More than half of women in Marine bootcamp

can't do 3 pull ups.

The new minimum requirement will be suspended due to the majority not being strong enough.

The women will now be able to choose which upper body strength test to perform.

WOMEN'S RIGHTS!

http://news.yahoo.com/marines-delay-female-fitness-plan-half-fail-203830967--politics.html

Who the hell can't do 3 pull ups?! Jeez hahaha

lol

women with their teeny arms.

Minimum requirement is being removed? What next, running?

The point of being able to do so many pull ups, is so that in a situation where your body is tired, you can still pull yourself up/over whatever you need to.

Soon we'll see the "being able to fly" requirement for helicopter pilots being removed, because the majority can't fly helicopters.

When it comes to increased standards for women, the person who puts those standards in place is taking a risk. If too many people can't meet the new standard then it makes them look bad and that will reflect on their next evaluation for promotion.

On the other hand, lowering the standards back is probably more preferable than the alternative, which would be to start the draft back up and explicitly target athletes that meet their ideal image.

Or they could, you know, not take in females who cannot pass the basic physical requirements

Wouldn't lowering the fitness requirements also put the soldiers at greater risk once they end up in a combat situation?

The Marine corps are just letting anyone in now it seems.

They need more people with guns, who're willing to get shot.

Lowering fitness requirements means less money is spent on pensions down the road.

Indeed, bullet sponges come cheap.

I would think 3 pull-ups would be easier than a 15 second flexed hang..but maybe it's different for chicks

Nice! Instead of fixing a problem correctly use an approach that dumbs it down. Christ almighty we are a screwed up country.

Keep the standards as they have always been. It no woman passes, then no women gets in. And that is that.

ming mao = virgin for life

Standards for the Marines have always been extremely difficult, elite. Specific requirements have change through time and will continue to change, but the highest standards for the Marines should continue regardless of the final gender composition of individuals passing the tests.

3

fucking

pull ups

im fat and dont work out and never have done military and can do four or five

shitty fucking standards

steroids can solve this.

I bet 95% of the males posting here can't even do 1 pullup.

That sounds good in theory, but when the standard is so high you can't meet numbers with willing volunteers you can take your pick between lowering the standard or using the draft to target athletic people who can meet the standard but aren't interested in joining (college kids with athletic scholarships, for example).

And like I said, you don't want to be that guy who made the decision that raised the attrition rate for Recruit Training. If Major General Smith raised the standard and his decision caused 75% of new recruits to fail chances are he won't ever see Lieutenant General before retirement.

Actually, these are Marines, if you call a Marine a soldier they will be highly offended.

What the military tries to do is have higher standards for jobs that require it but have a minimum standard that applies no matter what your job is. For example, somebody who is joining to be a cook in a support battalion isn't going to have to meet the same standard as someone going to a Ranger battalion. However, that cook still has to meet the same minimum standard somebody who rides in tanks has to meet.

There are some jobs that, outside of physical training in the morning, have you sitting behind a desk all day. Private Manning was a 5'3, skinny person who probably weighed less than 120 pounds but didn't have to do much physical work due to being a intel analyst who worked on computers all day. On the other hand, as an infantryman Manning probably wouldn't have even made it through basic.

There seems to be this odd delusion by a moron in this thread that, somehow, if the number of pullups required is not reduced, we will necessarily have a draft.

Yeah, okay, pal.

Mingmao is being deluded by his misogyny again. The issue in the article is that the female recruits haven't been trained to perform this task (they do something totally different which is apparently useless for building strength) and the military would rather wait a while for their current female marines to train and shape up instead of firing 55% of them. At the same time, they still have to test recruits so they're keeping the original one around and allowing women to choose between the two. Since women aren't officially entering combat till 2016, the military considers this approach reasonable, or at least preferable to other options like firing half of the female recruits or implementing another test with lower standards.

Also, it's not like this drive for female soldiers is borne out of feminazism anyway. For obvious reasons, it's better for your military to have a potential manpower base of 120 million as opposed of 61 million and now's a good time as any for the U.S. to lay the foundations for a larger pool of recruits.

