Integrating Women Into the Marine Corps Infantry: Costs, Representation, and Lessons from Earlier Integration Efforts

Abstract

While women have been present on battlefields through history, their roles have expanded considerably in recent decades. The lifting of remaining restrictions fits into the pattern of expansion over time. Here, we focus on the Marine Corps infantry. We model the entry of women into infantry positions over time, but we also provide context for the current changes based on previous U.S. experience, and the experiences of other countries. Previous experiences opening closed occupations to women suggest that a variety of specific strategies are likely to be helpful to the Marines’ integration efforts. Both our cost model and previous experiences suggest that the proportion of women in the Marine Corps infantry is likely to grow very slowly; rates at which women complete training and remain in the Marine Corps will have a substantial impact on this growth. Mostly because growth is expected to be slow, the personnel-related costs of integration are predicted to be modest.

Keywords:

• Military women
• combat restrictions
• gender integration
• cost analysis
• military attrition

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of our co-workers, Todd Nichols, Gillian S. Oak, Thomas E. Trail, and Jonathan P. Wong. We are especially indebted to Agnes Schaefer for her leadership and guidance throughout the course of this project, and to John Winkler for his support of the research.

Notes

1. For the full report, see Schaefer et al. 2015. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of our co-workers and are especially indebted to Agnes Schaefer for her leadership and guidance throughout the course of this project.

2. For a comprehensive history of the WAAC and the WAC, see Treadwell (1954) and Public Law 689 (1942).

3. A full review of this literature is outside the scope of this paper. For a full review see Schaefer et al. 2015.

4. Despite these differences, there are many similarities between the USMC and foreign militaries. For example, most foreign militaries’ infantry missions are similar to the USMC’s (e.g. to ‘close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver’). Second, the USMC and foreign militaries will face similar equipment issues related to the integration of women into combat missions. Finally, while the USMC may have a higher OPTEMPO and somewhat unique mission set, many foreign military infantry divisions share an environmental context with the USMC, for example having to live in the field, walk long distances, and receive fire from the enemy.

5. Our deep dives focused on the following countries (year in which positions open in women in parentheses): Australia (2013), Canada(1989), Norway (1993), Sweden (1989), New Zealand (2005), Israel (2000), United Kingdom (2016).

6. For this, we considered the following factors: policy or legal change, clear evidence of leadership commitment, national strategies for integration of women into combat positions, forcewide training programs to facilitate integration.

7. There is an ongoing debate about whether women should be integrated in small groups or whether they should be spread as singletons, distributed more broadly across the force. Most countries do seem to lean toward the critical mass approach, as it seems more effective at providing women necessary support and facilitating their longer term success.

8. We do not have details in most cases on the specific policy changes made.

9. These standards vary by country.

10. We form our estimates based on information from the largest infantry military occupational specialty (MOS), ‘Rifleman,’ but many of the results are applicable across occupational fields.

11. There is a great deal of information available about integration. For example, the Australian Defense Force published a highly detailed plan for integration for each of its services; each plan included at least 50 activities but even in such a detailed plan to cost-specific information was contained in a single column and it included only an indication of which activities were expected to increase costs. Most activities were not expected to increase costs. For a detailed analysis of earlier integration efforts within the U.S. military, see Miller et al. (2012) which also does not include cost estimates.

12. For more details, see Schaefer et al. (2015).

13. See, e.g. the Department of the Navy’s Financial Management and Comptroller website, which provides details on the Department of the Navy’s budgets.

14. These data were the most recent available at the beginning of our project. We experimented with limiting our sample to more recent years; the results were quite similar to those presented here.

15. Here, ‘retention’ is defined simply as remaining in the Marine Corps. At different points in the career, retention implies different things. In particular, those who fail to complete training early in their careers (or ‘attrite’) do not remain in the Marine Corps but those who do not qualify to reenlist or choose not to reenlist are not retained either. Some enlisted personnel become officers; these personnel are considered to be retained.

16. This is true both in the early and later months of Marines’ careers; it is also true across the Services. For a detailed examination of differences in retention/attrition rates between men and women in the Marine Corps, see Quester (2010).

17. The vast majority of the Marines in our sample hold an initial training MOS of 8100, 9900, or 9971 during bootcamp. Some go on to serve in the infantry; others go on to serve in other MOSs. After training is complete, these MOSs show up on the service member’s record but during initial training, there is no indication in our personnel files of the intended occupation.

18. While we do not have comparable data from the other Services, in general Marines appear to have somewhat shorter careers than other service members; consistent with this, the age distribution of Marines skews younger than that of the other Services. See https://www.cna.org/pop-rep/2015/appendixb/b_15.html. To the extent that this impacts representation, we would expect the proportion of women to grow faster due to this relatively high turnover.

