Aspiring D.C. pot dealers challenge rejections to sell medical marijuana

they have decided not to pursue legal action. For nearly a year, the women have used their retirement savings to lease a dispensary location in Shaw, hoping to provide medical marijuana to people with glaucoma, AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis. They want to know exactly where they fell short in their months-long application bid. “We don’t want to waste their time or our time,” Rice said. “It’s confusing even to us.” The health department, which is overseeing the roll-out of the medical marijuana program, relied on a panel of experts to score each application. The agency told one applicant that much of the proposal was “adequate,” but denied it anyway. It dinged at least three of the unsuccessful applicants for not providing a sample label even though the application didn’t require one. Rice’s group asked to see its scores through a request under the District of Columbia Freedom of Information Act. But the agency refused to release the scores or other material that would shed light on the panel’s decision-making process, arguing that a final announcement has not yet been made, and that such documents contain trade secrets. The scores are also part of confidential deliberations by government officials that the city is not legally obligated to disclose, said health department spokeswoman Najma Roberts. That explanation troubles the applicants who were turned away. “I don’t understand why this is so secretive, especially for something so high-profile,” said Tom Lindenfeld, a local political consultant working with Compassion Centers, which is affiliated with an established dispensary operator in California. The two other groups that have filed appeals are the Health Company, which is led by Michael Duplessie, a Bethesda ophthalmologist, and the Free World Remedy, led by Jonathan Marlow, a competitive bass fisherman from Northern Virginia whose mother suffers from multiple sclerosis. The legal challenges are the latest wrinkle in a selection process marred by glitches from the start. The District’s regulations are among the toughest in the country, with strict limits on how many plants can be grown, how much the dispensaries can charge and who can buy it. Only people with certain chronic conditions such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis and glaucoma qualify; they are allowed two ounces in a 30-day period with a doctor’s recommendation. The city began accepting applications The health department initially rejected some applicants for minor errors, such as leaving off e-mail addresses, then later let

The medical marijuana advocacy group The Green House, LLC, meets May 4 to discuss their plans for trying to gain a license to be able to legally sell marijuana. Their initial application was rejected but the group is filing an appeal. (Jahi Chikwendiu/WASHINGTON POST)
Correction:
Johnnie Scott Rice has held a lot of titles in her life: director of constituent services, advisory neighborhood commissioner, D.C. Council candidate. But there is one title she covets that has eluded her: District pot dealer.
Rice, 71, is part of the Green House, a self-proclaimed “group of old ladies” that the city recently turned down for a license to sell medical marijuana. Three other rejected applicants, including a Bethesda eye doctor and a competitive bass fisherman, have gone to court in the past week to contest the city’s decision, said Ted O. Gest, spokesman for the D.C. attorney general’s office.
Many of those turned down have said the selection process is confusing and opaque. They contend that the D.C. Health Department did not provide clear explanations for its decisions — an accusation that city officials deny.
Rice and her partners, who include a former lingerie store owner and a social worker, are disappointed, although they have decided not to pursue legal action. For nearly a year, the women have used their retirement savings to lease a dispensary location in Shaw, hoping to provide medical marijuana to people with glaucoma, AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis. They want to know exactly where they fell short in their months-long application bid.
“We don’t want to waste their time or our time,” Rice said. “It’s confusing even to us.”
The health department, which is overseeing the roll-out of the medical marijuana program, relied on a panel of experts to score each application.
The agency told one applicant that much of the proposal was “adequate,” but denied it anyway. It dinged at least three of the unsuccessful applicants for not providing a sample label even though the application didn’t require one.
Rice’s group asked to see its scores through a request under the District of Columbia Freedom of Information Act. But the agency refused to release the scores or other material that would shed light on the panel’s decision-making process, arguing that a final announcement has not yet been made, and that such documents contain trade secrets. The scores are also part of confidential deliberations by government officials that the city is not legally obligated to disclose, said health department spokeswoman Najma Roberts.
That explanation troubles the applicants who were turned away.
“I don’t understand why this is so secretive, especially for something so high-profile,” said Tom Lindenfeld, a local political consultant working with Compassion Centers, which is affiliated with an established dispensary operator in California.
The two other groups that have filed appeals are the Health Company, which is led by Michael Duplessie, a Bethesda ophthalmologist, and the Free World Remedy, led by Jonathan Marlow, a competitive bass fisherman from Northern Virginia whose mother suffers from multiple sclerosis.
The legal challenges are the latest wrinkle in a selection process marred by glitches from the start.
Since passing a medical marijuana law in 2010, the District has taken a go-slow approach in an effort to avoid some of the mistakes that have been made in other jurisdictions, such as Colorado and California, where critics say medical marijuana has become little more than legalized drug dealing.
The District’s regulations are among the toughest in the country, with strict limits on how many plants can be grown, how much the dispensaries can charge and who can buy it. Only people with certain chronic conditions such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis and glaucoma qualify; they are allowed two ounces in a 30-day period with a doctor’s recommendation.
The city began accepting applications
The health department initially rejected some applicants for minor errors, such as leaving off e-mail addresses, then later let them back in. Officials also rejected Duplessie’s application to operate a cultivation center because it was 90 minutes late — even though an evacuation of the agency’s offices was partly to blame.
The agency was supposed to announce the dispensary licensees this spring but pushed the date back to June, forcing some of the applicants, including Rice’s group, to spend additional money to continue leasing space.
The health department last month informed the 17 aspiring pot retailers which of them were still in the running. Only four made it through, and they must win approval from their local advisory neighborhood commissions.
The four that made it: Herbal Alternatives, which is looking to open a dispensary near 20th and M streets NW; Metropolitan Wellness Center Corporation, which is eyeing a location along Barracks Row on Capitol Hill by a fast-food restaurant and a tattoo parlor; Takoma Wellness Center, which plans to open near the Takoma Metro station; and VentureForth LLC, which has a site by O and North Capitol streets NW.
So far, many of the groups that the city has tapped to grow and to sell medical marijuana have mainly been established pot dispensaries and cultivators from other parts of the country, including Abatin Wellness Center of Sacramento, the brainchild of former talk-show host Montel Williams.
Local officials, including D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large), had hoped for more local representation. The local players who have made the cut for either a dispensary or cultivation license are retired Takoma Park rabbi Jeffrey Kahn and his wife, Stephanie; financier Corey Barnette; and Capitol Hill liquor store owners Rick and Jon Genderson.
Deep roots in the city were a big part of the pitch that Rice, a third-generation Washingtonian, made at community gatherings in Shaw, where their dispensary was to be located, on the same block as social-service agency Bread for the City.
Rice grew up in Trinidad, the daughter of a bricklayer, and has been a longtime fixture on the D.C. political scene. She has run for office, worked as an aide to Catania and served as an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Ward 7 for 10 years. She is also an insulin-dependent diabetic, has glaucoma and can no longer drive at night. Not long after the D.C. Council made medical marijuana legal, she heard from friends in California that cannabis could help people with glaucoma.
“It made me think about this,” she said. “If this medicine can improve these conditions in me, why not?”
Unbeknownst to her, Francine Levinson, 61, was also thinking about applying for a license. Levinson has started businesses before. She got into banking after she discovered she couldn’t get a loan without her husband or her father signing for her. She became a founding member of the First Women’s Bank of Maryland. Levinson later ran a lingerie store for nine years. She and Rice have been friends for years, but they didn’t tell each other right away about their interest in pursuing a medical marijuana dispensary license.
“Everybody was so timid about it,” Rice said.
After a mutual friend clued both of them in, the two decided to partner up and even considered naming the business “Frankie and Johnnie,” a reference to the classic song, until Levinson’s daughter, Stephanie Mantelmacher, 46, said, “no one is going to know what that means.” Seeing that her input might come in handy, Mantelmacher, a former executive with XM Satellite Radio, joined the group. Leigh A. Slaughter, 58, a lawyer and real estate agent, and former Whitman-Walker Clinic official Patricia Hawkins, 71, filled out the team.
If the city opens up the process again, Rice said, they would consider making another attempt. Until then, they can only imagine what might have been.
The people who will be coming to buy medical marijuana “don’t want to see some young kids selling dope,” she said. “Most of the clientele is going to look like us. We are the face of the users of medical marijuana.”
shina@washpost.com
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Issues with US military recruitment

A current issue with US military recruitment is the 2016 suspension of the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI), a recruitment program for non-permanent residents with high-demand skills from medicine to languages. Critics state that America has not kept its promise of service in exchange for US citizenship and that scrutiny of immigrants' background checks are unfairly keeping them from serving. As more women enlist, their roles in the US military are ever evolving as policies change allowing them to serve in combat roles.  A loss of trade-related jobs is increasing the number of applicants for US military recruiters. Documents discussing legal action directly attributed to a US President (such as Trump) are not relevant.

