Marine Corps Times sometimes does some great journalism.  Their investigation on the previous commandant’s removal of their periodical from Marine exchanges being a good example but they fail here.

Col Haring is famous for making absurd arguments to support her agenda of a gender blind military.  That doesn’t sound so bad until one realizes she won’t let a little thing like standards get in the way.    Haring is guilty of having an agenda founded in extreme ignorance. This same “officer” made the argument that since Audie Murphy was of small stature women could be just as successful in the combat arms. I eviscerated her argument with examples of Audie Murphy’s performance in basic training to include documenting the combat load he carried in Sicily.  They have since deleted dozens of comments including mine. (When I have the chance I’ll reconstruct them.)

Her elite form of foolishness gets rolled out by the media to make waves or support their continued efforts to use the military as a social experiment. They think her rank and her pedigree is credible when discussing things she has no experience in.  Those that know nothing about the military are often fooled.

Her silly comments aside, I’d be much more concerned with what those two Marine officers said about that 152 pound standard.  They couldn’t explain why it exists demonstrating a lack of vision as well as judgement. They are likely very guilty of limiting the answer to the last decade where troops didn’t have to carry much of a load considering we operated from fixed logistical facilities and relied heavily on vehicles.

Beware when someone like Haring asks about “operational requirements” as a way to lower the standard. When’s the last time troops had to run miles, do pushups or do situps in combat?  Let’s remove those from PT tests huh?

To those that have been there or understand close combat there exists a need to do gut checks especially for our leaders and elite troops.  Also the ability to do extreme physical tasks over time speaks to other requirements that may occur in battle like carrying the wounded, ammo or going exponentially longer with a lighter load.

We can wish for this silliness to disappear but it’s going to take some extreme circumstances to eliminate this level of PCism from the military.