Coming soon to a recruit depot near you: Marine Corps gender integrated basic training! What a recruiting tool that will be. I’ll bet recruiters the nation over are celebrating today.

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ordered the Marines to come up with a gender integration plan for recruit training by January 15, 2016. They further need to implement the plan by April 1, 2016. This plan must include information on how training will be integrated (co-location IS NOT ENOUGH) as well as indicating what position titles can be renamed – by eliminating “man” – so that women can feel more loved, err, included.

What a bunch of BS!

Retiring Marine General John Kelly knows the score though. He predicts that while they are not saying it now, standards will be lowered because that’s the only way real numbers of women will be able to get into the infantry, Rangers, or SEALS. He’s right! That is the reality you big shots in DC. Sorry to break it you, you all being so smart and all.

Women on the whole cannot do these jobs. There will be very, very few to pass current standards. Like an infinitesimally small number. Like super incredibly microscopic! Like really, really tiny! That will leave a problem. They will try to increase numbers and the only way to do it will be by waiving or lowering the standards. They will call it something like “normalizing the criteria” or “re-associating objectives with satisfactory outcomes” or “job based occupational standards” or “occupational relevant standards” or some crap like that that doesn’t sound like what it actually is.

And when this happens, when they get more women into these positions then everything will be great right? Men just need to get used to it and stop being so sexist, right? Wrong again! Women will become injured at a rate much higher than their Neanderthal male bunkmates. They will have to be taken out of regular duty and training in order to get medical care and recover, if they can recover. If they have a really bad injury, they may have to change MOS’s! This will only set back their careers a little bit as they start all over at a new MOS school then enter a new command with limited knowledge even though they may have more time in service than their new boss. But all of those problems, while unnecessary in the first place, can be overcome by great leadership! and someone who really loves the Corps! Any sacrifice is OK! Unless, of course their injury is actually career ending.

What are some potentially really bad injuries peculiar to women? Pelvic stress fractures come to mind. These take months to heal and can affect a woman for the rest of her life – mostly because you need your pelvis to walk. Maybe worse is the potential for infertility – described most credibly by Captain Katie Petronio a combat engineer who experienced rapid degradation of her physical capabilities while on deployment. From her experience she says she had muscle deterioration and other ailments that resulted in loss of fertility. But that’s ok, we’ll take care of their medical care for life. They can just go the VA! We owe it to them!

Master Gunnery Sergeant Jessie Jane Duff, a 20 year veteran of the Marine Corps says women are just different from men. OMG Brilliant! Why doesn’t anyone in Washington know this? We must do a study or something. Oh right, we did in 2015! And also in 1992. They didn’t listen. Succinctly put, Master GySgt Duff implies she’ll entertain women in the infantry just as soon as we see equal representation in the NFL.

And that is the biggest tragedy of all this absolute BS political correctness. The bottom line is that this is going to hurt women. Here’s your real war on women you big tough PC warriors! You are waging it!

The words of the 1992 commission say it best:

“[the] unnecessary distraction or any dilution of the combat effectiveness puts the mission and lives in jeopardy. Risking the lives of a military unit in combat to provide career opportunities or accommodate the personal desires or interests of an individual, or group of individuals, is more than bad military judgment. It is morally wrong.”

It is morally wrong.

Look, I don’t want to take anything away from the very small number of women who can succeed in this situation, but the fact remains that the top 10% of women line up closest with the bottom 40% of men. I suppose if you train average women as if they are training for the Olympics they might be able to do ok, but I think if you need that much training to keep up, is that really where you should be spending your time?

Here’s another fun possibility: Let’s put some bets out there to see when the first law suits will be filed by women who were placed into positions where they had little chance of success and whose potential for military service was destroyed because of it. It will be a corollary to our current employment law – equal employment opportunities will demand that women must be accommodated. There will be new litigation to define hostile work environment. There are all kinds of places we can go with this! Well no one can say that Obama hasn’t done his part for both gun sales and the legal industry.

But for anyone who cares about women and our military services it’s a big fat lose-lose situation. The Marine Corps loses, the ladies lose, and the nation suffers. As a woman, I really hate that I have to say there are some things that we need to leave to the men, but when you look at the facts, I feel we can reach no other supportable answer. I really do feel for the people who have to try to implement this impossible objective, for the newest female recruits who will be subjected to this ill-conceived experiment, and for the men who are now under that much more scrutiny to make room.

I believe we will lose both male and female service members through recruitment and retention as a direct result of this policy. We will not be able to make up for the loss by people who might now be interested in the military because of this policy. I would like to see some hard numbers on that. I hope someone is keeping track.