Find an article addressing this question on military policies.

How the Pentagon ending its deal with immigrant recruits could hurt the military

Staff Sgt. Eteru Ane, of American Samoa, takes an oath of allegiance to become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2007 at Logistical Support Area Anaconda, Iraq. American Samoa is the only U.S. territory where citizenship is not granted at birth. (U.S. Army)
The Washington Post reported last month that the Pentagon has recommended ending a program that gives foreign-born troops with medical and language skills leverage in gaining citizenship. Congress has weighed in since then, and some recruits under threat of deportation have sought preemptive refuge.
Advocates, defense analysts and the military’s own assessments of the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest program point to an initiative that, when working as designed, benefits national security, reduces recruitment and training costs, and provides a steady stream of troops.
But internal discussions point to concerns over security risks and even internal mismanagement as a reason to scuttle the program that has minted 10,400 troops since its implementation in 2009. The Pentagon has declined to comment on the program’s future, citing a host of related lawsuits.
Ending the program could produce some unintended consequences that affect the military’s ability to executes its missions around the world. Here are a few:
Valuable use within Special Operations Command
Special Operations Command, which specializes in missions to train and advise foreign militaries and militias, has been a vocal supporter of the program since its onset. The command was heavily involved in creating the program in 2008, and personnel with especially crucial skills are prioritized for Special Operations assignments, a Pentagon overview of the program said.
Then Sgt. Saral K. Shrestha, a Nepalese native and MAVNI recruit, was tapped by the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group for his fluency in Urdu on a deployment to Afghanistan. He would later win the Army’s soldier of the year competition in 2012.
In 2013, then Sgt. Saral K. Shrestha, a Nepalese native and Military Accessions Vital to National Interest recruit, described what it was like coming to Nebraska from Nepal and receiving U.S. citizenship.
Special operators spend time and resources to groom culturally attuned translators to become their eyes and ears in often hostile environments, where trust can mean the difference between mission success and failure, said Paul Scharre, the director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.
Linguists in the program cut through the middlemen, Scharre said.
Scharre served in Afghanistan as an Army Ranger and worked with both local translators and Afghan-born contractors who lived for years in the United States. While he has not worked with MAVNI program recruits specifically, he said translators with American insight are “far and away” the most valuable on the battlefield.
“They can bridge cultural divides and explain why locals are behaving in a certain way that U.S. troops can understand,” Scharre said, describing one translator born in Afghanistan who had lived in San Francisco for many years.
An Air Force Special Operations information page listing vital languages overlaps with global military operations. Slots in fiscal years 2015 and 2016 for French, Arabic, Korean, Polish, Swahili and Somali are listed as filled, dovetailing with ongoing missions against the Islamic State and reinforcing NATO allies against mounting Russian aggression.
The need for native speakers of Dari, another language spoken in Afghanistan — where Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will soon unveil a new strategy for the nearly 16-year old war — is listed as unfilled.
Dental clearances for deployment
Dental work is not typically in the national security conversation. But it’s among a checklist of health-related issues all troops must pass to receive orders for combat deployments, and physician shortages have the potential to affect the amount of troops the military can send to war.
The MAVNI program filled an immediate need addressing vacancies in the Army Reserve Dental Corps, with nearly half of empty slots filled the first year of the program in 2009, said Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer who led the program’s design and implementation.
Now two-thirds of all Army Reserve dentists are program recruits, according to NPR, which points to a quiet reliance on a pipeline of trained medical professionals with one big incentive to sign up that U.S.-born recruits do not need: citizenship.
Personnel funds dipping into operations
While program recruits are a fraction of the military’s roughly 2.2 million active troops and reservists, the potential of losing access to their highly specialized skills could have outsize security consequences, said Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Rising personnel costs means it is generally more expensive to recruit new troops than to retain those already in service. Recruitment of U.S. citizens with critical skills is particularly difficult and expensive when competing with the private sector, Harrison said.
“If you’re going to avoid skills shortfalls, it might mean siphoning resources from other accounts,” Harrison said.
“The Defense Department will often pull money out of operations and maintenance accounts” to cover personnel costs, he said, leaving, for instance, less funds for replenishing stocks of munitions drained from counter-Islamic State operations and repairing vehicles damaged in combat.
Program recruits have also been a reliable way to inject motivated troops into the force. The Pentagon’s review of the program found the recruits have a lower attrition rate than U.S.-born service members, which would save the military recruiting funds down the road.
And linguists who stay in uniform would blunt costs of finding third-party translators, Harrison said.
“When you lose a linguist, you end up buying them back at a higher rate through a contractor,” he said.
The MAVNI program has not always worked as intended. The program, which is renewed on a yearly basis, has been suspended several times since 2009 for security reviews and internal questions about its efficiency.
Pentagon reviews of the program point to dissatisfaction with some recruits over their specialties being underutilized, or by being placed into jobs unrelated to their skills.
But that’s an agencywide issue, Scharre said.
“The military has a problem of thinking of people as interchangeable cogs rather than looking at individual skill sets,” he said.
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Issues with US military recruitment

The Army is trying to find criminal conduct among immigrant recruits, email shows

This story has been updated. Read more:

The lawsuits and public pressure made it clear: The Army had a problem.
In August, it reversed its decision to expel dozens of immigrant recruits who were seeking expedited citizenship by serving in the U.S. military.
But days before, on Aug. 13, a military intelligence unit asked Army Reserve attorneys to scrutinize its completed security screening packets for admissions of potential crimes by immigrant recruits, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.
The email is written in a who, what, when, where, why format. The “why” says: "[Immigrant recruits] are currently suing the federal government claiming they were wrongfully discharged from the Army.”
Critics say the request appears to be retribution for the lawsuits that helped overturn dozens of dismissals and was intended to legitimize a process beset with legal and bureaucratic problems that have been blamed internally for draining vast resources.
“Instead of a good-faith attempt to give due process, it’s done in bad faith,” Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer and immigration attorney, told The Post on Tuesday.
The Pentagon acknowledged the email but said the request was not designed to discharge immigrant recruits or charge them with crimes.
Air Force Maj. Carla Gleason, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in a statement that “the request for personnel to assist in the review was to ensure we were following federal guidelines and to ensure the packages were complete and accurate given the ongoing MAVNI litigation.”
Gleason provided her statement on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, she said the reviews were “determined to be unnecessary” two days after initial coordination and the packets were diverted back to Army intelligence officials “for reporting to other agencies.”
The Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program, or MAVNI, promises expedited citizenship for badly needed language and medical skills. More than 10,400 immigrants entered the force through the program since 2009, when it was implemented by Stock. It was shuttered last year.
The August email followed a tumultuous summer where the Army responded to lawsuits by halting the discharge of recruits while the Pentagon figured out an orderly and fair screening process. Gleason said last month that the Pentagon wants to treat recruits with “dignity and respect.”
An unknown number of recruits and reservists have been kicked out after their enlistment because of problems in their counterintelligence screening process — which typically occurs after recruits clear background checks through FBI and police databases, Stock said.
The Pentagon has defended the stricter screening measures introduced in 2016, saying 20 MAVNIs have been investigated for national security concerns in the past five years. It will not say if any of those investigations led to charges or action.
But what has emerged in recent months is a mosaic of seemingly innocuous reasons for dismissals or for reasons outside a recruit’s control. Many reasons for discharges are connected to their foreign backgrounds — which the Pentagon desired to harness in the first place.
The Army has turned immigrants away for holding foreign investments, sending money to parents or communicating with relatives who work in foreign governments, said Stock, who has reviewed declassified reports. Others were discharged because another agency failed to provide documents for screeners in time for an interview, she added.
Now, following questions and a lawsuit over the process, it appears screeners looked to uncover more substantial issues.
The 902nd Military Intelligence Group at Fort Meade, Md., which has conducted the counterintelligence screenings, asked Army Reserve attorneys to help “review [immigrant recruit] packets to determine whether the applicants admitted to or provided information about a crime that requires reporting to law enforcement,” the email says.
The counterintelligence screening is an hours-long interview where recruits are asked about their foreign activities before their arrival in the United States, their relatives and employment history, and loyalty to America.
At least three dozen attorneys were asked to help review screenings, according to an Army legal official who received the email. A majority of those attorneys do not practice immigration law in private practice or in the government, the official told The Post.
“It looks like additional screening will potentially be useful to the Army in defending its actions in civil litigation,” said the official, who declined to provide a name to speak candidly.
Gleason did not answer questions about whether the request for help evaluating screening packets raised questions about the review process, nor a question asking if screeners were directed to focus on immigration-related issues to later forward to other agencies.
The results are not shared with recruits and are only available if they make public records requests. One recruit, a Chinese PhD student, was turned away because a screener with no medical experience said he had Asperger’s syndrome — on the basis that he once observed a family member with autism, The Post previously reported.
Stock said she has reviewed about 30 declassified screening packets. Recruits have shared them with her when asking for help.
“They don’t have the bureaucratic will to fix this. They just want to get this problem over with,” Stock said of the Pentagon. “The way you get rid of the problem is you get rid of the people.”
This story has been updated.
Read more:
Foreign-born recruits, promised citizenship by the Pentagon, flee the country to avoid deportation
How the Pentagon ending its deal with immigrant recruits could hurt the military


Issues with US military recruitment

What do military service members think about diversity — especially gender diversity — in their ranks?

