(Everyone had, apparently, forgotten the men and women who had fought together in previous foxholes, most recently five years earlier during Desert Storm, in which 40,000 women fought and fifteen were killed.)
Kassebaum Baker, the congressional study, recommended that men and women be segregated during basic training and that they be separated at least at the platoon level in the Army (about forty people), the flight level in the Air Force (an Air Force flight is about the size of an Army or Marine Corps platoon), and the division level in the Navy/Marine Corps during basic. A division is a much larger unit, so while men and women could train in the same small units in the Army and Air Force, they'd be widely separated in the Marine Corps and Navy. Why? Researchers said that integration would promote less unit cohesion and more distraction. But they also found that the units split by separate housing couldn't be as supportive of each other or have as high discipline. So the recommendations were to keep the women together and keep the men together for a couple of months, and then send them off to work and train and serve with each other—and expect them to know how to hold each other accountable and treat each other with respect.
Defense Secretary William Cohen disagreed with the findings of the panel because he had already seen integration work well and, perhaps, realized that separating the men and the women punished all women for the men's bad behavior at Aberdeen and in Vegas. (These perpetrators were adult, high-ranking men. No discipline. Seriously, men, get your act together). He instead called for some changes in training and living quarters. His military chiefs had also opposed segregating basic training.
You caught that, right? Twenty years ago, everybody—except Congress and the Marine Corps—understood that training should not be segregated. Secretary Cohen asked for better security and more accountability—in the Army, the first floor of the barracks might be all women; and the second, third, and fourth floors, all men. Yelling, “Male on the floor!” as one entered a hallway apparently wasn't cutting it, and Cohen asked that there be doors installed where they'd been removed and that people have more privacy.
Cohen and some members of Congress argued that segregating men and women decreased the role of women, and that separating their barracks entirely for training would cost too much—the military's eternal best defense against Congress.
His reasoning wasn't based on gut feeling.
Several studies from the US Army Research Institute led the Army to integrate units because they found that both men and women performed better in integrated units.3 The women were better shooters, and both men and women did better on their physical-fitness tests. Other researchers, including those from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI), found that integrated training did not negatively impact performance or teamwork, or increase “distraction” levels.4
They did find, however, that there needed to be buy-in from the DIs. If DIs disagreed with integration, their units performed more poorly.
Ultimately, the services were told that gender integration was fine. In fact, go with gender integration unless you can come up with a compelling reason not to.
So everybody, except the Marine Corps, continued with gender integration.
So in forty years, other than a few commanders on the recruit depot who were willing to push the envelope by having male and female recruits run PT and hike together, the Marine Corps had consistently refused to integrate recruit training, citing the Kassebaum Baker study.
But when the attention wanes and the intention of Congress and the secretary of defense shifts, people come into leadership roles with different biases.
For example, my boss. Judging from my experience, he was not a fan of integration, either because he was too afraid to ask for changes or he just didn't believe women belonged.
He wasn't alone. As the rest of the services began openly discussing the possibility of integrating combat units and allowing women to serve in infantry roles, the Marine Corps closed ranks against the “other.”
In this atmosphere, there was no room for Fourth Battalion to succeed.
In 2015, the secretary of defense announced an end to the ban on women in ground-combat units and roles. He did, however, allow the services to request exceptions to the policy if they had concrete evidence that the change decreased combat effectiveness. At that time, the Marine Corps requested a waiver based on the results of their Integrated Task Force combat integration study, which tested the ability of male and female enlisted Marines in various field exercises. And since the women who participated had graduated from Fourth Battalion before changes to training methods were made, the results were exactly what you'd expect. The Marine Corps found that all-male units could move faster, shoot better, and evacuate casualties more quickly than mixed-gender units could.
I strongly believe the USMC study was flawed from the start since it was conducted in a way that would ensure it reached a preconceived outcome. With that understanding, the study's “findings” were unsurprising.
RAND researched gender integration and found that groups that were openly hostile to gender integration had lower unit cohesion after integration than did those that were open to gender integration.5
The services have been working to change attitudes about women in general. Also not surprisingly, RAND found that an average of about 21 percent of women in all branches of the military reported sexual harassment, but the rate of harassment in the Marine Corps was higher than the other services: 27 percent reported sexual harassment at work.6 And units with higher rates of sexual harassment had lower levels of unit cohesion.7 As it turns out, this is also true for civilian organizations.
But, contrary to the beliefs of many senior Marines, sexual harassment and gender bias are not female problems. As evidenced by the current reckoning across America, men in the top ranks of the news media, the entertainment industry, and elsewhere are being accused of sexual harassment and assault, and are
