From the Halls of Montezuma...

David Kitterman, Rico's childhood friend and the son of a (now-dead, alas) three-war colonel in the Marine Corps, forwarded (from a Marine friend) this article in Defense Watch by Ray Starmann:

The Marines are facing their greatest fight; the battle to implement the gender-neutral policies ordered by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus.
There is no doubt that Ray Mabus will go down in history as the worst Secretary of Navy in the long annals of the Marine Corps. Mabus is a disaster for the Marine Corps: a ready-made, machine fabricated, glow in the dark nightmare. Ray Mabus is a politically correct clusterfuck; one each, olive drab. Ray Mabus is a leftist Visigoth, a man who’s breaking the premier fighting force in the world into a million, shattered pieces.
Whether Mabus is just a lackey following orders to keep his job and a key to the E Ring executive latrine, or an actual believer in the gender-neutral fantasy world is unknown. Either way, two things are clear; Ray Mabus is no friend of the Marine Corps, and the policies that he has helped green light are putting the country in mortal danger.
The forced implementation of gender-neutral policies and women in the combat arms and special operations units of the Marine Corps was made official on 1 April 2016, when the deadline passed for the Congressional review of Ash Carter’s authorization in December of 2015.
Last year, both Ray Mabus and Ash Carter decided to not only ignore, but not even examine the Marines’ thirty-six million dollar, nine month study, which pitted all-male units against coed and all-female units in simulated combat environments. The all-male units performed better in every test than the coed or all-female units.
Mabus and Carter also chose to ignore the fact that female officers had gone 0 for 26 at the Marine Infantry Officers’ Basic Course in 2015.
Several months ago, Mabus demonstrated his complete and utter ignorance of combat and the combat arms when he wrote this diatribe for The Washington Post editorial board:

As the nature of warfare becomes more dynamic and unpredictable, we need to be the strongest force possible, and diversity is one of our greatest strengths. When we talk about diversity, we mean the full spectrum of demographics, but even more important, we mean diversity of thinking. The Marine Corps Times has highlighted an anecdote about the creative, expeditious way a four-woman team in the Marine Corps’ study confronted an eight-foot obstacle; an American Forces Network report featured female Marines who demonstrated that gender does not define their service. These are the thinkers we need in every part of our force; they will maximize our combat effectiveness.

According to Mabus, wars are won by diversity of thinking. Apparently, military history and multi-million dollar studies are irrelevant for measuring how women will perform in the combat arms. What counts as a major indicator is the fact that four female Marines managed to scale an eight-foot wall.

Mabus, I can find four ten-year-old Girl Scouts selling cookies who can scale an eight-foot wall. Forget about shooting the enemy point blank in the face or sticking a bayonet in his guts. What counts is diversity of thought.