Following a Supreme Court decision in January, the Pentagon confirmed April 15 that it would effectively ban transgender people from attending the U.S. Naval Academy and other service academies starting in the fall of 2020.
We wanted to examine what Naval Academy midshipmen think about diversity in general and about gender nonconformity in particular.
Even though there has been plenty of debate within the U.S. military about transgender service, it is notoriously difficult to discern attitudes on contentious issues through direct survey questions, so we carried out survey experiments at the Naval Academy to investigate these questions. We found that the midshipmen agree there is value in having a military that is racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse. However, they weren’t as sure about gender diversity.
Midshipmen are indifferent toward female applicants for admission and slightly positive toward female faculty candidates. But attitudes toward gender-non-binary applicants are strongly negative.
How we did our research
As we explain in our forthcoming article in Armed Forces & Society, we used randomized conjoint analysis. Here’s how it works: We gave participants pairs of hypothetical applicants for admission as midshipmen or Naval Academy faculty. Each applicant profile was made up of a bundle of personal qualities, accomplishments and demographics.
On race and ethnicity, the applicants were described as either black, white, Asian, Native American or Hispanic. On gender, most were described either as men or women, but we also included applicants whose gender was “non-binary.”
Respondents’ choices from among thousands of paired comparisons allowed us to estimate their relative preferences on characteristics related to diversity and those that are not. This method allows researchers to assess attitudes on sensitive topics without alerting participants what our focus is.
We administered two experiments at the Naval Academy in the winter of 2018, one measuring attitudes on student admissions and the other on faculty recruitment — 1,154 midshipmen, or 26 percent of all those enrolled, participated. We conducted similar experiments at six other universities, allowing us to compare attitudes at the Naval Academy with those at civilian institutions.
Midshipmen’s attitudes are pretty similar to those of college students
Midshipmen strongly favor applicants from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and moderately favor members of traditionally underrepresented racial or ethnic groups. However, midshipmen express a powerful preference against gender-non-binary applicants and faculty candidates — which we didn’t find at other colleges.
Midshipmen favor racial and economic diversity.
The strongest factors driving selection have to do with scholarly achievement — standardized test scores and high school grades for admissions, and teaching and research records for faculty — but midshipmen prefer members of traditionally underrepresented racial or ethnic groups in both admissions and faculty recruitment. For admission to the Naval Academy, they favor first-generation applicants and applicants from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
Here’s how that breaks down. When asked which candidates they would admit, our respondents were five percentage points more likely to admit a black applicant and three percentage points more likely to select a Native American than one who is white. They felt similarly about hiring faculty, with moderate preferences of three to four percentage points for black, Hispanic and Native American candidates over whites.
Meanwhile, midshipmen were 12 percentage points less likely to select an applicant whose family’s income is in the nation’s top income percentile than someone whose family income was at the median. And they were five percentage points more likely to select a first-generation applicant than one whose parents attended college.
Those preferences were pretty consistent across demographic subgroups. White and nonwhite midshipmen and midshipmen from families with higher or lower incomes felt roughly the same. Most important, no cohort disfavored applicants from traditionally underrepresented racial or ethnic groups or disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
Midshipmen strongly disfavor gender-non-binary applicants and faculty candidates.
Attitudes toward gender at the Naval Academy are much different than at other schools. Most college students slightly favor female and non-binary applicants over men. At the academy, a female applicant is just as likely as a man to be selected, all things being equal, and midshipmen weakly prefer women to men for faculty slots. But a gender-non-binary applicant was less likely to be selected than a male applicant — by 20 percentage points for admission and 13 percentage points for a faculty slot.
That varied by demographic group. Whites more strongly disfavored female and gender-non-binary applicants than nonwhites did. And men were more likely to disfavor female and gender-non-binary applicants than women.
Gender nonconformity challenges the military hierarchy.
Midshipmen favor socioeconomic and racial or ethnic diversity in admissions and faculty hires. So why are their attitudes toward gender-non-binary individuals so different?
Mixed signals from the top levels of leadership could play a role. Until recently, federal guidelines banned intersex and gender-nonconforming individuals in the military because of supposed medical risks. In June 2016, the Obama administration prohibited the armed forces from involuntarily separating people who came out as transgender. President Trump reversed course on July 26, 2017, through multiple tweets in which he announced he would ban transgender people from the military.
Historically, when signals from the top are clear, attitudes in the officer ranks follow. Naval Academy attitudes toward women were initially skeptical but shifted quickly in favor after women first matriculated in the 1970s. Attitudes toward gay and lesbian service members shifted in favor after the “don’t ask, don’t tell” debates of the 1990s subsided.
The debate over transgender people in the military is relatively new and unfamiliar, and institutional disagreements may foster reservations among midshipmen. If the courts and top civilian and military leaders were to line up, attitudes among officers in training would probably follow. However, recent events suggest that if signals from the top do line up, they most certainly will be against transgender acceptance.
John M. Carey is the Wentworth Professor in the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College.
Yusaku Horiuchi is professor of government and the Mitsui Professor of Japanese Studies at Dartmouth College.
John Polga-Hecimovich is assistant professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy.
The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of or endorsement by the United States Naval Academy, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.


Issues with US military recruitment

End of women-in-conflict ban inspires some to enlist

Female soldiers train on a firing range in Fort Campbell, Ky., in September 2012. (Mark Humphrey/AP)
While some politicians have yet to come to terms with the women-in-combat issue, a few women have already made up their minds. They’re enlisting ASAP.
In the hours after the Pentagon announced that women could soon serve in gender-segregated combat roles, dozens of young women tweeted or Facebooked their plans to followers. Kimberly Munzinger, who left the Marines when she couldn’t become a field artillerist, might join again after she wraps up her degree. Lily Bolourian, who had planned to go to law school, called a reservist friend to meet for coffee and talk about enlisting.
“I had never even thought about the military before,” Bolourian said. “But I feel a call to serve now. We finally have equality, and I want to be a part of that history.”
Bolourian doesn’t look like your average recruit: She’s petite at 5’2” and giggles often when she speaks. She also doesn’t come from a military family. Her parents avoided Iran’s compulsory service requirement when they emigrated to the United States before the Iranian revolution, and they hoped their daughter would become an astronaut or engineer.
But Bolourian, who has organized abortion protests and served as the women’s outreach coordinator for Obama’s D.C. campaign, sees the change as a civil rights issue on par with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
“Women have fought for this for years,” she said. “I never thought I’d see it by the time I’m 22.”
Kimberly Munzinger never thought she’d see the day, either. A senior speech pathology major at Eastern Michigan University, Munzinger spent four years flying drones for the Marines before she abandoned her dream of shooting “big guns.”
“WOMEN ARE FINALLY ALLOWED IN COMBAT!!!” She tweeted on Jan. 23, immediately after the Pentagon announcement. “We should have never been [expletive] banned in the 1st place. Give me my enlist papers.”
In his statement Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta did not forecast how the change could impact recruitment, if at all. But a 2012 study on the controversial repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” found no impact on unit recruitment or retention.
As many as 230,000 new jobs could open to women, many of them in Army and Marine infantry units. Currently women make up 15 percent of the U.S. military.
“My being a female never harmed a flight mission I directed,” Mulzinger said. “I’ve heard people say that women have different hygiene habits, or they’re not strong enough. But there are some men who can’t lift 300 pounds.”
Mulzinger herself lifts 325.


Issues with US military recruitment

The Army kicked out dozens of immigrant recruits. Now it’s allowing them back amid a legal battle.