You people are a bunch of sexist pigs! Those standards were created by MEN to oppress women!
/sarcasm

lol ... You ARE a ********! You'll never admit that, but the fact is that women do not belong in the army period. Well, except maybe as a nurse or similar. The reasons are so completely obvious and are not at all driven by misogyny or whatever dribble they teach you in 'gender' studies' these day, but I'm not going to even bother stating them as they will just fall on deaf ears anyway.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos wants training officials to "continue to gather data and ensure that female Marines are provided with the best opportunity to succeed.

The military services are working to figure out how to move women into newly opened jobs and have been devising updated physical standards, training, education and other programs for thousands of jobs they must open Jan. 1, 2016, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Nathan Christensen, a Defense Department spokesman. They must open as many jobs to women as possible; if they decide to keep some closed, they must explain why.

That's funny, so funny. Gender quotas are stupid, counterproductive and futile as ****, but having a gender quota for military combat jobs takes all that to a level unheard of. Somewhere in the article a military official expressed his concerns that those physical fitness tests and the number of women failing them are risking the retention of female marine corps' personnel. So what? What is so concerning about this? Isn't that the whole point of military physical tests? To weed out the unfit?

I don't think anyone has sufficient knowledge to make that assertion, that female recruits haven't been trained properly to pass the physical fitness tests. It could be the case, but it could also be the case that they were trained enough and properly the same way male recruits were trained and they just failed by virtue of being physically less capable, something we can assert as a general rule without being labeled misogynists hopefully. If we look at this situation from a physiological point of view, it won't be surprising that the physically less capable sex would have higher rates of failing a certain challenging physical fitness test.

And I doubt the U.S military is facing any problems with its pool of recruits given how anyone who doesn't know what to do with his life or just failed in every attempt to have a decent career in today's shitty economy joins the military, something that isn't unique to the U.S btw. Even if the U.S' army is facing such a problem, recruiting incapable and lacking combatants isn't the answer. I'm not saying that all female recruits are necessarily lacking and incapable, but if someone failed a standardized physical test to measure one's fitness and readiness for combat and challenging situations, then that one is lacking and incapable in terms of combat and physically challenging circumstances, be it male or female.

Me: The U.S. Marine Corps wants its female recruits to be physically fit enough for combat, but too many can't beat the tests because they haven't trained for them. The U.S. Marine Corps also does not want soldiers of substandard quality, so they don't want to relax the pullup test for women. Therefore, it is more practical and cost-effective to train the women to do pullups and test them later than to fire half of the female recruits now.

You: Women are weak and inferior and only deserve support roles because vaginas. Instead of providing any logical reasoning I shall attack people who look like they disagree with me. Also, I will associate them with a famously evil group of people who ironically are more similar ideologically to me than to feminists.

Feministsfeminism - Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women. →

@coolbeans90: It is called a worst-case scenario and doesn't exclusively involve pull-ups. Right now the military can afford to be more selective because budget cuts are causing them to discharge tens of thousands of troops a year until they meet their eventual end-strength goals. On the other hand, several years ago when we were beefing up troop numbers to handle two wars standards were dropped so the military wouldn't have to resort to drafting young men who met the desired standards but were unwilling to serve. Somehow you got the idea that I was only speaking of pull-ups when it was based on lower standards in general.

It's unlikely that those recruits will have trained for a test that they never had to take until this year, and a little digging shows me that "pullup training" can't have been in there for more than a year. I can hardly believe that you will get a 45% success rate for three pullups for trained women. This NPR article on the same issue shows that trainers can get a 100% success rate for a test of 8-12 pullups within a six-month regimen. Considering the evidence, it's more reasonable for the military to wait and see if the results improve than to test them now and get half of the female recruits fired.

It doesn't matter if there is an abundance of soldiers now, because the U.S. military has to consider all kinds of possibilities where it may be overstretched/depleted/, .etc. Why not look for ways to possibly double the potential manpower base and offer opportunities for military careers to women at the same time? I mean, you just pointed out that men often choose to join the military for economic reasons, it's only fair and socially just to give women the same choices if the military can make it work for themselves. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to make it a balanced 50-50 distribution of sexes.

One thing you need to realize when reading statements like that is senior officer promotions and appointments are determined by Congressional approval. The decision to allow women to train and eventually take direct combat jobs wasn't made by anybody in uniform, it was made by politicians bending to the will of women's rights activists who feel that women should be allowed to do any job regardless of qualification. Some of whom never served in the military a day in their life but know what to do to get reelected.

