamara and his whiz kids decided that, with slight changes to make it the M-16, it would be a dandy rifle for everybody.  There were soldiers and Marines who paid a high price for that in Vietnam, as more delicate early M-16s had an awkward propensity to jam in firefights, something that was not a problem with the rugged M-14.

There has been serial mismanagement in the U.S. armed forces for a very long time.  We are right to blame feminism, and now homosexualism, for the most egregious institutional abuses of the services.  But the problems don’t begin or end there.  Many of our problems arise from a military culture that encourages career-driven yes-men, whose instinct is never to disagree with civilian leadership or tell anyone with any power over them anything that civilian official might not want to hear.  And so, at a time of institutional crisis in the armed forces, there are no – or very nearly no – generals and admirals who will give the politicians the straight scoop.  They enjoy the perquisites of senior rank too much, and certainly don’t want to jeopardize the well-paying jobs with defense contractors they expect to get after they retire — which make up for the decades of mediocre pay on active duty.

Buck writes:

Excellent overview by Pete.

I’m six-two and weigh 205 pounds, exactly what I weighed at age twenty when I started and finish boot camp at Parris Island. I was a fit athlete when I arrived and most things came easy. Pull-ups not so much. I never got past ten. That athletic muscle mass is long gone. Just for grins, I just went into my basement and executed three painful pull-ups, two of them legit. That was the first time in several decades. I’m done with that.

It’s criminal that we have to explain this.

The acceptable mean maximum weight of a 20 year old female Marine is 148 pounds within their acceptable height range of 58 to 72 inches. At six foot the max is 175 pounds. For a six foot male, age 20, it’s 227 pounds. All along the range of acceptable heights and weights for male and female Marines there is roughly a 50 pound weight difference.

Muscle mass, proportion and fitness being equal, if I had been pulling up fifty less pounds, I could have done a great many more pull-ups. I was just average. I could have pulled me and another fifty pounds of gear over an even higher obstacle.

On average, the male Marines most proficient at pull-ups were lighter and shorter – closer in size to the females. Simple physics; less weight, shorter arms. Female Marines, having that overall advantage, should routinely out-perform male Marines. But, they perform at a dramatically inferior level. What might explain that? Something to do with their bodies?

I read that in tests at the Bronx Zoo in 1924, using a dynamometer – a scale that measures the mechanical force of a pull on a spring – a 165-pound male chimpanzee registered a pull of 847 pounds, while a 165-pound man, could manage a one-handed pull of about 210 pounds. Could that be a function of body type?

A 600 pound gorilla can climb and hang by one hand all day long. Body type?

Many years ago I read that physicist, using King Kong as an extreme illustration, determined that a gorilla of his size, though the most powerful creature (think warrior) on Earth, could not have sustained his own weight – neither his muscle or bone – physically proportioned like an actual gorilla. Mass and gravity would have made him impossible. Body type. He’d need four massive legs.

Female gymnasts consistently range in height within three inches of five feet, and at around 100 pounds; about the minimum acceptable for a female Marine. Certainly they can do a great many pull-ups. Could they, perhaps the most freakishly fit and physically damaged young females on the planet, carry 60 pounds of gear and carry or drag a 227 pound wounded male to safety; or go hand-to-hand with the same size male combatant in a fight to the death? Another body type.

Is this what we want and need, female warriors culled from the extremes or fringe of society? We all know that this is a modern liberal lie. But, I recently met a career Marine who (seemingly) couldn’t be more proud of his two Marine daughters. Shut my mouth. What the hell do I say to him? The warrior ethos has been dumped into the modern liberal gender blender with everything else. Who the hell wants to stick their hand into that?

Pete responds to Diana:

Re: “My guess is that the powers that be in both the military and the state apparatuses that work hand in hand with the military to ruin us, think that we are so technologically ahead of any possible enemy that none of this matters. And for the most part that’s probably true.”