Read more: Pentagon’s chief spokeswoman is under investigation for allegedly mistreating employees

The Army on Monday reinstated dozens of immigrant reservists who sought citizenship through military enlistment, reversing a decision that has affected more than a hundred foreign-born recruits amid a lawsuit contending some dismissals were unfair and given without cause.
The decision puts the recruits back on a path of expedited citizenship the military has promised in exchange for crucial language and medical skills. Until recently, these soldiers could become American citizens within months of entering training, significantly faster than the naturalization process outside the military.
The Army’s reversal is the latest concession in a barrage of court filings that claim the recent discharge of immigrant recruits violated Army policy and potentially violated due process guaranteed in the Constitution. Critics of the Pentagon’s handling of the program say it points to serious problems with how the military vets its foreign recruits.
Army officials said in a Monday court filing that six reservists involved in a lawsuit had their discharges revoked, along with 32 reservists whose dismissals were halted. A total of 149 cases are being reviewed, the Army said.
More than 10,000 immigrants have entered the military since 2009 through the program, which sought to enlist immigrants with skills the Pentagon has said are especially vital to military missions.
An Associated Press report from July said the Army had begun discharging dozens of immigrant recruits, prompting questions over its decisions and process.
That led to a July 20 memo ordering a halt to discharges of immigrants who enlisted in the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program, to evaluate its administrative process for separation. Days before the memo, the Army reversed the discharge of Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian reservist who first brought suit against the Army. His attorneys declined to comment.
The reinstatement of dozens of recruits and the broader look at 149 total cases is an outcropping of that review, Pentagon spokeswoman Air Force Maj. Carla Gleason told The Washington Post on Tuesday.
Security concerns have driven the implementation of complicated and thorough vetting, Gleason said, which scrutinizes immigrants far more than U.S.-born troops. She has previously said 20 MAVNI recruits have been investigated for national security risks since 2013 but has not said if any of those probes led to charges or arrests.
The new screening process implemented in September 2016, along with broad security concerns, led the Pentagon to shutter the program in December.
But the Army and the Pentagon want the process to be above board and fair for recruits still in the pipeline, Gleason said. Recruits signed enlistment contracts. Because of that, she noted, the military “wants to treat you with dignity and respect.”
Court filings and attorneys for immigrant recruits paint a different picture of how the military has handled the process.
Margaret Stock, who helped implement MAVNI when she was an Army officer and is now an immigration lawyer, said she has reviewed or been told first hand about 20 to 30 counterintelligence review summaries obtained by recruits who filed Freedom of Information Act requests.
She describes reviews riddled with errors and leaps of logic.
A common reason to weed out non-citizen recruits is the existence of foreign relatives or sending money to relatives in other countries — a fairly common reality for immigrants.
“They set up a system designed to fail,” Stock told The Post.
One Chinese recruit and PhD candidate studying physics was denied enlistment after an Army counterintelligence screener said he had trouble with social interactions and may have signs of “high functioning Asperger’s,” according to a document reviewed by The Post.
The recruit had no mental health diagnosis and hadn’t heard of the condition before, Stock said. The screener wrote after an interview that he had no medical expertise beyond observing a family member with autism.
The recruit, who had enlisted in August 2016 and was told he failed the security review in June, had received no explanation from his recruiter and only obtained his screening summary from a FOIA request.
In a letter, his recruiter said he was among the most disciplined recruits under his supervision, Stock said.
Now his future as a citizen and soldier are in doubt. The Army did not immediately return comment about its screening policies.
Other recruits have seen their lives upended by the Pentagon’s handling of the MAVNI program.
More than 1,000 recruits had to wait so long for their checks to be finished that they lost lawful immigration status, exposing them to potential deportation, the Pentagon said in a memo obtained by The Post last summer.
Some fled or sought asylum to avoid returning to countries where they face persecution or that forbid foreign military service, including one Iraqi-born recruit who fled to Canada out of fear that the Islamic State would assassinate him if he were deported.
In other instances, some enlistment contracts were canceled nationwide in an apparent and broad misunderstanding of rules that allowed recruits to wait an additional year for the military to finish the checks. Some Army recruiters reinstated contracts for immigrants shortly after receiving inquiries from The Post in the fall.
Read more:
‘Fat Leonard’ scandal grows with indictment of three more retired Navy officials
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Issues with US military recruitment

Air Force struggles to keep pace with explosion in the use of combat drones

 An Air Force pilot conducts a training flight at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base, which oversees drone operations overseas. (Missy Ryan/The Washington Post)
CREECH AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. —
“Yeah, it looks like a gun,” says an American drone pilot, peering into a gray-tone screen in a darkened, distant trailer.
The pilot, who Air Force officials asked be identified only as Capt. Bert, is talking to ground headquarters through a headset. He then counts off the half-minute until one of the drone’s Hellfire missiles strikes its target, throwing the man to the ground with a flash of light.
The ground controller’s voice comes back in a static burst. “Confirmed: enemy killed in action.”
But this target is not a suspected militant on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. He’s a U.S. airman, role-playing in the desert outside Las Vegas, and the missile strike was a training simulation at the Nevada air base that coordinates U.S. drone flight overseas.
Air Force officials hope to provide more training missions like this for drone operators as the U.S. military cuts back the pace of drone operations overseas. They say increased training for new and existing pilots, along with steps to improve pilot recruitment and retention, is crucial to maintaining the effectiveness of an overstressed force and would help the Air Force meet future demand for remotely piloted flight.
The plan to reduce drone capacity to a maximum of 60 simultaneous combat flights by this fall, which the Air Force made public this spring, is the centerpiece of an effort to make the pace of Air Force drone operations more sustainable, and to help heal the stresses caused by a decade of frenetic expansion.
But with renewed operations in Iraq against the Islamic State, a new campaign of strikes against the group in Syria and continued operations in Afghanistan, the demand for unmanned aircraft’s surveillance and combat powers is higher than ever.
Col. James “Cliffy” Cluff, the top Air Force commander for remotely piloted aircraft, said the service had expected demand for drone flights to fall off as the United States wrapped up its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That plan “was overcome by the enemy,” he told reporters in a rare media visit to Creech Air Force Base, where Cluff commands 3,000 pilots and support personnel. Since last summer’s dramatic advances by Islamic State militants, U.S. aircraft have conducted 3,600 strikes in Iraq and Syria, many of them conducted by unmanned planes.
The remotely piloted aircraft program burst into action in the decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2001, the Air Force was only capable of keeping two drones flying combat missions at a time. Behind every drone in the air conducting a combat air patrol, there are hundreds of personnel required to maintain active and reserve aircraft and amass intelligence and even special teams deployed overseas dedicated to takeoff and landing of aircraft.
By 2010, during President Obama’s surge of troops to Afghanistan, the program’s flight capacity had reached 39. It peaked at 65 in 2014.
The growth has complicated challenges the Air Force has faced in fielding and retaining pilots for the program, which has often been seen by pilots as an unattractive alternative to piloting manned aircraft. Today, the Air Force needs to produce 300 new drone pilots a year. Because of recruitment and training constraints, it is only producing 180.The Air Force also loses 240 drone pilots each year as airmen return to other duties or they leave the service altogether.
The 500 pilots and 500 sensor operators at Creech, nestled among bare hillsides an hour’s drive from Las Vegas, have pushed themselves hard in recent years to keep pace with the demands of overseas operations. While they typically work shifts of at least eight flight hours, five days on and then two to three days off, they are often called in for a sixth consecutive day because of personnel shortages.
The strains of that pace are “why we’re attacking the manning problem today.” As commander of Creech, Cluff is in the odd position of touting the effectiveness of the skills of the airmen of his 432nd Wing and 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing and their arsenal of more than 130 Predator, Reaper and Sentinel aircraft while also pushing for recognition that the pace of their operations must be eased.
Earlier this year, the Air Force announced plans to address gaps in drone pilots, including larger retention bonuses and greater use of reservists, National Guard personnel and contractors.
A reduction in U.S. drone flights comes as other nations seek to accelerate their own unmanned flight programs, which has the potential to ease the future burden to U.S. operations. The United States is also moving to allow the sale of lethal American drone technology to certain allies.
Kelley Sayler, an associate fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said the reduction in flight capacity would “necessarily degrade” U.S. intelligence capabilities.
In the long run, she said, the Air Force must increase promotions and other opportunities available to drone pilots and consider making the job accessible to enlisted personnel or others with a lesser level of training.
“If the Air Force simply maintains its current course, we’re likely to see continued problems with retention, which could in turn result in further reductions in [flight capacity] and negatively impact future military operations,” she said.
The job is made personal for Shantae, a sensor operator who like other personnel asked to be identified only by her rank and first name.
The daughter of an active duty Marine, the senior airman takes pride in a mission she sees as primarily about keeping American personnel safe overseas. Air Force officials said the vast majority of unmanned flight hours are dedicated to surveillance, including watching over American troops as they conduct operations overseas. But she acknowledged that events on the battlefield sometimes “weigh heavy on you.”
The flight demands are made more striking by the fact that drone operators, like a small number of U.S. military personnel stationed in the United States, are “deployed in place.” While they may take part in combat operations during the day, most airmen get into their cars after their shifts conclude and make the 50-minute drive back to Las Vegas, with its lights and revelry.
“Every single day this base is at war,” Cluff said.
While the dissonance of remote warfare is real, a 2012 survey showed that what drone operators struggled with the most were familiar challenges: the demands of shift work, long hours, lack of sleep and inadequate staffing.
To address both kinds of stress, in 2011 the base stood up a “human performance team” including experts in air physiology, psychology and flight medicine, and chaplains, all of whom have top-level security clearances.
The Air Force is now trying to replicate the team elsewhere, officials at the base said.
In 2014 alone, officials at the base said, they made 13 “suicide saves,” or interventions with service members who were contemplating suicide. The suicide rate is no higher among drone personnel than other Air Force personnel.
While in other parts of the Air Force medical personnel might focus on training pilots on coping with high altitudes, those who operate unmanned aircraft must instead find ways to counteract the fatigue associated with long shifts sitting in trailers, their eyes glued to screens. Maj. Maria Elena Gomez-Mejia, who focuses on operational physiology, said many airmen struggled to adjust to regular changing work schedules that could keep them at Creech all or part of the night.
Over time, Air Force officials also hope to upgrade equipment in ways that will lessen the toll of long pilot hours. Now, pilots and their sensor operators must contend with a crowded array of 14 different screens, which provide information on everything from the aircraft’s position and course to area topography. To communicate with personnel on the ground or in the air, they can use radio, online chat or phone. The cluttered arrangement has not changed significantly in 15 years, Col. Matthew Finnegan said.
A next-generation cockpit now under development will merge those screens and streamline communications.


