It has come to this:

Marines across the Corps will be challenged on their unconscious prejudices and presuppositions as women get the opportunity to become grunts for the first time. The Marine Corps is rolling out mandatory training for all Marines before the first future female rifleman hits boot camp, aiming to set conditions for a smooth transition and head off cultural resistance. Mobile training teams will be dispatched to installations across the Corps throughout May and June to offer a two-day seminar to majors and lieutenant colonels, Col. Anne Weinberg, deputy director of the Marine Corps Force Innovation Office, told reporters Thursday. Those officers will then train the Marines under them. Topics include unconscious bias, which focuses on how people prejudge others based on factors such as race and gender, and principles of institutional change. The seminar will also walk officers through the elements of the Corps’ plan for opening ground combat jobs to women and include vignettes featuring challenges units might encounter. “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?” Weinberg said, describing a potential vignette. “Just some of these common sense things that these units probably haven’t had to deal with so that ground combat units haven’t had to deal with, but we’ve been dealing with in the rest of the Marine Corps for generations.”

Get this:

A Center for Naval Analyses survey of 54,000 Marines recently obtained by The Washington Post gives context to the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance as female Marines go infantry. The report found that a significant majority of male Marines at every rank opposed the decision to have women serve in ground combat jobs. The resistance was strongest among male junior officers in the ranks of captain and below, who opposed women in ground combat jobs at a rate of more than 72 percent. At least a third of female Marines at every rank were also opposed to the idea.

Notice that the objection is not to women in the Marines. It’s to female Marines serving in combat roles. Read the whole thing at Military.com.

And yet, the US military is going ahead with this deeply unpopular policy anyway, because hey, we’re going to re-engineer human nature according to egalitarian ideals. Note that the story says the survey reveals “the need for training on cultural and institutional resistance” — not that it reveals “that the decision to put women in ground combat positions was unwise and at least premature.”

Back in February, Military Times reported:

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa — a retired Army Guard lieutenant colonel and the only female veteran serving in the Senate — said she supports opening all jobs but said it could take a generation before real integration occurs. “This has been pushed quite rapidly by the administration, by the secretary of defense,” she said. “Not having well-thought-through implementation plans that have been thoroughly vetted could end up setting women back even further, instead of advancing them.” “We need to make sure we have thought through this,” Ernst said. Ernst emphasizes that she “fully supports” opening all combat jobs to women. Her 22 years in the military included a deployment to Kuwait and Iraq in 2003, and she says she wishes she had a wider range of opportunities during her career. But she also said the top concern she hears from men and women in the ranks is the potential for watering down standards to help women qualify for combat jobs, a move that could risk readiness and safety. Military leaders have repeatedly promised that won’t happen.

Right. Because standards are never lowered for politically correct reasons, anywhere. What this mandatory training is going to do is teach male grunts how to avert their eyes and keep their mouths shut. And boy, what a great idea it is to throw men and women into combat situations together. Hard to imagine sexual assault or misconduct anything going wrong.

There is nothing we won’t destroy for the sake of egalitarianism.

UPDATE: Reader Charles Curtis writes: