This month, the Marine Corps began a historic experiment at its base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., to test women’s performance in combat arms. This Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force uses high-tech tools to measure the physical performance of both men and women after a federal mandate to integrate women into all military occupational specialties — or request an exception — by January 2016. This differs from the past two decades, in which combat performance has only been measured in large-scale desert exercises. As a former Marine who was encouraged by the camaraderie of gender-integrated training, I look forward to this study’s promise to increase force readiness in a corps that is not quite 7 percent female.
As a 19-year-old R.O.T.C. midshipman in the summer of 2000, I went to Twentynine Palms for a distant granddaddy of the current experiment: a Combined Arms Exercise, which measured an infantry battalion’s combat readiness. A white government school bus delivered two dozen of us midshipmen to the base: eight women and the rest men.
In those weeks, we observed a company closing with its target and calling in mortars on old, bombed-out vehicles. Specially trained senior enlisted personnel and officers — called “coyotes” — monitored fires and kept notes on accuracy and timing. With instincts honed over hundreds of exercises, they evaluated unit performance on tasks such as conducting a raid and conducting a ground attack, standards the corps carefully maintains. Individual performance, however, wasn’t measured; platoons were expected to show up already trained. And all the combat arms specialties we encountered — such as firing rockets and roaring through the desert in armored vehicles — were open only to men.
But our instructor, a former Force Reconnaissance captain, made no mention of gender when assigning tasks; we all hiked the same terrain and carried the same supplies in our packs. I tried hard to keep up with one strong midshipman as her calves churned soft sand, knowing I’d see her again the following summer at Officer Candidates School. When we split into four-person fire teams to observe a reserve unit’s live-fire exercises, I was the only woman in mine, but we all looked identical in helmets and load-bearing vests.
The differences between the sexes that I experienced were surmountable. One afternoon, while others napped under camouflage netting, heavy with the smell of gear and sweat, I finagled my first taste of “Vitamin M,” the 800 milligram Motrin pill the Marine Corps doles out for pain. I told the doctor I had a stomach ache.
“You’re dehydrated,” he said. “What you want to do is drink water, maybe have a little salt tab — –”
“No, Doc,” I said. “I mean a girl stomach ache. I have cramps.”
He raised his eyebrows but coughed up the Motrin. I downed it and continued training.
The most significant integration came when we bedded down in the field. We split up not by sex, but by fire team. Team by team, we rolled out our sleeping bags on gravel and took turns standing watch. My brothers in arms slept to my left and my right, several feet away.
In the 15 years since then, the Marine Corps’ desert combat exercises have evolved to replicate environments found in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for a time incorporated gear for the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System, a military version of laser tag. The training focused on units ranging in size from 30 to 1,000 Marines. Only a few men-only roles now remain, in fields including infantry, artillery, tanks, light armored vehicles and amphibious assault vehicles, or A.A.V.s.
This spring, researchers in the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force are evaluating both men and women in tasks including “marching under loads, fire and movement, providing offensive fires, defensive operations, conducting crew/casualty evacuations … ammunition resupply and A.A.V. water recovery,” according to Katelyn Allison, a University of Pittsburgh faculty member who is a co-principal investigator for the project.
Squads consist of up to 25 percent women, which means they can range from three women and 10 men one day, to one woman and 12 men the next, to a men-only squad later. This changing composition aims to correct for individual personality differences that can affect the teamwork of any combat unit.
And while my medical care was just Motrin, these Marines are being monitored at a whole new level.
Before even starting, the participants underwent a two-day test battery to gauge their baseline body composition, musculoskeletal strength, aerobic and anaerobic power capacity, balance and flexibility, Dr. Allison explained. They will continue to undergo these tests at different times during and after training.
Over the next three months, trainers will be collecting more data as the Marines run through simulated combat scenarios, including live-fire movement to contact and pulling heavy crash test dummies from vehicles. GPS will track each Marine’s position, weapon-mounted sensors will count shots fired, and wired targets will record the timing of each bullet, so that researchers can triangulate who fired where and when. Heart rate monitors will measure individual Marines’ physical exertion in real time; subsequent after-action surveys and cortisol swabs will match the Marines’ reported efforts to their actual physiological states.
This avalanche of data offers individualized detail, complementary to the gestalt approach of eagle-eyed coyotes scribbling handwritten notes as I watched 15 summers ago. This specificity can help the researchers filter the effects of any one Marine.
The aim, Dr. Allison said, “is to establish gender-neutral characteristics that can predict safe and successful completion of ground combat tactical training and tasks.” If remediation is necessary for subsets of the population, she said, “targeted physical training may aim to increase overall force readiness and resiliency.” In other words, smaller female Marines might need additional physical training to prepare for inclusion into combat arms specialties. But so might short, slender men. Targeted training would increase the probability that more female Marines could fill combat arms roles, and could help the corps comply with federally mandated gender integration.
But Dr. Allison also warned that “the load is the same regardless of the size of the person carrying or moving the load,” and “Marines of smaller stature may find difficulty.”
This is consistent with my experience; I am 5-foot-1 and 118 pounds. Marching 20 miles in 80 pounds of gear was more difficult for me than for my bigger comrades, but not impossible. I gained confidence from my stay in Twentynine Palms that carried me through gender-integrated basic officer training. I was encouraged that although the percentage of women was small, we could integrate as much as possible if we performed to the same standards. After all, years later, no one cared that I was a woman when our battalion convoyed from Kuwait into Iraq.
So I’m rooting for the young women of the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force as the Marine Corps takes their measure in this challenge. If in the future, at the end of a day of hoisting ammunition or clambering out of assault vehicles, a young Marine shakes out her sleeping bag and rests her head on a rolled-up sweatshirt, and to her left and her right are brothers — and sisters — in arms, it will expand the historical definition of a combat warrior.
Teresa Fazio was a Marine Corps officer from 2002 to 2006, deploying once to Iraq. She lives and works in New York City, and is writing a memoir set during and after deployment. She is also a member of the Truman National Security Project Defense Council.You can follow her on Twitter.