Issues with US military recruitment

Flournoy to Trump: Let women serve in combat roles

profound impacts — certainly for morale, certainly for retention of women who are looking for opportunities … and it will probably also impact recruiting,” Michèle Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy during President Obama’s first term, said Monday at an event at the Aspen Institute. Trump has said he would follow the recommendations of military leaders on a range of military personnel policies. But it’s not clear what this will mean for last December’s decision to open up all combat roles to women who meet fixed standards and last July’s move to allow transgender soldiers to serve openly and receive related medical coverage. “We have a politically correct military, and it’s getting more and more politically correct every day,” Trump said at a campaign event in October. “Some of the things that they’re asking you to do and be politically correct about are ridiculous.” Flournoy, who was widely expected to be named as the first female defense secretary if Clinton had won, said the Trump team should look at all of the research, develop a deeper understanding of the issue and then make decisions based on what the actual implications would be of rolling back military personnel reforms, rather than treating it as a political issue. “I would hope the new administration would take a fact-based, data-informed approach to this issue, understand it for all of its potential implications and ultimately choose to stay on the trajectory that’s been set by a couple of administrations now,” she said. Setting standards and then allowing members of the military to try to meet those standards regardless of gender or gender identity is the right approach socially and militarily, she argued. “Ultimately, having a military that is a truly a meritocracy, that has the diversity that looks like America, that leverages all our strengths across the full range of human capital and people who are willing to serve, that’s in our interest as a nation,” she said. “We reject the use of the military as a platform for social experimentation and will not accept or continue attempts to undermine military priorities and mission readiness,” the platform states. “Military readiness should not be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.” The incoming Trump administration is pledging to strengthen and expand the size of the U.S. military, but it risks weakening that very effort by pushing away women who want to fight.

President-elect Donald Trump. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump called the Obama administration’s move to open combat fighting roles to women in the military “politically correct” and said he might reverse the policy. On Monday, the woman who might have been Hillary Clinton’s defense secretary called on him to preserve options for women who serve in uniform.
“If we reverse direction, it will very likely have very profound impacts — certainly for morale, certainly for retention of women who are looking for opportunities … and it will probably also impact recruiting,” Michèle Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy during President Obama’s first term, said Monday at an event at the Aspen Institute.
Trump has said he would follow the recommendations of military leaders on a range of military personnel policies. But it’s not clear what this will mean for last December’s decision to open up all combat roles to women who meet fixed standards and last July’s move to allow transgender soldiers to serve openly and receive related medical coverage.
“We have a politically correct military, and it’s getting more and more politically correct every day,” Trump said at a campaign event in October. “Some of the things that they’re asking you to do and be politically correct about are ridiculous.”
In September, Trump defended a 2013 tweet in which he seemed to blame gender integration in the military for a rise in sexual assaults. “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military — only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” Trump tweeted.
Flournoy, who was widely expected to be named as the first female defense secretary if Clinton had won, said the Trump team should look at all of the research, develop a deeper understanding of the issue and then make decisions based on what the actual implications would be of rolling back military personnel reforms, rather than treating it as a political issue.
“I would hope the new administration would take a fact-based, data-informed approach to this issue, understand it for all of its potential implications and ultimately choose to stay on the trajectory that’s been set by a couple of administrations now,” she said.
Setting standards and then allowing members of the military to try to meet those standards regardless of gender or gender identity is the right approach socially and militarily, she argued.
“Ultimately, having a military that is a truly a meritocracy, that has the diversity that looks like America, that leverages all our strengths across the full range of human capital and people who are willing to serve, that’s in our interest as a nation,” she said.
If Trump does decide the new policy based on the views of the uniformed military leadership, the current reforms could very well be reversed. According to reports, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, opposed the decision to allow women to serve in combat roles and tried to exempt his service, the Marine Corps, from the policy.
The GOP platform explicitly calls for keeping women out of combat units and infantry battalions and proposes a review of the Obama administration’s “ideology based personnel policies.”
“We reject the use of the military as a platform for social experimentation and will not accept or continue attempts to undermine military priorities and mission readiness,” the platform states. “Military readiness should not be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.”
The incoming Trump administration is pledging to strengthen and expand the size of the U.S. military, but it risks weakening that very effort by pushing away women who want to fight.


Issues with US military recruitment

Army suspends discharges of foreign-born recruits from citizenship program

The Army is suspending discharges of foreign-born recruits who enlisted as part of a special military program that put them on the path to U.S. citizenship, following lawsuits by soldiers who say they have been expelled unfairly and without explanation.
In a July 20 memo, a top Army personnel official ordered the service to “suspend processing of all involuntary separation actions” for individuals in the program and ordered a review of the discharge procedures for affected soldiers by Aug. 15.
Marshall M. Williams, acting assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, also asked the Army deputy chief of staff in charge of personnel to recommend whether additional guidance should be issued regarding the discharge procedures for individuals who enlisted through the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program (MAVNI).
The existence of the memo, which emerged in a court proceeding, was first reported Thursday by the Associated Press.
The Army’s decision to halt the discharges temporarily comes amid a raft of legal actions by soldiers who enlisted through the program and have now been discharged, potentially complicating their promised path to citizenship.
The service issued the July 20 memo days after reversing its decision to discharge Lucas Calixto, a 28-year-old reservist from Brazil, who entered the military through the program and sued the Pentagon because he faced an uncertain future in the United States owing to his separation.
The decision is the latest controversy surrounding a pilot program that the Pentagon established in 2008 offering expedited American citizenship for foreign-born recruits with highly desired language and medical skills. More than 10,000 recruits have enlisted in the U.S. military through the program, in some cases obtaining citizenship by the end of their basic training.
It wasn’t clear if the Army suspension would lead to fewer MAVNI recruits being discharged in the future.
The Pentagon suspended the program in 2016 after judging that its procedures presented an unacceptable risk of insider threats including espionage and terrorism. The department ordered that those service members who enlisted through the program be subjected to enhanced security screening — a procedure that would be impossible for many of them to pass.
An increasing number of service members in the program have been receiving discharge orders since then. They have argued in court filings that they haven’t received proper explanations about why they are being pushed out or opportunities to appeal the decisions.
Cynthia O. Smith, a spokeswoman for the Army, said in a statement that the service had suspended discharges of individuals recruited through the program “in order to conduct a thorough review of the administrative separation process.”
Smith added, “We continue to abide by all requirements to include completing a thorough background investigation on all MAVNI applicants.”
Maj. Carla Gleason, a Pentagon spokesperson, said the required security screening can be difficult and time-consuming for MAVNI recruits because they are foreign nationals and the military has a limited ability to verify information in the individual’s home country.
Margaret Stock, a lawyer and retired lieutenant colonel in the military police, who helped create the program, said she believed the Army memo was a reaction to Calixto’s lawsuit and “an admission by the Army that they are violating the soldiers’ rights.”
“It violates Army regulations to discharge them without telling them why they are being discharged,” Stock said. She said the program had been designed to recruit qualified immigrants and now the Pentagon was expelling them in some cases for having foreign relatives.
“It’s clear to me that they just want to get rid of people — and it looks like a good clean excuse to get rid of people to make it look like they failed a background check,” Stock said.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last year that the Pentagon would like to find a way to save the program.
paul.sonne@washpost.com