19. In our calculations of the size of the infantry, we also include Marines who first held the MOS of 0311 and then obtained the MOS of 0369 (‘Infantry Unit Leader’) as 0311s. These staff sergeants make up a small proportion of our data; excluding them does not qualitatively change our results, although the proportion of the infantry that is female increases slightly when we exclude 0369s.

20. Specific examples of other infantry MOSs include 0313 (LAV Crewman), 0331 (Machine Gunner), 0341 (Mortarman), 0351 (Infantry Assaultman), and 0352 (Antitank Missleman). Additionally, the MOS 0369 (Infantry Unit Leader) is part of the infantry but is held only by Marines who have achieved at least the rank of staff sergeant. Focusing on ‘rifleman’ allows us to capture the majority of the infantry, and to examine a group with a consistent training pipeline (there are small training differences between infantry MOSs). However, the total number of months served (39) is nearly identical if we focus on the entire infantry or only on 0311s.

21. Our data, provided by the Defense Manpower Data Center, include information on enlisted Marines who served from January 1996 through December 2012. Our files do not include the exact dates that Marines complete boot camp. Therefore, we use three-month attrition rates to approximate boot camp attrition, but we recognize that true boot camp attrition rates are slightly higher because some Marines repeat portions of boot camp (see Quester 2010). We exclude officers from our analysis due to the small number of female officers in the Marine Corps. We acknowledge that the time period covered by our data may not accurately reflect the future of the Marine Corps, but by including data from a relatively long time frame we capture retention over a wide range of scenarios.

22. See Office of the Secretary of Defense (2014), especially Table D-5. The other services have a higher proportion of women than the Marine Corps at each point in time, perhaps because of the very central and large role that combat arms–like MOSs and the 0311 MOS in particular play in the Marine Corps.

23. Of course, these are out-of-sample predictions but this estimate, modeled from the number of female and male accessions each year and a time trend with non-linear terms, is quite insensitive to changes in the years of data used and other simple variations. We also note that our results change only marginally when we instead use an increase of 75 women per year (the historic average).

24. The extent to which the number of women entering the infantry represents additional recruits, versus a reorganization of the women already in the Marine Corps, has implications for the overall cost of opening the infantry to women. For example, if an additional 100 women enter the Marine Corps in the near future but 400 women enter infantry training, then there will be fewer female Marines serving in non infantry MOSs; this is likely to result in lower personnel costs associated with the non infantry MOSs.

25. For a complete discussion of early term attrition rates in the Marine Corps over the last 35 years, see Quester (2010). This document also points out that boot camp attrition rates tend to be slightly higher than three-month attrition rates (our files allow us to calculate only the three-month rates), and that boot camp attrition rates have been as high as 15% for men and 25% for women in past decades.

26. While we do not know how many men would successfully complete training if the standards were set at a different level, the standards seem highly predictive for men – most men who meet them and enter training go on to successfully complete the training. If the standards accurately predict women’s success, the likely result is that relatively few women will enter infantry training, but those who do enter will complete the training at a high rate. If, in contrast, the standards do not accurately predict women’s success, then we may see many more women entering training, but the completion rate may be much lower.

27. We calculate this figure by examining all Marines who hold the MOS of 0311 and had left the Marine Corps by the end of 2012 (to avoid right-censoring). As noted above, infantry MOSs such as 0369 ‘Infantry Unit Leader’ are held by Marines with previous experience in 0311; we include this time in our calculations to count all productive infantry time.

28. Thirty percent approximates the historic rate, while 45% represents a slightly higher rate than that observed during the recent build-up. See Lien, Quester, and Shuford (2008) as well as Quester et al. (2007).

29. See the Department of the Navy website, which provides details on the Navy’s FY15 budget as well as some information about historical spending.

30. While there are no recent estimates for the marginal cost of an additional ‘high-quality’ Marine Corps recruit, this figure is consistent with estimates found in Asch et al. (2010); Schmitz et al. (2008). In manpower research, ‘high-quality’ generally implies that the recruit possesses a high school diploma or the equivalent and scored at least 50 on the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT). Note that estimates of marginal costs of expanding high-quality recruits are substantially higher than the figures provided above; for example, see Orvis et al. (2016). However, in this case the expansion is minimal; indeed, the number of male Marines might be be expected to decrease. There are no separate estimates of the marginal cost of recruiting men versus women into the Marine Corps. Finally, accounting-type estimates based on cost data are somewhat higher than the figures above, but our results are not very sensitive to such differences.

31. See Asch et al. (2010), which estimates the cost of an additional year at the first reenlistment point to be between $14,000 and $17,000 in FY07.

32. See the Department of the Navy’s website for details on the Navy’s FY15 budget.

33. We emphasize that retaining the men who do not complete infantry training is likely to represent at least as large a savings as retaining the women who do not complete infantry training. For example, if 200 women enter infantry training each year and 2,800 men enter, and men wash out at a 5% rate and women wash out at a 55% rate, those who fail to complete training will include 140 men and 110 women.