One of the many problems which plagues the present-day military and defense establishment is the belief that technology can solve all problems. This notion flatly-contradicts what the history of warfare tells us – that technology alone is rarely decisive in prevailing over a determined enemy. The Vietnam conflict provides a case in point; during the early years of that war, senior Pentagon officials and generals spoke disparagingly of the Viet Cong and NVA (North Vietnamese Army) as a disorganized bunch of peasants in black pajamas who could not possibly defeat the most-technologically advanced nation on earth. Yet, those same leaders were the very ones scratching their heads in bewilderment as Saigon fell in 1975.

Strategic theorist the late Colonel John Boyd, generally regarded as one of the finest military minds this nation has produced, spoke of warfare as being conducted in three spheres – the moral (the moral/ethical reasons war is being waged; the rightness of one’s cause), the mental (the thought processes behind the waging of war) and the physical (anything physical having to do with fighting). Of these, Boyd viewed the moral sphere of war as the most important, and the physical sphere as the least-decisive – but U.S. defense planners consistently act as if this order is reversed, especially with their emphasis on technology and throwing money at problems. Boyd also was fond of thundering at his audiences “Ideas, people and technology – in that order!”  This statement was intended to reinforce his view that ideas and people are more-decisive in war than technology alone.

Re: “This lady told me that the training was curtailed because too many women suffered broken shoulders due to rifle recoil. I’ve always wondered what kind of rifle that was. Was it an AK-47? In any case, even in a dictatorship run by a loon, a bad idea was abandoned.”

Diana, I had not heard of that aspect of life in the Communist Bloc, so thank you for sharing the information. During the Cold War years, the Warsaw Pact nations generally allowed women into the armed forces in relative high numbers, consistent with the radical egalitarianism of the Marxist-Leninist ideology. However, like western military forces, they ran into the immutable facts of human biology and the differences between men and women. Consequently, they suffered many of the same problems as their western counterparts did in integrating women into the services.

On the basis of the information you have supplied, it is not possible to determine exactly what type of weapon your Romanian friend used – but it is probable that she used an AK-47 assault rifle, or one of its many variants. As you may know, the AK-47 family of assault rifles is the most widely-produced military small arm in history. The original AK-47 fired a 7.62x39mm round, intermediate in size, power and recoil between a full-sized .30-caliber rifle cartridge and the 5.56x45mm NATO round. The 7.62×39 round has some recoil – but not as much as a full-sized .30-caliber rifle round; I was not aware that female recruits suffered injuries from the use of the AK-47, but it is certainly possible, as your friend’s experience proves. Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 family of rifles, did not design it with female users in mind. It is a crude yet robust and effective weapon – but like most Soviet weapons, it was not designed with the comfort or convenience of the user in mind.

Interestingly, the Soviets later copied the U.S. somewhat when they released the AK-74, which rechambered (redesigned) the AK-47 to use a smaller and lighter cartridge comparable to that used by the U.S. M-16/AR-15 family of weapons, namely – the Soviet 5.45x39mm round.

Diana writes:

My thanks to Pete for addressing my question about the kind of weapon my old acquaintance used in the Romanian Army.

In this long-ago conversation, my friend referred specifically and only to her experience in Romania under Ceaucescu, who ruled with a mailed iron fist from 1967 to 1989.

This woman had done her military service sometime in the late 70s: that is, during the very worst of the Ceaucescu years. Romania under Ceaucescu was a very bad combination of a backward, former Turkish colony, and a country under the grip of a Communist dictator who was also incredibly crazy. Perhaps he went through a phase where he “encouraged” women to volunteer.

Are we so different?

As to what Pete said regarding the issue of technological superiority, exactly! Technology can only get you so far. I live in a major city, whose fire department is now under assault by the Federal government to hire more black firefighters. Soon women will follow. Disaster will follow.

And of course, the real issue here is moral rot. A soldier who has nothing to fight for won’t fight.

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