Issues with US military recruitment

Foreign-born recruits, promised citizenship by the Pentagon, flee the country to avoid deportation

U.S. troops are sworn in as naturalized citizens on Nov. 2, 2012, at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.<br />(State Department)
Frustrated by delayed promises of citizenship from the U.S. military, and in fear of the Islamic State if he were deported back to Iraq, Ranj Rafeeq has given up the American Dream for a Canadian one.
Rafeeq was eager as a teenager to translate for U.S. troops stationed in his home town of Kirkuk in 2005. He immigrated to Portland, Ore., to study seven years later, hoping to don an Army uniform after earning his graduate degree in civil engineering.
He signed an enlistment contract in January 2016, with a training date set in September.
“I loved American soldiers. It was my dream to be a part of them,” Rafeeq, now 29, told The Washington Post.
But Rafeeq’s plans to serve imploded as the Pentagon’s program, designed to leverage medical and language skills of immigrants in exchange for fast-tracked citizenship, was log-jammed with additional security measures for recruits last fall, stressing an already overburdened screening process.
The program was put on hold in September 2016 — just as he was scheduled to report for training — sparking fear in Rafeeq and across the recruit population that their path to citizenship would abruptly end.
Then he received a letter from Kurdish officials warning of sweeps targeting Kurds for deportation and watched as news reports of the program’s struggles mounted.
Rafeeq’s student visa was set to expire on Aug. 1. He faced a decision: wait for the Pentagon’s bureaucracy to untangle itself as the Trump administration seeks to expand deportation powers, or flee.
He chose to flee. On June 11, Rafeeq went to Vancouver to apply for asylum in Canada. His biggest fear with deportation is the chance that Islamic State militants would prize his capture if they uncovered his attempt to enlist.
“I can’t go back to Kirkuk,” he said. “They would kill me.”
Pentagon proposals spark fear
On June 26, The Post first reported on the Defense Department’s internal recommendations to shutter the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest program, which has naturalized 10,400 troops since 2009, and to cancel the contracts of 1,800 of recruits like Rafeeq who are waiting to train.
About 1,000 of those recruits have waited so long that they have fallen out of legal immigration status. An internal Defense Department memo obtained by The Post acknowledges that canceling these contracts would expose the recruits to deportation. In response, lawmakers urged Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to honor the contracts of those recruits.
The recruits, who have already sworn allegiance to the United States in their oaths of enlistment, could potentially face harsh interrogations or jail time if they are deported to countries such as China or Russia, said Tom Malinowski, former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in the Obama administration.
“These are not rule of law societies, and if they want to put pressure on [recruits], they will,” Malinowski told The Post.
Malinowski said public announcements and photos of enlistments on social media could easily be exploited by adversarial intelligence agencies, in a potential propaganda victory attacking not just the United States but its most revered institution — the military.
Those governments could force the recruits to “tell the honest story of how America betrayed them,” he said.
“The basic purpose of Russian propaganda is not to extol Russia, but to convince people that America is amoral,” Malinowski said.
The Chinese government’s charge of treason, which it finds in cases threatening to national security, ranges from 10 years of confinement to death, according to the Chinese People’s Congress.
Along with South Korea, China is one of the main sources of program recruits, according to a Pentagon assessment of the program.
Media reports on the memo ignited discussion among the program’s recruits and hopefuls, who closely track developments in tightknit online forums, with one Facebook page alone listing 20,000 members.
A recruit from India who administers some of pages told The Post he has seen an increase in the discussion of recruits seeking preemptive refuge. He estimates that hundreds of the 1,000 potentially under threat of deportation have either fled or are seriously considering fleeing to Canada, Germany, Australia and other countries.
One Chinese national, who declined to give his name, enlisted in the program and expected to leave for training in July 2016, but the program’s suspension and a closing window for his immigration status prompted him to file for asylum in the United States last month.
China has a nativist culture, he said, and if deported he would face persecution from neighbors suspicious of his activities after living in the United States for six years.
“I wish people would see us as assets, not liabilities,” he said. “I love the United States a great deal, and I would do anything to defend this country.”
Security concerns
The program was created after military officials determined that certain medical skills and language proficiencies — such as Russian, Mandarin Chinese and Korean — were vital to national security but in short supply among U.S.-born troops. The program promises citizenship in months instead of the years-long naturalization process.
Program recruits are especially valuable to the Special Operations Command because of deep cultural and language skills necessary to train and advise foreign militaries and militias, according to a 2013 Pentagon review of the program.
Rafeeq’s case is emblematic of sudden widespread distrust in the program at a time when the military seeks to ramp up personnel numbers after years of Obama-led troop level drawdowns, said Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer who led the program’s design and implementation and is now an immigration lawyer.
“The Defense Department has undermined the program in such a way that it is unlikely that the damage can be undone at this point,” she said. “Immigrant recruits are unlikely to trust the military in the future, and recruiting will suffer.”
Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael declined to comment on any aspect of the program, citing ongoing lawsuits related to the program filed against the agency. It is unclear whether the recommendations will be implemented.
The action memo revealed by The Post draws on agency concerns that infiltrators could use the program but does not mention whether any have exploited the program.
Officials assigned threat level tiers to the nearly 10,000 program recruits, both in the service and waiting to serve, based on characteristics such as proximity to classified information and how thoroughly they have been vetted.
Stock said program recruits are the most vetted in the military, and infiltrators likely would not risk screenings in the process involving the departments of State and Homeland Security, and various intelligence agencies.
“Instead of improving overall vetting of all individuals who pose a risk, the Defense Department has chosen to waste valuable vetting resources, time and energy on ‘extreme vetting’ of people who pose little risk,” Stock said.
‘I was looking for ways to make America great’
Rafeeq has watched Iraq burn from Portland. His family fled violence in Kirkuk after his younger brother was injured by a car bomb. The Islamic State battled Kurdish militias there in 2014, and militants have been active there as recently as October.
For years he has wanted to lend the United States his native tongue of Kurdish and Arabic in the fight against the Islamic State. That has changed.
“I lost all my faith in the military. I felt like they were lying to me and all my brothers and sisters,” Rafeeq said. “I was looking for ways to make America great in the world while they were trying to kick us out.”
If Canada grants him asylum, Rafeeq wants to join the military, with a maple leaf on his shoulder.
“In Afghanistan, in Syria, I will serve them,” he said. “They are hospitable and respectful toward me.”
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Issues with US military recruitment

The Pentagon promised citizenship to immigrants who served. Now it might help deport them.

