Trailblazing female who became infantry Marine is getting kicked out for fraternization

Not necessarily, we are Soldiers and Soldiers follow orders. I mean honestly what was the training cadre supposed to do in this situation? This directive supposedly came from Congress through SOCOM all the way down the pipeline. It puts the cadre in a tough and unfair situation. Do they quit? Refuse to follow the orders given to them by their superiors and sacrifice their careers that they have surely put in a great deal of work for seeing how being a Ranger is no cakewalk. This isn't a failure of the training cadre, this is a failure of our government if this story was actually true.

When put in screwed up situations like that you are basically left with two choices. Keep your own integrity and lose your career or follow the crappy order that was given to you and roll with the punches. In my opinion any order given that causes one to seriously have to question their own integrity is a poor order and the fault of whomever gave the order, not the one receiving it.

At the end of the day for better or for worse we all answer to the civilians in Congress, many of whom have never served a day in their lives. We aren't a stratocracy, we are a republic. So whether we like it or not civilians are the overall authority over the military and if the military and the civilians ever disagree then it's the civilians who win because we work for them. That's why we have dumb **** like sequestration get pushed down by a civilian even while damn near every military commander was screaming telling them how stupid of an idea that was.

 

This.

I was out at dinner earlier today with the most senior aviator in our unit, good friend of mine, along with some other buddies of ours. A discussion was brought up about an aviator of ours who has struggled for many years to become competent and is just unable to get the hang of it and unfortunately the time has come for him to be forced to find a new career path. Our senior guy said in quote "This will be the hardest one of these reassignments I've ever had to make. He's a super nice guy and I've already talked to branch about getting him a new assignment that will take care of him and keep him as an officer so that he can retire in a few years. But at the end of the day this is a business, and we are in the business of training our pilots how to kill people in the most effective way possible, if they can't be trained then we can't use them, period".

And he is 100% right. It's not personal, it's business. We all love this guy, he really is the most genuinely nice person that I have ever met in my career and a good friend of mine. But he just simply not a competent aviator and after years of trying different techniques to train him he just can't get up to par. So he has to go. Why? Because he is detrimental to the war machine, nothing more nothing less.

That is the ONLY QUESTION that actually matters when making decisions in regards to the military. Is it beneficial or detrimental to the war machine? No emotions, no participation trophy, no progressive agenda, none of it. If you are detrimental to the war machine, whether it's even your own fault or not, then you shouldn't be a part of it.

We aren't in the business of emotions and fairness, we are in the business of making the most efficient war machine possible.

 

Not to derail the discussion but this actually brings a valuable point to the table. Straight males are the largest victims of sexual assault in the military, yet why is this not discussed to the same extent as female sexual assault victims? Why is every single SHARP poster hanging up around installations a poster of a female Soldier? Why is it that during the required SHARP briefings that we are forced to attend every few weeks this topic is not discussed? It's overwhelmingly a discussion about females, not males, and if one were to sit through these briefings as often as we have to then you would draw the conclusion that the article linked here is completely false.

Why do we do this? Because it's human engineering. Human beings are biologically programmed to view females as more vulnerable than males and protect them. This adds another dynamic to the equation and was one of the main reasons why it was such a struggle to even allow women to serve in combat roles. The whole "guys will run out into a bullet storm to save the female against all logic" type thing.

Even in a military where the largest percentage of victims are straight males, they are given exponentially less attention than female victims who are actually a smaller percentage of victims. Why? Because that is how humanity itself is engineered.

Females add an emotional dynamic to combat units that human brains are just not programmed to handle without bias. That is the problem, the military is still a male dominated society within society, the military came up with SHARP, and the military chose to use females as the poster child for the program even though they are not the greatest victims of assault because just like in civilian society "we must protect the women".

If we were actually able to operate without bias then every poster, movie cover, etc regarding SHARP would feature a straight male Solider, for he is the primary victim. But they aren't because we as a society pay special attention to our women. We cannot effectively run a combat unit when certain people are given special attention, inadvertently or not. It adds an emotional dynamic to the equation that is bad for cohesion and overall effectiveness.

But "it's not fair" if women aren't allowed to serve in whatever capacity they want, so we dismiss what the majority of combat troops believe is a bad idea for the sake of fairness.