I should have been thinking about it from a position of politics.
I, and my team, had a lot of work to do at Fourth Battalion to make things better, and there were a few people who did not like those changes. But I had the support of my top leadership at Parris Island…until I made one key mistake. I wrote a paper for the Marine Corps Gazette, documenting our success. It was accepted for publication in March, to be published in the September 2015 issue. I provided a copy to the Parris Island depot sergeant major so that she could brief the depot general. I didn't want to go around him, and I knew that he supported what we were doing. (After all, he had told me to stay the course and keep doing what I was doing.) I just wanted to make him aware of the forthcoming publication of my article.
But before the paper was published, it was briefed to the generals at the Pentagon. Somehow, a paper written by a lieutenant colonel in charge of a battalion of women had made the rounds in the highest ranks. Sweet! They'll see what we're doing and see that it's good, and we'll be supported in it! You would think the statistics would be cause for celebration, right? Spoiler alert: They were not.
Immediately, the talk turned to, “How do we get Germano out of there?”
This is what they heard during the briefing, based on what I wrote in that article and on what Joe's friends and coworkers who attended the briefing say they heard: Women at Parris Island for decades had qualified at rates between 67 percent and 78 percent during their initial qualification test on the rifle range, while men qualified at between 85 percent and 93 percent. In Fiscal Year 2015, we raised the women's qualification rate to 92 percent.
The generals learned that our injury rate for women went down to a rate comparable to the men's when we instituted better strength training, such as hiking, rather than taking a bus, to classes and other training, while carrying rucksacks and weapons. We also taught the women how to stretch properly before and after physical training.
The generals learned that women ran faster when we place them in groups based on ability, rather than expecting all of the women to run together based on the slowest member of the group.
These achievements, compared to Marine Corps lore, seemed almost miraculous; yet no one seemed at all interested in how we did it, according to Joe's sources. The generals heard the statistics, and that was enough to determine that they should push my firing, for “abrasive” behavior and being too hard on my Marines and recruits.
I'm fairly certain lollipops and gold stars—rather than an expectation that women can shoot well and will be thrilled with an expert marksmanship badge as a reward—would not have improved the female recruits’ scores. But I'm also fairly certain that the “how” of it wasn't important to the Marine Corps generals.
Why?
When the generals conducted their gender-integration study, the outcomes were much different from the outcomes at Fourth Battalion.
The Marine Corps began working on its Marine Corps Force Integration Plan in January 2013, when the secretary of defense rescinded the Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule, which prohibited women from being assigned to ground-combat units and jobs like the infantry. Women could work in support roles, such as supply or clerical jobs, but they could not have jobs that might involve combat, such as infantry or artillery, and they could not be assigned in support roles to those units. In February 2012, the Defense Department decided women could be on the ground with combat units that were likely to engage in direct combat. They were already filling 315 of 337 available job specialties. They were obviously serving in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they had done so years before, during Desert Storm in 1991. But the Defense Department had not looked specifically at women in combat since 1992, during the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces.
When the Marine Corps finished the gender-integration study, they cited the twenty-five-year-old findings of the 1992 Presidential Commission—apparently deciding the best way through a tough decision is backward. “Risking the lives of a military unit in combat to provide career opportunities or accommodate the personal desires or interests of any individual, or group of individuals, is more than bad military judgment,” the Corps quoted the old report, “It is morally wrong.”1
Marine Corps leaders have made that argument before—the “social experiment” argument. You may have heard it:
Gen. Clifton D. Cates, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote in 1949 that the military could not “be an agency for experimentation in civil liberty without detriment to its ability to maintain the efficiency and high state of readiness so essential to national defense,” according to Morris J. MacGregor's book, Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940–1965.2
Cates was referring to African American service members.
To make its case against women, the Marine Corps placed one hundred female volunteers in a battalion with three hundred male volunteers, and they found that the all-male squads performed better than the squads composed of both men and women.
Why?
The men shot better, climbed over obstacles faster, and had fewer injuries.
When I read it, the study makes me so angry, I feel like my head is going to spin in a complete circle like Linda Blair in The Exorcist—with no injuries, of course, because I've had plenty of training in head-spinning anger over the past year. I've learned how to stretch properly.
The US Army, Air Force, and Navy have all recommended that women be allowed to serve in ground-combat jobs. In those branches, the men and women train together from the beginning of their time in service. Just before the Marine Corps’ gender-integration study came out, two women graduated from the Army's Ranger School. This is amazing—not so much because women are capable, but because
