This article at Foreign Policy.com is written by three female Marine officers – two pilots and an admin officer. They support the Obama administration’s, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus’ directive to open all combat arms positions to women. These females officers assert that this will only work if leadership sets the right tone for “combat integration.”

Leadership on this issue is key, but the leadership that needs to be under scrutiny goes much higher than the Commandant of the Marine Corps. It is the leadership in Washington. Those who had the opportunity to make the right decision have failed, and that’s why this will fail too.

The Marine Corps is the only service that asked for a waiver on a few of its combat arms positions – those that are most physically demanding, like infantry. The Marine Corps provided data of a year-long study that showed integrated units did more poorly on combat related tasks than did all male units. It also found the rate of injury for women was much higher than that for men. This was not a surprising result.

Despite this concrete showing of poor performance and potentially more dangerous environment for women, the Washington leadership decided it would move ahead with the plan anyway. Marine leaders sent out messages to move ahead with the plan, but these female officers are not satisfied because they say the messages didn’t have the right “tone” (geez, could their attitude be more stereotypically female – but I digress). Below is the message from the Commandant that these authors had the most problem with. I honestly don’t see the issue with it, it sounds fine to me:

CMC @GenRobertNeller on integration "We will maintain our standards & maximize the talent and skills of all Marines"https://t.co/aJ61eXvLTk

— U.S. Marines (@USMC) December 4, 2015