U.S. troops are sworn in as naturalized citizens on Nov. 2, 2012, at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. (State Department)
The Pentagon is considering a plan to cancel enlistment contracts for 1,000 foreign-born recruits without legal immigration status, knowingly exposing them to deportation, a Defense Department memo shows.
The undated action memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Jim Mattis by personnel and intelligence officials at the Pentagon and obtained by The Washington Post, describes potential security threats of immigrants recruited in a program designed to award fast-tracked citizenship in exchange for urgently needed medical and language skills.
Additionally, 4,100 troops — most of whom are naturalized citizens — may face “enhanced screening,” though the Pentagon voiced concern on how to navigate “significant legal constraints” of “continuous monitoring” of citizens without cause, according to the memo.
Officials have assigned threat level tiers to the nearly 10,000 Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI) program recruits, both in the service and waiting to serve, based on characteristics like proximity to classified information or how thoroughly they have been vetted.
The Defense Department launched the program in 2009. Since the program’s start, more than 10,400 troops, most of them with service in the Army, have filled medical billets and language specialties — like Russian, Mandarin Chinese and Pashto — which were identified by the Pentagon as vital to the success of military operations, but in short supply among U.S.-born troops.
Last year, officials heightened security screenings specifically for MAVNI recruits, diverting “already constrained Army fiscal and manpower resources,” the memo said.
A U.S. Army recruiting command virtual town hall on June 16 addressed questions about the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI) program launched by the Defense Department in 2009.
The overtasked vetting process and heightened security risk led officials to recommend canceling enlistment contracts for all 1,800 awaiting orders for basic training, and halting the program altogether, according to the memo.
Those recruits are in what the military calls the delayed-entry program, a holding pool of recruits assigned training dates in the future. About 1,000 of them have seen their visas expire while waiting for travel orders, which would put them at risk of deportation if their contracts are canceled.
Defense Department spokesman Johnny Michael said Monday the agency is reviewing program requirements, declining to confirm the existence of the memo or ongoing internal discussions. The copy obtained by The Washington Post was signed off by Pentagon personnel official Tony Kurta on May 19. It is unclear when the memo was issued and its current status.
Margaret Stock, a retired Army officer central in implementing the program in 2009, reviewed the document and called the decision a breach of contract made in bad faith.
“It’s terrible. You trusted the Army, who delayed the process, and now they’re going to cancel your contract and have you deported,” Stock said.
Stock, now an attorney who practices immigration law in Alaska, said the Department of Homeland Security would possibly welcome the move as the Trump administration seeks to ramp up deportations.
The recruits are on government rolls detailing their addresses, phone numbers and legal statuses, making them prime targets for removal. It remains unclear if military officials would hand over that information to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Pentagon is also considering ending the careers of 2,400 part-time troops in the program who have yet to attend basic training.
Stock, the retired officer, waved off concerns of heightened risk of the MAVNI recruits cited in the memo, which says 30 percent subject to “enhanced screening” have “unmitigable derogatory information” that could bar them from service.
That term is typically used to describe applicants with characteristics that cannot be helped, Stock says, like a family member who worked for a foreign government or simply having foreign relatives.
There does not appear to have been a policy designed to grant exceptions to what would be a common occurrence among the population, she said.
“It’s okay to investigate someone with a legitimate security threat,” Stock said. “But the recruits share a characteristic they don’t like, which is they’re foreigners. They’re going to be treated as second-class citizens for their entire career.”
Stock pointed to a recent Army blunder — an enlistment of a U.S. citizen who fought alongside Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine — as an example of extreme vetting that occurs for program recruits but not native-born troops.
It’s against Pentagon equal-opportunity policies, Stock said.
“You can’t treat people with a certain characteristic differently,” she said. “You don’t do surveillance on everyone who is Irish-American because Mike Flynn broke the law when talking to the Russians.”


Issues with US military recruitment

Military spouses face added challenges while trying to find jobs. This could help.

Matt Bevin (R) is the governor of Kentucky; Kim Reynolds (R) is the governor of Iowa.
With Americans nationwide enjoying the best job market in decades, the unemployment rates in our states, Kentucky (4.1 percent) and Iowa (2.4 percent), are also at or near generational lows. Yet at least one group of Americans struggles with high unemployment: military spouses. In the most recent figures available, the Defense Department reported that the unemployment rate for spouses of military members on active duty in 2017 was 24 percent
.
Military spouses who can find work often must settle for jobs below their skill and experience levels. They earn 27 percent less

 than their civilian counterparts with similar skills and experience, according to a 2018 report by the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. A 2017 U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey found
 that nearly half of military spouses describe their financial situation as “struggling” or living “paycheck to paycheck.”
It’s bad enough that the country is letting down the more than 600,000
 spouses of America’s men and women in uniform, but the Pentagon says
the lack of job opportunities also potentially harms national security: “The inability of spouses to obtain and retain fulfilling employment as they relocate with the military compromises the quality of life of military families and the readiness of the military force.” The employment barriers facing military spouses may also make it more difficult to recruit men and women willing to serve in the armed forces.
One of the most significant barriers for military spouses, as it is for many other job seekers, is state occupational licensing rules governing hundreds of occupations, including teaching, paralegal and health-care work. Obtaining state certification can require taking courses, passing tests and paying steep fees. These requirements are especially onerous for military spouses, who usually expect to be in a particular state for only a couple of years.
According to Syracuse University research, more than one-third
 of military spouses work in fields subject to occupational licensing, disproportionately more than the general population. And according to the Chamber
survey, nearly one-quarter of military spouses cite occupational licensing as their biggest barrier to employment.
Like countless people across the country who selflessly put their spouses’ careers ahead of their own, military spouses will always face some additional employment challenges. Not only are their moves frequent, but also the military bases are often far from urban centers, where jobs are more plentiful. Numerous public and private programs already exist to help overcome some of these challenges. But state legislators can do even more good by eliminating the burdensome state occupational requirements that require military spouses to repeatedly acquire expensive and time-consuming licenses to work legally in their chosen professions.
Military spouses will no longer have to worry about such rules in Kentucky and Iowa. We are proud to have each recently signed statewide legislation to allow military spouses (and veterans) to use their occupational licenses, issued in any other state,
 in our states as well.
Under the legislation, state administrative bodies must issue occupational licenses within 30 days of receiving an application from military spouses who are licensed in another state. The reform will benefit not only military spouses but also our state economies, which can now more easily employ this underutilized talent pool.
With help from the Job Creators Network
, which has led this multistate effort by convening a meeting of governors and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta to address this issue, support is growing nationwide for such occupational-licensing reforms. We are working with 12 other states to implement similar legislation.
We encourage every state to join this licensing-reform effort and help military spouses share in the current labor-market prosperity.


Issues with US military recruitment

Free trade doesn’t just lead to job loss. It means more deaths from drug overdoses and increased military recruitment.

President Trump will soon send the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to Congress. It won’t pass in the House, though, without support from Democrats who want the new trade deal to include tougher labor and environmental provisions. For example, Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, demands that the USMCA include better programs to help American workers hurt by free trade.
Critics such as Neal argue that American free trade agreements fail to address what happens to local communities that are hit by waves of imports and layoffs. While the economic and political consequences of trade-related job losses are well known — lower wages and more support for populist leaders — my research suggests that the impact of free trade is much broader.
In a recently published study, my co-author and I find that trade-related job losses are closely related to spikes in opioid-related overdose deaths. Less-educated males in Appalachia bear the brunt of free trade as well as the opioid epidemic. And as young people look for ways out of communities hurt by trade, enlistment in the U.S. Army also surges. It’s not just that youth are more willing to enlist after trade shocks — the military tends to send more recruiters to these communities.
Trade-related job losses lead to higher levels of opioid addiction
The opioid epidemic now kills roughly 130 people in the United States every day. While this is a national public health emergency, less-educated white men in Appalachia have been particularly harmed.
In 2015, the overdose mortality rate in Appalachia was 65 percent higher than the rest of the country. Less-educated white males suffer overdose deaths at such a high rate that it has lowered their overall life expectancy.
As can be seen in the figure above, Appalachia has the highest rate of trade-related job loss in the country. And trade puts downward pressure on the wages and job prospects of less-educated manufacturing workers, the majority of which are white men.
Job loss generally increases the risk of depression and drug misuse. Since jobs lost from trade are relatively “good” manufacturing jobs — offering better wages, benefits, and higher unionization rates than the rest of the private sector — it may be even more difficult for workers to adjust after layoffs. Worse still, the risk of drug use has significantly increased with the introduction of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, into heroin markets around the United States.
In a recently published paper, Simeon Kimmel and I explored the nationwide relationship between free trade and the opioid epidemic. We found that 1,000 trade-related job losses in a given locality were associated with a 2.7 percent increase in opioid-related overdose deaths. When fentanyl was present in the local heroin supply, however, the same size trade shock was associated with an 11.3 percent increase in such overdose deaths.
People go into the army — since they don’t have many other options
Since the mid-1990s, free trade has also steadily sent Americans into the military. Trade-related job losses reduce the economic and educational opportunities available to unskilled workers and therefore increase the supply of potential military recruits. Demand for recruits also increases, as the U.S. government responds to these economic shocks by increasing recruitment efforts and enlistment goals in trade-affected counties.
Hickory, N.C., an Appalachian city once known as the “furniture capital of the world,” suffered 11,000 trade-related job losses between 1996 and 2010. In the face of these trade shocks, enlistment in the U.S. Army quadrupled for the local county.
I spoke with a local high school ROTC leader, who explained that students “will try to join the military after high school because they’ve tried the job market, they’ve tried going to college and couldn’t go. … Very few of them are joining the military for patriotic reasons.”
A high school guidance counselor in Hickory told me that before the trade shocks, recruiters would visit their school once a year. Now, military recruiters come multiple times a week and eat lunch with students in the cafeteria. The counselor lamented, “I’m not sure how many states and counties around the country allow just a constant flow of military recruiters in.”
These dynamics spread far beyond the closed furniture mills of North Carolina. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Defense Department and analyzed data from around the United States from 1996 through 2010. The study found that a shock of 1,000 trade-related job losses was associated with a 33 percent increase in Army enlistment in the average county.
U.S. policies do not focus on these problems
With the 2020 presidential election approaching, there is a growing bipartisan consensus in favor of trade protection and government intervention into markets. However, tariffs will not have direct benefits for the communities that have already suffered trade-related job losses. And revised trade agreements such as the USMCA — with their lack of compensation for trade losers — continue to overlook the broader social consequences of free trade.
Adam Dean


Issues with US military recruitment

Immigrant doctors want to help the Army fight the coronavirus. The Pentagon won’t let them.

