In quiet shift, Marines allow mixed-gender DI teams to train recruits

Last year, without fanfare or a formal announcement, the Marine Corps took a step a key leader had formerly said was not feasible due to manpower constraints, assembling teams of both male and female drill instructors to train recruit companies and platoons at its two boot camps.

The Marine Corps Recruit Depots received a directive in December 2023 from the then-commander of Marine Corps Training and Education Command, Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, instructing boot camp staff to start building the teams, Lt. Col. Stephen Draper, TECOM branch head for individual training, told Marine Corps Times in an interview.

“They were able to start in a matter of months,” Draper said. “I believe [Marine Corps Recruit Depot] San Diego was able to knock it out as early as Jan. 24.”

While not every DI team can be gender-integrated due to a limited number of female drill instructors at the depots, Draper said minimums were established.

At San Diego, where a total of 12 DI teams train as many recruit companies at any given time, leaders decided to have no fewer than three integrated teams, with the potential to staff more if resources permit.

Across the depots, he said, about 10% of all DI teams are integrated — about the same proportion of female recruits at the depots. A typical integrated team, he added, will have three DIs of one gender and a fourth of the opposite gender, with most featuring three male instructors and one female.

“That number certainly fluctuates,” Draper said. “[Recruit training battalion leaders] look at the flow of people coming in and where their DIs are employed, and then they allocate their DI teams and put them together as they see fit.”

Moving to a mixed-gender DI team model was a key recommendation of a $2 million independent study commissioned by the Marine Corps and carried out by the University of Pittsburgh between 2020 and 2022.

The study, which ran to more than 700 pages, cited a counterproductive “group think” they’d found that develops in single-gender leadership teams, and said a move to mixed-gender teams would give recruits a broader range of role models.

“The Marine Corps posits ‘having strong leaders of both genders as role models for young recruits is integral to their assimilation into our ranks’ yet recruits’ primary training experiences are currently executed by same-gender drill instructor teams,” the report stated. “Receiving direct, sustained training from drill instructors of both genders reinforces for recruits the concept that men and women are equally respected and authoritative leaders of their service.”

Study authors proposed a model that would allow same-gender leaders to supervise platoons in squad bays overnight, but otherwise enable a mixed-gender training experience.

The Marine Corps, which has taken significant steps — under pressure from Congress — to further integrate its training depots, including closing its exclusively female Fourth Recruit Training Battalion in 2023 and admitting female recruits to San Diego for the first time in 2021, continues to operate single-gender recruit platoons, citing privacy and safety reasons.

In an interview with Marine Corps Times in 2022, Iiams said he didn’t want to create mixed-gender DI teams until staffing allowed all teams to be integrated.

“I’m a one-standard kind of individual,” he said. “I don’t want to have mixed DI teams for only portions of the recruit population. … It’s got to be everyone.”

A TECOM spokesman, Maj. Hector Infante, took issue with the characterization of Iiams’ subsequent order to integrate as a reversal of position, saying the Marine Corps had been following a “deliberate, methodical approach” to integrating all recruit training.

“The main reason the USMC had not integrated DI teams who conduct troop handling duties at the platoon level before 2024 was due to privacy issues with the recruits, as well as ensuring adequate rest for DIs,” Infante said in a written statement, saying that a requirement for same-gender supervision of troops as they sleep and perform hygiene activities in their squad bays required an adjustment of standard procedures and staff rest plans with mixed teams.

“On a team with four DIs, if one is opposite-gender, then only three DIs are part of the … overnight duty rotation, which means less time off/rest for those DIs,” he said.

It’s not clear when the Marine Corps might ever be able to staff integrated DI teams across the fleet. With women continuing to make up such a small proportion of the service, efforts to ramp up the female DI population come at the expense of other career opportunities they might have in the fleet, leaders have said.

Draper said the unannounced rollout of the mixed teams wasn’t designed to deflect attention from the change.

“We weren’t looking for a pat on the back or anything,” he said. “We were just looking at: what’s the best way to do this, what makes the most sense and what makes the most lethal Marines?”

Staff burnout has long been a concern for drill instructors writ large, and particularly for female DIs, a community for which smaller numbers have typically meant less time off between rotations and little flexibility for the demands of life and family.

“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,” the University of Pittsburgh report found. “Without sufficient time to rest and prepare between cycles, the drill instructor job takes an even greater toll on physical, mental, and emotional health.

“An enlisted female Marine Corps training cadre member from Parris Island stated, ‘Most of our female drill instructors lose custody of their children, their marriages fall apart, [and] their bodies end up in casts.’”

In early findings from the change, Draper said the mixed teams had indeed taken some pressure off and created more possibilities for female DIs.

“It’s really kind of opened the door, that they have a lot more opportunities at the depots to do other things,” he said. “So, all around, I think it’s a much more efficient use of personnel.”