The military does not make it a secret what boot camp is like nor is it a secret that you are going to be thrown into a life or death situation where your actions can mean the difference between life and death for yourself and your comrades. They do not treat you like shit for the lulz; they want to make you into a tougher individual so you have the skills to not only survive but thrive. It sounds like this women was punished for encouraging this excellence.
Exactly. She should get a medal. This is what I meant about the training: for better or worse it exists for a reason.
(As a note I find it way more likely that some upper person didn't like the female commander, and knew if he claimed there was complaints from girls that everyone would believe it, because everyone knows girls are butthurt.)
It's fine to have different standards in training and selection so long as this is reflected in how they're deployed. For example, they might require that recruits intended for combat be able to lift x amount of weight because of equipment and the need to carry the wounded. If so, then this must be a requirement of the training, and no exceptions given for gender or anything else. Either you can do the job or you can't. If people can't complete these tasks then it's fine to let them graduate if the intention is to place them in roles where their inability to lift won't be a problem. Great eyesight is probably important for marksmanship but less so for someone intended to become a mechanic. It really comes down to expectations of their future roles, and did the colonel hold them to a reasonable standard?
This is exactly he conversation I had when the first female Marines all failed their first screening, some months ago. A lot of people went "haha, women are weak and therefore inferior", but they don't understand where the standards come from.
Let's say one of the test is to walk 10 miles carrying 60 lbs. (BS numbers, sorry.) The average male who trains will easily do this, unless he has some health/behavior problem, but the average female can't.
But where did they get he numbers? They didn't pull them out of the sky. They got them from decades of statistical data on training males and then set a reasonable a goal point.
If we were taking an average of both sexes over a hundred years, the numbers would reflect female physiology. and skew the numbers lower. (If anyone's interested I can pull up data that shows omen who strength train actually see an equal
percentage of gains as males.) The problem is, currently, that military equipment and deployment execution are designed to average male standards, so smaller people really will struggle physically to keep up. The solution is either adjust standards, or create separate standards for female-only groups. USMC doesn't want to do either of these, because they don't want to (a) weaken their male force, or (b) create a schism between male/famale groups because they're incapable of treating outsider-groups as brothers-in-arms which is an important part of their psych training.
And I'm gonna turn off the autism now.
