Q & A GEN. ROBERT B. NELLER, USMC
arms fi ght? The more senior you are, the larger your organization, the harder it is to get [repetitions]. And it’s costly.
Is this where we see the effect of an insurgency fight that lasted years? Do you have lieutenant colonels and colonels who, 20 years ago, would have had that kind of big-unit train- ing, but don’t today? That’s a fair statement. These of- ficers are smart. We just have to put them in an environment to adjust. For example, we sent a lot of artil- lery units [to Iraq and Afghanistan], and we weren’t shooting a lot of artillery. They did provisional mis- sions, security, and convoy missions. So we have a group of artillery offi- cers that didn’t grow up in a normal way, where they learned to maneu- ver and operate in the context of a firing artillery battery.
Is the experience they had valuable to be leaders and to deal with stresses of combat? Absolutely. But we’ve got to get them back out to do their stated mission to include maneuvers across the ground, displace command posts, and operate at night. Iraq and Afghan- istan were not benign environments. But the old saw is, ‘Don’t prepare to fi ght the last war.’ We have to train them for diff erent terrain and adver- saries and environments. Another example is signature management. ‘Look, you never used to worry about talking on the radio. Now you need to, because there are people out there who can fi nd you. And if they can fi nd you, they can target you. If they can target you, they can kill you. So what are you going to do about that?’ You only have to say it once, and they get it.
Women can now serve in combat specialties and units, if they qualify.
54 MILITARY OFFICER NOVEMBER 2016
Lance Cpl. Benjamin Cartwright, an infantry Marine with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, launches an unmanned aerial system at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Maintaining the Marine Corps’ technological edge will ensure an “unfair” fight.
Don’t prepare to fight the last war.
How is that going?
There’s two parts. One is opening units previously restricted to women in their current military occupa- tional specialty [MOS]. So for sev- eral years now, we’ve had a couple hundred female Marines, mostly of- fi cers and staff NCOs, in previously restricted units to serve in admin- istration, intelligence, communica- tions, logistics, supply, [and] mortar team. That happened pretty much as I thought it would. There were some really good ones and some who were just good solid Marines. And
there were a few who had a hard time — just like some guys are really good, a majority [are fi ne], and some struggle. That was a no-brainer and will make us better. If the best intel- ligence offi cer in the division is a woman, why wouldn’t you want her in that unit?
The other part is the opening up
[of] previously restricted MOSs. One result of a study we did, which no one had ever done in modern military history, was to look at the impact of gender integration on com- bat teams. We came up with gender- neutral standards for all ground combat specialties: infantry, ma- chine gunner, mortarman, assault- man, TOW gunner, artillery, tanks, [light armored vehicles], amtraks, and combat engineers. So every Ma- rine, before they ship to boot camp, knows they have to meet a certain physical standard. At training day
PHOTO: PFC. RHITA DANIEL, USMC
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