Marine Corps decision sets up clash over women in combat

It may be an outmoded advertising slogan, but apparently the U.S. Marine Corps is still “looking for a few good men,” at least to fill its infantry direct ground combat positions.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, commandant of the Marine Corps, recommended on Thursday that women be excluded from competing for certain front-line combat jobs. But his direct civilian superior, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, has already made it clear he opposes the proposal, raising the question of whether he will issue a veto.

The Marine Corps recommendations put Dunford, who takes over next week as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at odds with the Army, Navy, Air Force, and U.S. Special Operations Command, all of which plan to open combat positions to women. Each of the services has until January 2016 to make its recommendation to Defense Secretary Ash Carter.

Dunford’s report was informed by a yearlong study on gender integration. The study concluded that, overall, male-only units performed better than gender-integrated units. It found the male-only infantry units shot more accurately, could carry more weight, and moved more quickly through specific tactical exercises. It also concluded women had higher injury rates than men, including stress fractures that likely resulted from carrying heavy loads.

The injury data from the Marine Corps study are consistent with those from the U.S. Army’s “Exception to Policy” (ETP) experiments, in which female soldiers suffered injuries at double the rate of male soldiers.

But Navy Secretary Mabus blasted the Marine Corps study, telling the City Club of Cleveland that while the Marines did a long study of the matter, it relied on averages. For example, the average woman can’t carry as much or perform as quickly as a man.

“The other way to look at it is we’re not looking for average,” Mabus said. “There were women that met this standard, and a lot of the things there that women fell a little short in can be remedied by two things: training and leadership.”

But the issue of standards is central to the debate about assigning women to direct ground combat positions.

“If we know that [women] suffer injuries at the rate double those of men, well the only solution is lower the standard to avoid those injuries,” said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness and a member of President George H. W. Bush’s 1992 Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. “The more you do that, you don’t announce it to the media, you don’t even admit it. You say, well I’m meeting the same standard. But the word that is left out is ‘minimum.’”

Concern about the Marine Corps recommendations wasn’t limited to the Pentagon. According to The Hill, female lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee are questioning whether the study was intentionally designed to “undermine” then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s 2013 directive opening all combat positions to women.

“I am disappointed that this report is essentially being used as a way to exclude women,” Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., told The Hill. “We are not asking for standards to be lowered, all we are asking is for women to have the opportunity to pursue whichever roles in the military that they wish to pursue.”

But if all direct ground combat exclusions for women are removed, women likely will have no choice about volunteering for combat jobs. In its 1981 Rostker v. Goldberg decision, the U.S. Supreme Court found that since women are exempt from ground combat positions, male-only Selective Service registration was constitutional. Current litigation challenging this decision under new women-in-combat policies could succeed in overturning Rostker.

“You cannot have a military operating where combat assignments are optional for women, or if they feel like it,” said Donnelly. “You can’t do that and have a viable armed military. So, yes, women would be ordered into those units, not just allowed.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.