"First USMC Infantry Officer - Suitable Figures?" Topic

Any suitable figures in production or planned? link

There's no need, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference under the body armor etc. she'll be carrying the same load out as any other officer and the marines they are leading.

What he said.

Not really the butt will stick out. I'm not being funny over in Iraq that's how we could tell also smaller size plus walks like a female.

Height, mostly. Facial features are a giveaway, but not at tabletop distances.

This is probably the closest you will be able to get to a female marine.

link

Hasslefree have a few that would work.

Are they going to pull part of that 15% into a unit and put her in command? Or is she going to command men? That should work out well………………….

I think it's completely unfair to her, its bad enough she is boot Lt now she has the whole first female officer in the Infantry hanging over head, not considering her platoon Sgt and her platoon. Stupid political correct crap.

I think a headswap would do the job; see Amalric's efforts here:

TMP link

Agree with Irish Marine.
IMHO her career will be carefully managed to guarantee success. Her first assignment will be to Weapons Company, probably the 81 platoon. This will be followed by a staff assignment at the Bn level. A six month tour as a company commander will follow and then staff duty for the rest of her career. No Bn. Commander or Company commander will want to be "responsible" for her failing in this politically correct environment. She's guaranteed to be a success regardless of how she fails.

Not really the butt will stick out. I'm not being funny over in Iraq that's how we could tell also smaller size plus walks like a female.

Yeah, the BDU/ACU/MARPAT trousers really make a girl's butt look good.

Dunno why, probably has to do with tailoring.

So basically, take the shortest model you have, green stuff a better butt, and if you're really motivated do a head swap to show the LT with her helmet off (if your command teams are all based together, include the Platoon Sergeant either smacking her in the back of the head for taking her helmet off or doing a facepalm because she took her helmet off again).

Statuesque minis do some great heads for swapping, I used their 'Fine Scale' heads on Infinity minis.

All officers have different strengths and weaknesses. She will be no different. Some will dismiss her out of hand regardless of her actual performance and attempt to deny her the allowance of a "normal" LT learning curve. Others will overlook weaknesses and embarrassingly laud merely adequate performance (perhaps to the point of condescension.)

The best judges of whether or not she succeeds as an infantry officer will be the marines she commands. They have no stake in her professional success or failure. They simply desire to be competently led, fully aware the price of incompetence, low or high, would be disproportionately paid by them.

I wish her luck.

I also concur on the butt sculpting.

If I were one of her soldiers or NCO:s I would do everything I could to help her succeed, because that is the professional thing to do. Do my job to the best of my abilities and help others to do their job to the best of their abilities.

Lion – you've got that right! Got to love a girl in Multicam.

Soledad and Festerfest have the right of It. Gender be damned at this point, what matters is the SNCOs and NCOs doing their best to teach "thier" boot Lt.

I don't see this as any sort of good thing. An addition where none is necessary just adds complexity. This is biological and in combat it will bite us, sooner or later, and the failure will be blamed on the men being led by a female officer. In reverse, a female soldier in an otherwise all male unit will distract some of the men. Sooner or later that will bite us in combat too. It is human nature. If someone suggests that special training can prepare for such eventualities, then I will answer right now, that unnecessary training is a waste of resources and a further complication.

The military is supposed to be lean and cost no more than required to do the job. Inclusions because of politically correct behavior and cultural preferences will only increase waste and lower efficiency. We will lose fights because of this.

I don't have any issue with women officers. In combat they should command other women.

I agree with Great War Ace. Marine Corps is supposed to kill people and break stuff that's it.

Re: inclusion of "cultural preferences," the argument against allowing anyone who can meet the qualifications to serve in combat roles on the basis of gender is the only inclusion of cultural preferences I see. If the existing culture is such that men feel uncomfortable working with women, or seeing women as authority figures, that's the cultural preference that is ultimately destructive to the ability of a military. Ditto with desegregating the military back in the day-- ultimately this removed an artificial cultural restriction on the ability of the military to do whatever it needs to.

In both cases it *is* true that there may be negative effects on unit effectiveness during the transition while people used to the old culture adjust to a more rationalist organization, but the few years of minor problems are vastly outweighed by the many many (infinitive?) years after the change.

I draw your attentions to 'The Unwomanly Face Of War' by Svetlana Alexievich; an oral history of the 800,000-1,000,000 Soviet women who fought in WW2 as everything from cooks to bomb disposal to snipers to infantry to tankovy desantniki to pilots to partisans.

I also point out the success of the SDF, particularly the YPJ, whose officers (women) command mixed units of men and women with success and no problems.

I posit therefore that *actual lived combat experience from around the world* shows that fears of women causing problems are unfounded.

Good luck to the LT and all who will follow her.

@Great War Ace: Funny you mention that. Did you know that the first rape on an integrated USN ship was perpetrated by three females on a male?

@PMC317: I dunno, the Israelis have stopped completely integrating units down to the smallest units. The military units are all female or all male, I think at the company level (maybe battalion). Hardwired male brains hear women in trouble in combat, they abandon mission to rescue the women, even though they would have left a male unit there trusting that the male unit could hold on.

There is a massive difference between current, existential combat operations and sustained military effectiveness.

My rule of thumb is that if the Israelis STOP doing something, it's because it doesn't work in combat.

@Lion in the Stars
Do you mean the general end of women in combat roles in the IDF until 2000? Because in recent years (since opening all roles, in theory, to women) they went from one integrated infantry battalion (Caracal) to 3 in 2015 (adding Bardelas and Lions of Jordan, which notably is stationed in the West Bank rather than on a border) and now in 2017 they are adding an additional infantry unit and running a pilot program to add female tank crews (so far it looks like there won't be mixed crews for privacy reasons). I'm pretty sure that last unit will be in the North, so every possible enemy is facing an integrated unit, soon…

All this despite Israel being a bit more openly sexist than the USA (both from the growing religious section of society-- who say things like women joining combat units makes them a gentile-- and from the general secular culture arguably being a bit like America in terms of gender, but 20 years ago).

My understanding is that YPJ is all female. Commanding mixed and men units? Where does that come from?

I do not look at the valiant behavior in Russian resistance to the Nazis as any model to follow. Russia was in survival mode. Otherwise women would not have been involved in such numbers in the first place.

Read what I said: women commanding women, in all female units, is the only way to make women in combat work. Mixed units are right out.

"Integrated battalion" doesn't necessarily mean integrated squads/platoons, or a female officer in charge of a bunch of guys.

And GWA, the Russians were fielding entire battalions and regiments of women, almost never women mixed into mostly-male units.

I'm pretty sure the IDF mixed units are mixed all the way down to squads, though I'm having trouble finding any source that just outright states that. However most pictures seem to show small units that are mixed, and this article mentions a female sergeant of a male soldier (also has an example of what appears, to my eyes, to be 7 troopers in the same squad, 4 women and 3 men).
link

Did you have a source on their policy changing recently, though? I'd be surprised if they had but it is of course possible.