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Author: Grumpy
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A lost world
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Will it be the end of “sir” and “ma’am”? (Lance Cpl. Dakota Dodd/Marine Corps)
A new academic report on efforts to integrate Marine Corps boot camp recommends dropping gender-specific salutations for drill instructors, but service leaders are not convinced they want to take that step.
The lengthy report, commissioned by the Corps from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 and completed in 2022, points out that half of the military services already have done away with gendered identifiers for training staff.
“The Army, Navy, and Coast Guard effectively de-emphasize gender in an integrated environment,” the report states. “Instead of saying ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir,’ recruits in these Services refer to their drill instructors using their ranks or roles followed by their last names. Gendered identifiers prime recruits to think about or visually search for a drill instructor’s gender first, before their rank or role.”
The proposal was under consideration by a Marine Corps leadership team assembled to guide service efforts to integrate boot camp, Col. Howard Hall, chief of staff for Marine Corps Training and Education Command, told the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in December.
But, he said, leaders had concerns.
“That’s going to take some effort,” Hall told the committee during its quarterly public meeting Dec. 6 in Arlington, Virginia. “Honestly, that’s not a quick fix. What are inculcating in our young recruits that will or will not be reinforced when they graduate and enter the fleet Marine force? So again, we want to avoid any quick-fix solutions that introduce perturbations down the line.”
The University of Pittsburgh report highlights a number of ways ― subtle and not-so-subtle ― that Marine Corps boot camp centers male recruits and makes male Marines the standard. Three of the five sections of service history taught at boot camp contain no explicit mention of female Marines, and “core values” guided discussions exclusively highlight the stories of male Marines and sailors when giving examples of real-world heroism and leadership.
These examples paint a picture of a Marine Corps in transition.
The Corps still has the smallest percentage of female service members, and until 2019 all female recruits were trained in a single battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina. Women now train at both Marine Corps boot camps, but training materials have been slow to catch up to that reality.
The study found, for example, that PowerPoint slides from Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego describing service leadership traits still used all male pronouns: “A leader who is confident in his decisions instills confidence in his Marines.”
Learning sessions about marriage in the military routinely featured images of husbands in uniform and civilian wives, the study found.
Regarding Marine recruits’ treatment of drill instructors, anecdotes suggested female training staff members, even senior ones, were sometimes treated as less important or authoritative than male counterparts. One male drill instructor told interviewers that he saw a female chief drill instructor, who commanded an entire recruit series, standing ignored on the parade deck as other drill instructors asked for advice from a male peer.
The study’s authors suggest that dispensing with “sir” and “ma’am” in favor of the neutral “drill instructor” would help to counteract that behavior.
“Gender-neutral identifiers are an unambiguous, impartial way to circumvent these issues,” the authors write. “Employing gender-neutral identifiers eliminates the possibility of misgendering drill instructors, which can unintentionally offend or cause discord. By teaching recruits to use gender-neutral identifiers for their drill instructors, Services underscore the importance of respecting authoritative figures regardless of gender.”
Hall said the Marine Corps was working to change the training materials highlighted by the University of Pittsburgh study, but expressed concern about making any moves that would put boot camp practices out of step with fleet ones.
“All of a sudden, we change something at recruit training, and recruits start coming in and using a different identifier. It’s not something we would change overnight,” he told Marine Corps Times following the advisory committee meeting. “Again, we’ve got a history of ‘sir, ma’am, sir, ma’am. If we change something at the root level, how do we make the corresponding change at the Fleet Marine Force? So it’s not ours to implement alone.”
The gender identifiers proposal was one of a half-dozen recommendations the Marines’ entry-level training advisory council is now considering. It’s not clear when the service will decide which ones to pursue.
Hope Hodge Seck is an award-winning investigative and enterprise reporter covering the U.S. military and national defense. The former managing editor of Military.com, her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, Politico Magazine, USA Today and Popular Mechanics.
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The cost in the Ukraine
I snapped this picture in the waiting room at my clinic. These friable acoustic
ceiling tiles are absolutely everywhere. We generally don’t think much about them until there’s nothing else about which to think.
So, I’m sitting here alone in the semi-darkness, staring at those institutional ceiling tiles wearing one of those absurd open-backed surgical gowns. It is blue with a faded flower print. Who made that decision?
I’m patiently awaiting a minor medical procedure. It really isn’t a big deal. I’ve been clearing my throat a lot and asked a colleague to take a peek inside just to make sure there wasn’t something we could do about it. My wife calls it my moose call. It is worse after meals and is justifiably annoying for those around me.
The possibility I might die from this is fairly small. There is some anesthesia involved. However, I rather suspect that statistically speaking, the really dangerous bit was the drive to the clinic. The possibility of my buddy coming back to tell me he found something truly horrible is also fairly minuscule. But that is not the case with everybody in this building today. It also will not always be the case with me.
