Oppose the idea of military women serving in active ground combat?
Then it's reeducation camp for you!
It's actually called "unconscious bias training." How's that for a euphemism?
Seems that a 2012 survey buried by the Pentagon until recently revealed that two-thirds of male U.S. Marines don't want all infantry units opened up to women. And, as it turns out, most Americans feel the same way: they're not opposed to military women serving as support for ground troops, but they don't want them doing most of the fighting.
But no matter. The Marines will soon be cycling their men through the brainwashing machine in order to clear their heads of such "cultural and institutional resistance," as Military.com reports:
Marines across the Corps will be challenged on their unconscious prejudices and presuppositions as women get the opportunity to become grunts for the first time.
The Marine Corps is rolling out mandatory training for all Marines before the first future female rifleman hits boot camp, aiming to set conditions for a smooth transition and head off cultural resistance….
Topics include unconscious bias, which focuses on how people prejudge others based on factors such as race and gender, and principles of institutional change.
Here's why:
A Center for Naval Analyses survey of 54,000 Marines recently obtained by The Washington Post gives context to the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance as female Marines go infantry. The report found that a significant majority of male Marines at every rank opposed the decision to have women serve in ground combat jobs. The resistance was strongest among male junior officers in the ranks of captain and below, who opposed women in ground combat jobs at a rate of more than 72 percent. At least a third of female Marines at every rank were also opposed to the idea.
The Marine Corps was also the only service branch to request that some combat units remain closed to women, after an extensive study found that teams and squads with female members were slower and less lethal than all-male units.
Uh-oh! "Slower and less lethal"! We can't have that, so let's discredit the study:
The effort compared the performance of units with inexperienced female Marines — fresh out of training — against units made up of experienced male infantrymen, while focusing on speed and accuracy when engaging targets with multiple weapons systems, according to a Marine source familiar with the effort.
The Marines in these ad hoc units cycled in and out from one task to the next, which made it difficult to develop unit cohesion, the source said.
Women volunteering for the effort were screened at a lower physical-fitness standard than men but were expected to perform at the same strength and endurance levels as males on tasks such as negotiating obstacles and evacuating casualties, the source said.
In other words, the women didn't have to meet the men's physical-fitness requirements–so we shouldn't blame them for performing less efficiently in physical tasks than the men. Isn't there something tautological about this reasoning?
But oh well:
"There's no doubt we're leading cultural change. It's not the first time for the Marine Corps, but we like a challenge," said Brig. Gen. James Glynn, director of the Marine Corps' office of communication. "The purpose of the mobile training team is to begin to facilitate the cultural change … you've got to have the conversation."
You may not be able to change women's generally inferior combat performance, but hey, you can change the "culture," so it won't matter!