The man who made the Crucible part of boot camp is Marine Commandant General Charles Krulak. We call it a gut check. It is the ultimate gut check. It's the opportunity for individuals to all of a sudden see the power of tea work, the power of cohesion. You know, the old Chinese gung ho is a Chinese term.
Critics cite the gender-integrated training as one of the reasons for the slide.
For a number of years the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard had been training men and women together but did not require women to meet the same physical standards as men. Only the Marine Corps kept its tradition of separate basic training, and when the sex scandals at the Army's Aberdeen training facility broke, the way the Marines do it got new attention. Last summer, the Defense Department asked two commissions to look at what was wrong with basic training. One recommended a return to sex-segregated basic training. The other recommended better gender-integrated training.