If Gen. Amos or Lt. Cdr. Christensen say what they might really feel, which is they don't think women belong in infantry or some other direct combat job, then they pretty much ended their career on the spot. They are going to say what is politically correct. Gen. Amos has much less to lose since he's already a four star general who's guaranteed a pension that's over $200,000 a year and outside of being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can't go any higher. On the other hand, you can't say the same thing about a Lieutenant Commander.

Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't matter, I'm not trying to become a Marine.

LOL someone drinks the kool aid.

Pretty certain that if you're going to join the military then you ought to be in the expected good shape and strong mentally that the military brances expect, regardless of gender.

If you aren't then you aren't.

It is essentially a Resumè, if you don't have the qualifications the employer wants then you ain't gonna get the job.

Have to love all the self professed military experts in this thread....most of whom would wash out of basic.

remember men and women are equal though LOL

i am fat and couldn't tell you last time i even begin to think to work but shit i can pull my fucking ass up....

^ ya really. I am not hip on discriminating people in any way but fact is and will always be there are pros and cons to a female and a male

I would argue that if the benchmark was set at 3 pullups you would ensure you were capable of hitting that benchmark or you dont get in. In my ordinary line of work I like to know that the people beside me are capable of doing their job effectively. This is no different in the marines.

i don't mean to disrespect what they do but if my friend who could not even get through wrestling conditioning and was a constant party animal all through high school could get through marine boot camp, I know I could for sure. i don't think they should change benchmarks like this tho, its three pull ups.

That's sad honestly. Even my aunt can do that and she's almost 50.

Pretty much this, I admit I can barely do 1 pull up. Btw this is coming from someone who loves going to the gym, I've never been a fan of doing them.

@jcknapier711: You're an idiot. Women belong in the military. Most jobs in the military hardly require any physical ability. There's much more people supporting infantrymen than there are actual infantrymen. Not to mention, I knew of a few female soldiers who smoked the male PT test, scoring above a perfect score of 300.

The military isn't like how they show it in the movies.

Oh, and what you think of a pull up is not a real pull up. Start from a dead hang each time and actually go all the way up. I bet most of you fvcktards can't do even one.

Makes me proud I am not in the Marines. I would not want to trust my life in the hands of a woman who can't even do three pull ups.

Even when I was skinny I could do about 9 pull ups.

This decision can only lead to good things

I'd rather someone was cool under pressure and a good shot....but hey...if I'm ever attacked by a gymnastics group I guess it would be important to have someone able to do pull ups.

I would pull my wounded mate out and would want the same in return if I were injured. I wouldn't trust a weak person to drag my heavy ass out of there. What gymnastics has to do with this is beyond me. You have some weird fantasies son.

I'm not sure I'm getting you right here. Are you saying that female recruits haven't been training for long or that they haven't been training for THIS test long enough?

I too find it hard to believe that Marine Corps' recruits were given a physical test they haven't trained for. Given what we know about the female physiology, I don't find it that surprising that 55% of female recruits failed. It actually makes sense. In any case, that NPR article merely mentioned the opinion and the experience of one Marine Corps' personnel which happen to support or promote giving female recruits combat positions. Another veteran in the same article argues the complete opposite also from personal experience. He even went to the trouble of writing a book about the matter. In short I can't find any evidence which would indicate that the staggering failure rate is exceptional or due to unforeseen circumstances.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to giving female recruits combat positions. I may actually be, but that's irrelevant. The point is whether female recruits can take the heat of combat and whether they have what it takes to survive in extreme and physically challenging situations. As a general rule and in the current state of the world, I have no problem allowing women to be included in any branch of public life as long as they're capable of fulfilling the role under the concept of equality not favoritism.
If I ask you a simple question of which of the two sexes is physically more capable what would your answer be? Based on this answer, I simply can't see the possibility of having female soldiers to be something mainstream and established. I'm sure there are women out there who have the physical readiness and capacity in addition to the commitment and discipline to make it through, but I doubt it would ever amount to a phenomenon or a norm. In light of this fairly unarguable fact, a 55% failure rate among female recruits is not hard to grasp.

Anyway why are there female and male recruits? Shouldn't they be just recruits? If the Marine Corps and the entire U.S' military establishment are allowing women to join the army as equals, why not lump them all together in the same boot camps, the same establishments and under the same standards?