Navy Secretary Criticized By Marines for His Criticism of Integrated Combat Experiment

There was a pretty devastating article published in the Washington Post where Marines to include females that took part in the recent integrated combat arms experiment took shots at Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for his criticisms of their performance:

Marines involved in a controversial experiment evaluating a gender-integrated infantry unit say they feel betrayed by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus after he criticized the results of a nine-month study that found women are injured more frequently and shoot less accurately in simulated combat conditions.

“Our secretary of the Navy completely rolled the Marine Corps and the entire staff that was involved in putting this [experiment] in place under the bus,” said Sgt. Danielle Beck, a female anti-armor gunner with the task force.

Mabus questioned the findings of the research after a four-page summary of the results was released Thursday, saying he still thinks all jobs in the Marine Corps should be opened to women. He said results that found women were more than twice as likely to be injured and ultimately compromise a unit’s combat effectiveness were an “extrapolation based on injury rates, and I’m not sure that’s right,” he told NPR.  [Washington Post]

Here is something I find interesting because critics of the study were claiming the female volunteers were not properly trained when in fact they received five months of training before conducting the experiment:

“If you were to look at our training plan and how we progressed from October to February, you’re not going to find any evidence of institutional bias or some way we built this for females to fail,” said one Marine officer who participated in the experiment.

The officer, who asked to remain anonymous because of his active-duty status, explained that for the first five months of the experiment the Marines of the task force trained as a unit in North Carolina to prepare for the testing phase in California. This phase of training is known as “the work-up,” with the second phase in California — where the trials would be held — acting as the deployment.

Additionally if you read the rest of the article the women who participated in the experiment were high performers on their physical fitness test.  So basically you have motivated females that volunteered for the experiment, that were fit, and received five months of combat arms training that went and did the experiment with their male counterparts.

What gets me more than anything about this whole issue is that if Secretary Mabus had his mind made up beforehand why bother with the experiment in the first place?