The Marine Corps quietly directed its recruit depots to integrate male and female drill instructor teams at the platoon level in late 2023, and now the service is full steam ahead with the effort, according to several Marine officials who spoke to Military.com last week.
Between the Marine Corps' two recruit depots at San Diego and Parris Island, South Carolina, recruits from all over the country arrive on the famous yellow footprints to be trained by upward of 1,300 drill instructors, or DIs, charged with molding them into Marines over a 13-week boot camp.
Of those 1,300 drill instructors currently training recruits, roughly 15% are women -- and leaders at the depots and the service's education entity said that integrating that relatively limited number of women with their male counterparts at the lowest training level has gone smoothly over the last year-plus, with few adjustments required to make it happen.
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The depots currently have seven gender-integrated drill instructor teams at the platoon level, though that number can fluctuate week to week depending on the number of companies that graduate and assemble for training, service leaders from the San Diego and Parris Island recruit depots said.
"This is not a pilot program," Col. Misty Posey, chief of staff of the Marine Corps' Training and Education Command, or TECOM, said Wednesday. Posey was previously a commander of Parris Island's now-shuttered 4th Recruit Training Battalion, an all-female unit that closed in 2023 amid the service's efforts to gender-integrate training.
"This is what we're doing, and there was never a doubt that we could integrate platoon-level DI teams," Posey said. "There was never a doubt in the value in doing it. There was never a doubt in the fact that it would be successful."
While the Marine Corps has consistently had the lowest percentage of women compared to its sister branches, the number of women putting on the Eagle, Globe and Anchor has slowly increased by two percentage points since 2016, with the Pentagon reporting that women made up nearly 10% of the Corps in 2023.
And as that number steadily increased, Posey said that "one battalion was no longer sufficient or appropriate to train all female recruits" in terms of the space that was once allotted to them, "which meant more female DIs and staff were needed to train them."
"It really gave us a lot of flexibility," she added.
Posey said that the effort to integrate women into drill instructor roles during boot camp harkens back to 1996, when initial training for men and women began to mirror each other. She said that drill instructors could have been integrated at that point, but given the small number of female recruits and drill instructors in the Marine Corps, the service felt it was "more efficient" to train women in a separate unit.
In December 2023, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, a Pentagon entity, recommended that the Marine Corps integrate its platoon-level drill instructors. The committee said that it "believes mixed-gender drill instructor teams are essential to providing recruits training and mentorship from opposite-gender role models as they prepare to enter an integrated operational environment," according to the report.
That same month, retired Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, then-commanding general of TECOM, gave verbal guidance to both depots to provide a proof of concept for integrating platoon-level drill instructors within gender-segregated companies, as Marine Corps Times first reported earlier this year.
Part of the impetus to integrate drill instructors at the platoon level, the officials told Military.com, was to get all Marines used to seeing both men and women in leadership roles before heading to the operational fleet, which is mixed-gender.
"We had to make very few changes overall, because honestly, integration at the depots is not that much different from integration in any Marine Corps unit, and we've been doing that to various degrees over the past few decades and it worked great," said Col. Peter Rummler, the commander of the Recruit Training Regiment at San Diego.
"The Marines thought of it just as a continuation of what they've experienced during their tours in the fleet," he added.
Col. Christopher McArthur, commander of the Recruit Training Regiment at Parris Island, said that each integrated training team will always include at least two drill instructors who are the same gender of the platoon they are training. An all-male platoon will have a drill instructor team made up of two women and two men, for example, though numbers can fluctuate due to manning.
Posey, the TECOM chief of staff, said teams that instructed martial arts, marksmanship and rapelling, for example, have been gender-integrated "for quite some time," but added that the service wanted to take a "deliberate approach" to integrating platoon-level drill instructors to establish procedures for drill instructor rest plans and recruit privacy during hygiene time.
While women have been enlisting in the Marine Corps for more than a century, to include more recently playing critical roles in Female Engagement and Lioness Teams during the Global War on Terrorism, the service has been slower to integrate them into training or combat roles compared to its counterparts.
After the Pentagon lifted the ban on women in direct combat jobs in 2013, for example, the Marine Corps was the only branch to request an exception, which was rejected. As of November, nearly 700 women were serving in combat roles in the Marine Corps.
Platoons are still segregated by gender at the depots, and it was not until 2019 that the Marine Corps graduated its first coed company of Marines at Parris Island. By comparison, the Army began integrating women at the platoon level in the 1990s. Female recruits did not start training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego until 2021, roughly 100 years after the West Coast unit was established.
"I get asked often by older, former retired Marines, and I would just reassure folks that even though we're generally integrated, boot camp is still challenging. It's conducted to the same level of standard expectation it's always been," said McArthur, the commander of the Recruit Training Regiment at Parris Island.
"It's enhanced just [by] the mere fact that now that recruits get to see leaders of both genders, and that's a positive for them, as well as a positive opportunity for our Marines to lead both genders," he added.
A University of Pittsburgh study cited staff shortages as contributing "burnout" factors for the disproportionately fewer female drill instructors, among other takeaways in the 738-page report.
Maj. Hector Infante, a TECOM spokesperson, said insights from that study "have been instrumental in enhancing opportunities for integrated training, especially as personnel and resources became available for pilot programs and execution."
"Female drill instructors have the same work requirements as their male counterparts, but their smaller population size can lead to disproportionately heavier workloads and increased burnout," the study said. "The inflexibility of single-gender drill instructor teams combined with personnel shortages necessitate female drill instructors shortening their between-cycle breaks to ensure sufficient coverage for every female platoon."
Depot leaders said they did not see any challenges in terms of managing work-rest cycles amid the integration of drill instructor teams at the platoon level -- a historically demanding job for drill instructors overall, but especially for women who had to shoulder greater responsibilities given their fewer numbers, the study said.
Before, "women were always considered sort of second-class citizens, whether they were recruits or drill instructors, and part of that was because the leaders had historically created distance in terms of space and time to keep the women so separate that they were automatically assumed not to be able to keep up," former Marine Lt. Col. Kate Germano, who led the all-female 4th Recruit Training Battalion, told Military.com.
"Because there were female drill instructors who were allowed only to train the women, it caused a lot of burnout, a lot of exhaustion, a lot of divorce," she said.
Germano said that the integration of female drill instructors at the platoon level was a long time coming, and that because they were allowed only to train women in the drill instructor capacity for so long, the new change could lighten the load in terms of time off, giving women in those roles more time to recover.
Germano was relieved of command in 2015 despite improving metrics for female Marines under her leadership, such as shooting qualifications. The firing by the Corps sparked years of controversy over the way women are perceived in the military. She said that, for her, the integration of female drill instructors at the platoon level is indicative of an overall generational shift that wasn't around when she was serving.
"Ten years ago, we had individuals in top leadership positions who had never served side by side with women in combat and had never really understood what women were capable of," she said of the service's moves to integrate women into key roles. "And now we're seeing that that's the norm."
Both Germano and the current Marine Corps leadership said that the move to integrate women in platoon-level drill instructor roles makes it easier for the depots to manage their recruit shipping models amid a difficult recruiting environment for all branches.
"In the old days, women were only trained in one place, which limited the throughput of recruits, which limited the mission of the recruiters," Germano said. "And so now what we're seeing is, because training has been open to more than one location and there's more than one squad bay available, more women can be recruited, more women can be trained."
"And this ties back into this idea of integrating the teams, because the less you have to worry about only having women train women, the more people there are available to fill those company leadership slots," she added. "So it's all related. It's all connective tissue, and this is just sort of the cherry on top of the ice cream."
