Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 45

WOMEN IN COMBAT

(Photo by Staff Sgt. Tramel Garrett, 25th Infantry Division PAO)

Sgt. Amanda Carrasco, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, crosses the finish line 25 November 2014 during
the 25th Infantry Division pre-ranger female screening in Hawaii. The 10-day assessment was intended to screen and select candidates for
attendance at the Ranger Training Assessment Course, the Army's premier pre-ranger course, Fort Benning, Ga.

will still be 20 to 40 percent less, and we will still be
less able to bear heavy gear at a hard-pounding run.
It is not for lack of training. Throughout 2013, the
female recruits going through Marine Corps boot
camp were being trained to achieve the men’s minimum pull-up standard. They were trained to pass
the test, yet 55 percent of them could not make that
minimum, according to an Associated Press report.19
Ninety-nine percent of male recruits can, whether
or not they were particularly athletic before shipping
off to boot camp.
Can women scale the eight-foot wall in full
combat load without steps? No steps are provided to
give women a boost in the heat of battle, as they are
in coed military boot camps (and even the Marine
Corps’ Officer Candidate School). Santangello boasts
that she performed 16 pull-ups on her last physical
fitness test. That is excellent, but the test is done in a
t-shirt and shorts, it is a test only of general fitness,
and it is far less strenuous than infantry training, let
alone combat. Can women do a dozen pull-ups in
full combat gear? That is just one of many requirements in the Combat Endurance Test (CET). Can
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

women carry a man on their backs with a full 80 lb.
combat load? These differences in ability are deal
breakers in combat—that is why these standards are
not arbitrary. The military has yet to see the so-called
“push-button war” that activists cite as mitigating for
women’s lesser physical strength. Our combat units
have often been on foot with their heavy loads in the
rough mountainous terrain of Afghanistan. The high
infantry standards are designed to keep the weak
out because accommodating the weak means lives
lost and mission failure. The standards of the Officer
Infantry Course are high because infantry officers
must not only be educated, brave, and highly athletic,
but they also must be better at everything than the
members of their units because Marine officers lead
from the front. Hence their motto: Ductus Exemplo,
leadership by example.
In the 2013 Pentagon briefing to announce the
repeal of the combat exclusion, then Secretary of
Defense Leon E. Panetta stated that women are “serving in a growing number of critical roles on and off
the battlefield,” and that men and women are “fighting
and dying together.”20 However, serving in critical
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