With the complete disregard of the study and the results from Marine IOBC, and his refusal to consider a requested waiver to stop women from serving in the combat arms of the Marine Corps, Mabus paved the way for the chaos engulfing the Corps today.
In a 1 January 2016 memo to Marine Commandant General Robert Neller, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus requested a “detailed plan” on how the service will fully integrate its boot camp and Officer Candidate School. The plan is due on 15 January and will be implemented by 1 April, the memo states.
“The Department of the Navy’s implementation plan must include gender integration of Marine Corps enlisted recruit training and officer candidate school,” Mabus wrote. “In this submission, identify where, if anywhere, this training is already integrated, where it is separate, and specific steps that you will take to fully integrate these trainings.”
In a second memo from Mabus to Neller on the same day, the SecNav directed the Marine Corps to conduct a full review of its military occupational specialty titles in an effort to ensure that they are gender neutral. (Every Marine is a rifleperson. It’s so cute; it’s soooo Sanders.)
Furthermore, the Marine Corps is mandating so-called “unconscious bias” training, the Corps-wide brainwashing to convince Marines that all genders are neutral and that the five-foot, ninety-pound cheerleader in fatigues is going to take down a six-foot, two hundred-pound Ivan in hand to hand combat with her Ka-bar.
Colonel Anne Weinberg, deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office, recently told journalists that the Marine Corps would send mobile training teams to installations across the country in May and June of 2016 to give a two-day seminar to majors and lieutenant colonels, who will later offer the training to their subordinates, Military.com reported. (Mobile training teams, sounds very Maoist, very Soviet SMERSH-like to me, Comrade Colonel Weinberg from the Komitet.)
“You’re in the field, you only have a certain amount of space for billeting, and you’ve got three women and six guys. How are you going to billet?” Weinberg stated. “Just some of these common sense things that these units probably haven’t had to deal with, that ground combat units haven’t had to deal with, but we’ve been dealing with in the rest of the Marine Corps for generations.”
Billets in the field; Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot? I’m not sure what universe or Marine Corps that Colonel Anne Weinberg is residing in, but the Marines on Bloody Ridge, on Iwo Jima, in Kuwait, in Fallujah, didn’t’ have any “billets”.
Brigadier General James Glynn, the Marine Corps’ director of public affairs, said that the purpose of the mobile training team will be to “begin to facilitate the cultural change”. Glynn sounds just as clueless as Colonel Anne “Rosa Klebb” Weinberg about the realities of ground combat.
To complete the utter destruction of the Corps, units will be ordered to meet quotas of twenty-five to thirty-five percent females in infantry, armor, artillery, Marine Recon, and Marine Raider organizations. God help us all.
Obviously, no amount of evidence from Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness, from the study, from years of watching women struggle physically at certain tasks in the Marines, from the common knowledge that women do not have the upper body strength, aerobic lung capacity, and aggressiveness to complete the missions required of the combat arms, makes any difference to the social engineers.
The policies will be implemented even if the Marine Corps dies, which it will. The Marines will soon look like every city fire department that is under legal pressure to hire women. But fire departments are able to tuck women away at the station on a computer while the guys siren out, hump the gear, and put out the fire.
When you have a Marine infantry battalion with a TOE of four hundred grunts, and now a hundred and twenty of them are women, you aren’t hiding anything. You’re now advertising yourself to the world as the force that is going to lose every skirmish, firefight, and battle.
The Denver Broncos have just become the Little Sisters of the Poor, courtesy of the Obama administration. Still, there are a small percentage of women in the Marine Corps, and in every service, who have bought into the feminist fantasy deception. Any woman who thinks that an edgy You Go Girl attitude is going to get the new Marine Corps through future battles is out of their mind. Any woman who thinks that, just because they do kick-boxing in the gym, that makes them tough enough to go on a sustained combat operation in the boonies with a Marine grunt unit is delusional. Any woman who thinks that, because they can jog faster than some millennial loser in capris and a Taliban beard, that they’re going to be able to survive sustained combat operations with a Marine Raider unit, is nuts.
The fantasy will go out the window the moment the first hostile round goes down range. Just ask the Israelis. They had women in combat in the Six-Day War in 1967 and had real problems. They pulled them out of the combat arms and made them instructors until 2000, when they were under pressure again from social engineers to put women back in the combat arms. According to the Israeli news service, Arutz Sheva, the problems of women in the combat arms of the IDF have been covered up for the last decade. (Imagine that.)
The good thing is that most women in the Marine Corps and in the rest of the US military want to stay out of range of the combat arms and Special Ops, and for good reason; these jobs are brutal, they grind you down to the bone, and you can get killed doing them.
The bad thing is Ray Mabus and Ash Carter don’t care what most women in the Marine Corps want. Mabus and Carter haven’t been within two thousand miles of combat, yet these two boobs are making life and death decisions and deciding the fate of the Corps.
Want to know what Marines in the past experienced in combat? Want to know what women in ground combat units can expect?
Read E.B. Sledge’s book, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, John Wukovits’ book, One Square Mile of Hell, the Marines at Tarawa, Phil Caputo’s book, A Rumor of War, James Webb’s book, Fields of Fire, Karl Marlantes’ book, Matterhorn, or Patrick O’Connell's book, We Were One; Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines Who Took Fallujah .
Read them and tell me if this is something you want your sister, daughter, wife, or mother to experience. Tell me if this is something that you think is doable and realistic, and not just downright suicidal and a fantasy based on false premises.
Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Frozen Chosin, Khe Sanh, Hue, Khafji, Fallujah… Those famous Marine battles all had one thing in common; the Marines won, the bad guys lost. The Marines aren’t going to win anything anymore and every Marine knows it now, including General Joe Dunford.
What the hell is Dunford thinking? What the hell is Ray Mabus thinking? What the hell is Ash Carter thinking? What the hell is President Obama thinking? God only knows.
I know what our enemies are thinking. They’re thinking, it’s time to make a move. I know what our enemies are doing. They’re locking and loading and doing it with a big grin on their faces...

From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Gender Neutrality
We fight the feminists’ battles on the land and on the seas….

Rico says that 'two boob's are what the 'two boobs' are trying to force on the Marines...