I have faced my own death before. At some point, if I feel really froggy, I’ll share the details with you guys. I was a soldier, and soldiering is innately dangerous. I have also had five people die in my arms. That’s the sort of thing to make a guy wax introspective. But back to those ceiling tiles …
Those things are everywhere. Dropped ceilings are all the rage in institutional settings. When I worked on the psych ward in residency, the facility sported two sequential locked doors, like a prison. In theory, you couldn’t get in or out without clearing each barrier in order, but they still outfitted the place with those dropped ceilings replete with ceiling tiles.
One young man took it as a challenge to elope from the place. He told us as much. And then, one evening, he just vanished. It was pretty amazing. They reviewed the security footage, but the kid was just gone. As they say, the authorities were vexed.
The following day one of the elderly patients complained that a little monkey had scampered out of the ceiling and eaten her breakfast. At first, everyone just wrote that off as some mystical combination of her rarefied mental illness, advanced age and her sparkling personality. And then somebody thought about that little missing dude. You guessed it; he had been hiding in the ceiling overnight. I am still amazed he found someplace comfortable enough to tolerate the experience.
Think back to the last time you had to endure something ghastly at the dentist. Perhaps you had a tooth extracted, a cavity filled, or a canal rooted. I recall the last time that happened to me. I was staring at those institutional ceiling tiles and wishing I could be absolutely anywhere but there. How about if we took that to the next level?
They call it the Big Blue Marble. Our time on this lovely little
ball is limited. It behooves us all to think a bit about that.
I once toured the death house at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The facility was constructed by the inmates and was configured to accommodate lethal injection as the method de mortis. It was an utterly fascinating place.
The room itself was covered on the inside with soundproof material and sported two walls comprised of one-way mirrors — one for the victim’s family and the other for government witnesses. How does one get invited to something like that? Would anyone think ill of you if you respectfully declined? Does anybody ever do so?
I realized at the time I would likely never have the opportunity again, presupposing that I successfully resisted the urge to kill anybody, so I resolved to maximize the experience. The table was built like a cross with heavy leather tie-down straps. I climbed up on it and spread my arms out on the thing just to see how it felt. The table was hard. Apparently, Uncle Sam saw little need to waste resources on comfort given the circumstances.
As I reclined onto that table and imagined the dark circumstances surrounding their using it for real, I was struck by those ubiquitous acoustic ceiling tiles. The corner of one of them was cut away to admit a small microphone. The condemned got three minutes to speak before the warden departed the room. In such an institutional setting, when you die, you die alone.
The bottom line is that those benign unremarkable ceiling tiles play witness to some awfully profound human drama. They adorn my own medical office as well as that of my dentist. The trauma bays in the big urban medical center where I learned my craft sported them as well. That was the most dramatic place I had ever imagined. There is literally no telling how many people died horribly staring at those things.
Our sojourn on this odd blue orb is, by definition, time-limited. Everybody dies. Sometimes it is quick; other times, it takes a while. If you could tolerate a little unsolicited advice, if you haven’t already, you need to get right with God. The time to think about that for the first time is not when you are staring desperately up at those blasted ceiling tiles.
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WHAT!?!
Authored by Andrew Korybko via The Automatic Earth blog,
Speculation has been swirling over the past month about why the US-led West’s Golden Billion so decisively shifted its “official narrative” about the Ukrainian Conflict from prematurely celebrating Kiev’s supposedly “inevitable” victory to seriously warning about its potential loss in this proxy war.
This took the form of related remarks from the Polish Prime Minister, President, and Army Chief as well as the US’ Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after which the New York Times admitted that the sanctions failed.
The reason why they decided to so decisively shift the “official narrative” was because NATO’s military-industrial crisis, which the New York Times warned about last November and was then touched upon by Biden’s Naval Secretary last month, finally became undeniable. Putting all prior speculation about this to rest, NATO’s Secretary-General declared a so-called “race of logistics” against Russia on Monday precisely on this pretext and thus confirmed the bloc’s crippling military-industrial crisis.
According to the transcript of Jens Stoltenberg’s pre-ministerial press conference that was shared by NATO’s official website ahead of his meeting with this anti-Russian alliance’s Defense Ministers, he said the following of relevance to this subject:
“It is clear that we are in a race of logistics. Key capabilities like ammunition, fuel, and spare parts must reach Ukraine before Russia can seize the initiative on the battlefield.
…
Ministers will also focus on ways to increase our defence industrial capacity and replenish stockpiles. The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions, and depleting Allied stockpiles. The current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production. This puts our defence industries under strain.
For example, the waiting time for large-calibre ammunition has increased from 12 to 28 months.
Orders placed today would only be delivered two-and-a-half years later. So we need to ramp up production. And invest in our production capacity.
…
Well, this is an issue we started to address last year, because we saw that an enormous amount of support for Ukraine, the only way to deliver that was to dig into our existing stocks. But of course, in the long run, we cannot continue to do that we need to produce more, to be able to deliver sufficient ammunition to Ukraine, but at the same time, ensure that we have enough ammunition to protect and defend all NATO Allies, every inch of Allied territory.
…
Of course, in the short run, the industry can increase production by having more shifts, by using existing production facilities more. But really to have a significant increase, they need to invest and build new plans. And we see a combination both of utilizing existing capacity more and also by making decisions to invest in increased capacity. This has started but we need more.
…
So what I said was that the current rate of ammunition consumption is higher, bigger than the current rate of production. That’s a factual thing. But since we have been aware of that for some time, we have started to do something. We’re not just sitting there idle and watching this happening. …
And of course the industry has the capability to increase the production also short term, sometimes this on some non-used or not utilized capability there. But even when you have a factory running, you can have more shifts. You can even work during weekends.
…
So yes, we have a challenge. Yes, we have a problem. But problems are there to be solved and we are addressing that problem and we have strategies to solve it both in the short term and also longer term to as a mobilized defense industry. And if there’s anything NATO Allies, and our economies and our societies have proved over decades, is that we are dynamic, we are adaptable, we can change when needed.
…
And let me also add, of course this is –the challenge of having enough ammunition is also a big challenge for Russia. So it just shows that this is a war of attrition, and the war to attrition becomes a battle of logistics and we focus on the logistical part of the defence capacity, defence industry capacity to ramp up production.”
As proven by Stoltenberg’s press conference, there should thus be no doubt that NATO is experiencing an unprecedented military-industrial crisis, which is responsible for reshaping its members’ narratives and overall strategy towards the Ukrainian Conflict.
This self-declared “race of logistics”, which he also described as a “war of attrition”, first of all proves that the bloc wasn’t prepared for waging a prolonged proxy war against Russia otherwise they’d have preemptively retooled their military-industrial complexes accordingly. The New York Times’ recent admission that the anti-Russian sanctions are a failure also suggests that NATO completely miscalculated in this respect by expecting Russia to collapse as a result of those restrictions, which didn’t happen.
These two factors add crucial context to why the Golden Billion’s “official narrative” about the conflict so decisively shifted over the past month. They simply can’t sustain the pace, scale, and scope of their armed assistance to Kiev, especially not after their much-ballyhooed sanctions failed to catalyze Russia’s economic collapse or at the very least give their proxy an edge in this “race of logistics”/”war of attrition”. As a result, they were forced to change how they present this conflict to their people.
Most tellingly, the Polish President didn’t rule out the scenario of Kiev making territorial concessions to Russia in his recent interview with Le Figaro, which he said should solely be that country’s choice to make and not anti-war Republicans’. Even Stoltenberg let slip during his latest press conference that “we must continue to provide Ukraine with what it needs to win. And to achieve a just and sustainable peace”, which also didn’t include his usual explicit condemnation of the territorial concession scenario.
That selfsame “just and sustainable peace”, according to the Jerusalem Post’s Dave Anderson, can actually be achieved by Kiev finally giving up its territorial claims. In his opinion piece about how “Ukraine can win against Russia by giving up land, not killing troops”, which was coincidentally published on the same day as Stoltenberg’s press conference, he argued that this swift resolution of Ukraine’s territorial disputes with Russia could result in its accelerated admission to NATO.
That outcome would thus sustainably ensure its security, thereby representing a victory over Russia, at least according to Anderson’s view. In the broader context of this analysis and in particular the interpretation of Stoltenberg’s remarks from his latest press conference, his article can thus be seen as the latest contribution to decisively shifting the “official narrative” about the Ukrainian Conflict in the direction of preconditioning the Western public to accept some sort of “compromise” with Russia.
All of this, the reader should be reminded, is occurring because of NATO’s military-industrial crisis hamstringing its members’ capabilities to sustain their bloc’s pace, scale, and scope of armed assistance to Kiev. Their “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” against Russia is obviously trending towards Moscow’s favor after that Eurasian Great Power proved that it truly has the wherewithal to sustain the pace, scale, and scope of its special operation in spite of the Golden Billion’s unparalleled sanctions against it.
If someone still remained in denial about the existence of NATO’s military-industrial crisis in spite of Stoltenberg’s surprisingly candid admission on Monday, then they should also be made aware of Politico’s exclusive report that was published on the same day, which reinforced his claim. Four unnamed US officials told this outlet that their country can’t send Kiev its requested “Army Tactical Missile Systems” (ATACMS) because “it doesn’t have any [of them] to spare”.
This revelation should thus serve as the proverbial “icing on the cake” proving that NATO is in the midst of such a serious military-industrial crisis right now that its US leader itself can’t even afford to spare important munitions that could give its proxies in Kiev the edge that they so desperately need right now. What’s so stunning about this strategic dynamic is that the combined military-industrial capabilities of the bloc’s two and a half dozen countries can’t compete with their single Russian adversary’s.
That insight in turn shows just how mighty Russia’s military-industrial complex is that it’s still capable of sustaining the same pace, scale, and scope of the ongoing special operation in Ukraine despite the sanctions against it while 30 Golden Billion countries can’t collectively do the same. Should its rumored full-scale offensive transpire, then it’s likely to deal a deathblow to NATO’s proxies due to Russia’s edge in this “race of logistics”/”war of attrition” and thus force them to finally cede their disputed regions.
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