If you've ever heard that statistics can be misleading, this in one of those instances. While Women Marines (WMs) make up less than 10% of the total fighting force, the instant removal of those WMs would significantly reduce unit readiness and consequently combat effectiveness.
You see, woman are NOT billeted in combat roles in the Marines. As a consequence, WMs represent a much larger percentage of non-combat, but equally mission critical billets. If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be problems and you'd lose a tremendous amount of mission competency and overall experience.
To be honest, I've had WM's in my subordination only twice while I served, and that was while I was assigned to I&I duty. It wasn't that bad, although I'd by dishonest if I didn't admit there were some ancillary issues you just don't have in an all male environment.
I think on balance, WMs bring more the the Marine Corps than they cost.
Anybody is better than nobody but replacing those females with men would be a much better value.
I like to ask people, if we aren't losing anything by replacing our soldiers with women then we can make the Marine Corp 100% female and they would be just as good right?
I think we all know the answer to that, so really what we are asking is how many females can the military absorb before it costs us our country?
The answer is that no one knows because you can't measure or know what the unknownable future holds in our fights for survival, so until recently we just tried not to deliberately introduce weaknesses that we could avoid.