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Civilian dorm advisers are being added to Marine Corps barracks. What’s next? Fizzies in the base swimming pool? A dead horse in the commandant’s office? Is the Marine Corps becoming an “Animal House”?
The recent Military.com exposé on the deplorable conditions in barracks at Camp Pendleton’s School of Infantry West is alarming, but the response of senior Marine Corps leaders is disgraceful. Instead of relieving the entire chain of command of the Marine Corps training establishment, the service’s leadership has undertaken a managerial response.
The senior leadership at Camp Pendleton apparently had no idea of the conditions at the School of Infantry barracks until getting ready for an announced visit by the general officer in charge of the Marine Corps training establishment. The local leadership was shocked — shocked — to find out that the barracks were riddled with filth, vermin and graffiti, though this had apparently been the case for several years. Instead of holding the chain of command responsible for failures of the most basic leadership functions, the Corps ordered that civilians be brought in to fix problems that should never have occurred in the first place.
Back in the days…