A Marine Corps study has found that ground units made up only of men perform better than units with men and women.
According to
the study released Thursday, women were injured twice as often as men, aren't as accurate at shooting and have a harder time removing wounded troops from the battlefield.
The study found that women who had been through infantry target school were less accurate at hitting targets with M4 rifles than men who had not had the schooling.
Men hit targets 44 percent of the time, while women hit targets only 28 percent of the time.
Men were able to move faster carrying gear than women and could throw their packs over a wall, whereas women had to have help getting their gear over.
The study didn't only compare men to women individually, but also compared how units made up only of men compared to units integrated with men and women.
The all-male units beat the mixed units on 69 percent of the 134 tasks studied. The integrated teams were better at two machine gun-related tasks, while all units fared equally in the rest of the tasks.
The males' rate of injury to muscles, tendons and ligaments was 18.8 percent. It was 40.5 percent for females.
The Marine Corps has the lowest percentage of women of all the armed services at 7 percent.
Under an Obama administration order, all the armed services are supposed to be fully integrated by 2016 unless waivers for certain jobs have been sought and granted.
"If you were to turn down a request for a waiver like that I guess the political machine in the White House would be saying we don’t care about the effectiveness of the ground combat units," California Rep. Duncan Hunter, a member of the Armed Services Committee, told
USA Today.
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