6/4/19
Why did Bob Neller join the Marines? "I needed a job," the top Marine officer says nonchalantly. He went to Officer Candidate School the summer before his senior year at the University of Virginia with the intention of then going to law school. "The law school thing didn't work out," he recalls, "and I wanted to get married, and my parents were getting divorced, and I didn't have any money. And the Marine Corps said, 'Hey come do this for 2 1/2 years.' And I said, 'Sure.' "It stretched to 44 years. For the past four years, Neller has been the Marine Corps commandant, the officer charged with equipping, training and maintaining a ready service, as well as being a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During his tenure, Marines — and the Army — accepted women into ground combat roles. The Army is more than 2.5 times the size of the Marine Corps, but still the numbers are lopsided. The Army counts 400 female officers and enlisted troops in the infantry, as well as 28 female graduates from Army Ranger School. The Marines say they have 31 graduates of infantry training and fewer than a handful of female infantry officers. "The numbers are the numbers," says Neller. "The Congress has told us to have gender-neutral standards for all [military] occupational specialties [the military's term for a specific job]. If you want to compete for any MOS, man or woman, you compete, and if you meet the standard you earn the MOS." But is Neller surprised by the low numbers? "No. I'm not," he says. "We knew this. We testified to this. We've told everybody we knew the numbers would be small. Because we didn't believe there were many women that were interested in doing this."
"The bigger stat is: Right now in the divisions of the Marine Corps — the three active-duty divisions — there's over 800 women in those divisions in a variety of MOSs," Neller says. "That wasn't the case several years ago." The largest number of women — at least 211 at last count — are in artillery units, Neller says. And what are you learning? "They're all different. It could be command climate. Sometimes it's other things. People are digging into it, they're trying. Look, the thing I have to remind myself everyday is there's 186,000 Marines out there. And the great, great, great majority of them are doing their job, they're treating each other with dignity and respect. They're operationally competent, they're physically fit, they're looking out for each other. What's the future look like for the Marine Corps? "Our environment's changed, so we have to adjust and anticipate what's coming in the future," he says. "I think we're back to a period of great power competition." "In the last 10, 15 years though we didn't talk about the Russians or the Chinese," Neller says. "Now we talk about them all the time." Neller says the threats from those countries include longer range missiles and other weapons, drones and cyberattacks. "I believe that whoever can maintain their network and deny the other person theirs may win the whole thing without having to fight," he says. What does Neller worry about? "You worry about, are we able to change fast enough? Are we going to have reliable, consistent funding to increase the readiness and the capability of the force? Are we still going to be able to recruit?" By this fall, those questions will have to be addressed by the next commandant.
