Marines brace for mandatory sensitivity training

FILE: August 18, 2010: A female Marine in Marjah, Afghanistan. (REUTERS)

If you need more proof that the Obama administration has turned the greatest fighting force on the planet into a social engineering petri dish, just consider what’s about to be forced upon the Marine Corps.

Marines will soon be forced to attend “unconscious bias” training – in advance of the women joining the infantry.

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The seminar will focus on how people prejudge others based on factors like race and gender, and principals of institutional change, Miltary.com reports.

“There’s no doubt we’re leading cultural change,” Brig. Gen. James Glynn told the website. “It’s not the first time for the Marine Corps, but we like a challenge.”

That could be a mighty big challenge. A Center for Naval Analyses survey found a “significant majority” of male Marines opposed having women serve in ground combat jobs.

Mobile training teams will be dispatched across the Corps started in May.

“The purpose of the mobile training team is to begin to facilitate the cultural change…you’ve got to have the conservation,” Glynn said.

So what kind of agenda items can Marines expect to discuss during their sensitivity training sessions?

Col. Anne Weinberg described one of the potential questions to Military.com reporters.

“You’re in the field, you only have this certain amount of space for billeting and you’ve got three women and six guys. How are you going to billet?” she asked.

How in the world are the Marines supposed to get combat training, when they are deluged with sensitivity training and equal opportunity training and sexual harassment training?

“All that time squandered on this stuff is time you are not spending training for war,” Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (Ret.) told me.

Peters, who is also a military analyst for Fox News Channel, railed against the military’s quest to be politically correct.

“If I could make one change to improve our combat effectiveness in the military – it would be turning all those equal opportunity and sensitivity trainers and counselors into combat rifleman,” he said. “We need more rifles. We don’t need any more sensitivity.”

And Peters is not opposed to women serving in the military. May the best man or woman win the promotion, he said.

“But you can’t stack the deck,” he warned. “You cannot make our military primarily a tool of social engineering or you will destroy the military.”

The Marine Corps decision prompted dozens of negative responses on Miltary.com

“There are no points for political correctness in combat,” one reader wrote. “This insanity will get Marines killed both male and female.”

“The Few, the Proud, the ‘Unconsciously Biased’,” wrote another. “Obama is doing all that he can to decrease the effectiveness of our fighting forces.”

Two years ago I uncovered a 600-page manual used by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute. The manual teaches that “healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian” men hold an unfair advantage over other races.

“Simply put, a healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian male receives many unearned advantages of social privilege, whereas a black, homosexual, atheist female in poor health receives many unearned disadvantages of social privilege,” reads a statement in the manual.

And in early March Judicial Watch obtained documents revealing that some 400 soldiers at Fort Gordon, Georgia were subjected to a “white privilege” briefing.

“We have lost sight of the fact that the greatest immorality in war is for the United States to lose,” Peters told me. “For all our imperfections, we are nonetheless the greatest force for freedom and decency and a chance at a better life that humanity has ever had. We are the ultimate defenders of freedom.”

But Peters concluded with this ominous warning:

“God help us if we lose the ability to do that role,” he said.