This past Sunday 60 Minutes aired a piece on the integration of women in U.S. combat units, and specifically in the Marine Corps infantry. They got tremendous access to the Marine Corps' secretive Infantry Officer Course, or 'IOC' (to my knowledge, what can be seen in this segment is the most detail about IOC ever to be revealed to journalists, let alone to a television camera crew), spoke to the course director on the record, profiled a tough young female lieutenant trying to make it through the training, and visited the enlisted infantry course in Camp Lejeune, which has also been opened to women on a trial basis.
It was a thorough and interesting story. Check it out:
CBS vividly documents what has been public knowledge for sometime now: women are graduating, though at a much lower rate than men, from the enlisted infantry school, but failing to get through the officer course. (From the admittedly tiny sample of 26 female officers who have made the attempt, some subsequent to when this piece was filmed, zero have passed.) This is due to a substantial difference in physical difficulty between the two courses, a factor that the 60 Minutes crew does a good job of illustrating.
Brigadier General George Smith, the Marine officer in charge of supervising the integration effort, takes a hard line with CBS's David Martin on the issue of lowering standards for the course, noting, "David, I think the Infantry Officer Course is designed just right. You look around the globe today. The world is only getting messier and more complex. So we've got it right at the Infantry Officer Course." The Marine Corps, along with the other three services, will have to go back to the DOD this fall and report on the results of their efforts to integrate women. They also have the opportunity to apply for exemptions from the mandate to integrate--something that the Pentagon has made abundantly clear they are not enthusiastic about entertaining. The Pentagon's original order to integrate also contained the somewhat Orwellian mandate that the services "validate" all of their physical standards as a part of the integration effort, an unusual directive that chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey clarified by noting, "Importantly, though, if we do decide that 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 to the secretary, why is it that high? Does it really have to be that high?"
Judging by the interviews in this piece, it looks as though the Marine Corps still believes that the standards really have to be that high. All of which raises a series of questions that, apparently, CBS did not ask, but that are on the minds of everyone following this issue:
1) Will the Marine Corps apply for an exemption for the infantry and related specialties?
2) If the Corps doesn't apply for an exemption, and given that women graduate the enlisted course as a lower rate than the men, but the officer course not at all (though we can expect that, given a larger sample, a very small number will make it through) how will the Marine Corps manage a situation where its infantry battalions have small groups of junior female enlisted Marines assigned to them, with effectively zero female officer leadership?
Stay tuned.