Dozens of immigrant physicians who enlisted through a Pentagon program meant to harness their medical skills are stuck taking out trash and filing paperwork, an immigration attorney said, even as the military mobilizes doctors to fight the growing coronavirus pandemic.
Six recruits with relevant training — a pulmonary specialist, an epidemiologist and two internal medicine practitioners, among others — are frustrated that the glacial pace of security checks has slowed their chance to serve at a crucial moment, they told The Washington Post.
The inertia comes as the force’s growing need for medical professionals becomes clearer — and more urgent. More than 200 military medical students and nurses will receive diplomas early, officials said Thursday, and officials have braced for a surge in demand in military hospitals.
It is unclear whether the military has enough doctors to treat its own troops and family members as the pandemic worsens. The Army is testing if medical soldiers who have left the service are interested in rejoining, and several active duty units have mobilized to help civilian hospitals with non-coronavirus patients.
More than 300 service members have been infected, the agency said Thursday, including some who have recovered.
The immigrant physicians work in civilian hospitals but signed up to serve part-time with the Army. Now, they are desperate to serve in uniform as they wait for background checks to complete.
An internal medicine specialist, a doctor from India with a specialty in respiratory illnesses, said he has treated at least 40 patients with the coronavirus in a civilian hospital in New York City. He enlisted in the Army in 2015 and has mostly sat around while on reservist duty as a low-ranking soldier with little to do.
“I love to help people,” he told The Post. “But these hurdles are unnecessary. I’m wasting years of my medical experience in the Army.”
Like the other five recruits interviewed for this story, he declined to provide his name and some identifying details for fear of retribution from the U.S. government.
Those six recruits combined have spent 25 years on limited reserve duty as junior soldiers unable to use any of their medical skills in uniform.
The Pentagon did not return a request for comment, and the Army did not say how many immigrant physicians are still waiting to muster into the service.
The physicians enlisted in an immigrant recruitment program that traded fast-tracked citizenship for language and medical skills that the Pentagon identified as both vital to national security but in short supply among U.S.-born troops.
More than 10,000 skilled immigrants entered the military in the last decade, mostly for their linguistic skills. The program shuttered in 2017 amid security concerns and heightened background checks that stalled the process for years.
At least several dozen physicians are still waiting for their checks to finish. They busy themselves with menial tasks at their reserve units, where they have limited duties, said retired Army officer Margaret Stock, the architect of the program and an immigration attorney who has represented physician recruits.
The military has consistent physician shortages, a 2018 Government Accountability Office report found.
“The nation is facing a crisis when we need these people,” Stock said. “It was the point of recruiting them in the first place.”
The Military Accessions Vital to National Interest program was championed by Special Operations Command for its stream of language and cultural experts who could aid them in unconventional missions, a Pentagon overview of the program said.
It also helped the Army Reserve fill many dental jobs, a vital task because dentists must be available to clear soldiers for combat deployments. By 2017, two-thirds of Army reservist dentists came through the program.
But the pipeline closed that year following new stringent regulations and enhanced background checks, leading some to trickle in through thickets of bureaucracy.
One of them, a pulmonologist from the Middle East, treated veterans at a VA hospital, trained medical students, and in 2016, enlisted in the Army to provide his expertise in uniform.
He sits on the coronavirus response board at his Georgia hospital. “Respiratory failure is where my expertise begins,” he told The Post. “I take care of the sickest of the sick.”
He and the other physicians are in a reserve status that allows basic access to Army bases and limited responsibilities, but they have not been fully processed for basic or officer training.
He came to the United States a decade ago, but his enlistment coincided with new stringent background checks that delayed hundreds of recruits from completing the enlistment process, turning the reliable stream of recruits into a flurry of lawsuits, asylum claims and fears of deportation.
The process dragged out for years, he said, until last week, when he was given an unfavorable determination for having foreign family members, even though he was naturalized — part of a pattern of canceled enlistments and failed screenings for fact-of-life events and, often, simply for existing as foreigners.
He was given 30 days to provide a rebuttal for the determination, which does not yet mean he is denied a chance to serve.
“It was not my choice to be born in a different country,” he said. “I don’t know what I need to do to prove my allegiance.”
An internal medicine specialist in Louisiana — who said he has treated nearly two dozen coronavirus patients this week alone — has faced similar hurdles. He enlisted in 2016 and was naturalized, but he was also given an unfavorable determination because he often speaks to his foreign-born father.
His reserve duty has mostly involved classes and occasionally trash removal duty typical of junior soldiers, not physicians. “For more than four years I’m sitting and doing nothing,” he said.
Immigrant physician recruits typically join the Army Reserve, which would primarily treat other soldier members unless they were mobilized to assist in a public health response.
The Defense Department has failed to identify and place talented troops into jobs that harness their abilities, said Paul Scharre, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former policy analyst at the Pentagon.
“The military has done an unequivocally horrible job tapping into skills,” he said. But with MAVNI, “we know adding these people would make a difference.”
A Chinese epidemiologist in California echoed the sentiment. He enlisted in 2016 and was naturalized but has yet to move forward as an officer, spending time cleaning facilities as a cook at his selected reserve unit.
“I have skills and I can help,” he said. “I feel useless.”
This story has been updated.


Issues with US military recruitment

After Iraq and Afghanistan, pioneering women in the military set sights on Congress

In Amy McGrath’s pitch to voters in Kentucky, she wears a bomber jacket and stands next to an F/A-18, the fighter jet she flew as a Marine to drop bombs on Afghanistan.
In Mikie Sherrill’s political ad in New Jersey, the camera lingers over a whirring Sea King helicopter, like the one she piloted on Navy missions.
And in Martha McSally’s video announcing her run for Senate in Arizona, she is crouched in the cockpit of an Air Force fighter jet to underscore that she was the first woman to fly in combat.
Women who served in the military are running for elective office in greater numbers than at any time in history. Many broke gender barriers in uniform and say it’s time to make their mark in politics. For generations, military veterans who become elected officials have overwhelmingly been male and Republican, but these female veterans, many of whom served in pioneering combat roles in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are overwhelmingly Democrats and critical of President Trump.
“Many of us felt like we really had to focus on some of the areas that needed further groundbreaking, such as the House of Representatives and the Senate,” said Sherrill, 46, a Democrat running in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District. Sherrill said she and other female veterans are motivated to run for office by what she calls a “lack of respect” for women by the Trump administration and by the dearth of women on Capitol Hill. She said she was astounded to see an all-male Senate panel debating last year whether to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Sherrill is considered a strong contender who could flip the Republican seat being vacated by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee who surprised many by dropping out of the race in January after 24 years in Congress. His district voted for Trump by less than one percentage point.
Only four of the 535 members of Congress are female veterans, two Republicans and two Democrats. But at least 32 more women who served in the military are now campaigning for the House and Senate — 25 Democrats and seven Republicans, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Scores more are campaigning for statewide office and state legislative seats, many with the aim of running for Congress later.
The increase in veterans running — the number of men is rising, too — is beginning to reverse the long decline of veterans in Congress. In the 1970s, more than 70 percent of House and Senate members had served in the military. Today, about 20 percent have.
Although the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created a larger pool of potential candidates, it is no coincidence that at a time of sinking regard for politicians, bomber jackets, Bronze Stars and aviator wings are showing up in so many 2018 campaign ads. A recent Gallup poll showed that 72 percent of people had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military, but only 12 percent did for Congress.
Combat veterans in Congress have a long history of commanding attention when discussing war. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who lost her legs when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her Black Hawk helicopter in Iraq, was widely quoted recently when she called Trump a “five-deferment draft dodger” and accused him of goading North Korea.
In response to Trump calling Democrats “treasonous” for not clapping during his State of the Union address, Duckworth countered that she swore an oath to the Constitution and did not have to “mindlessly cater to the whims of Cadet Bone Spurs,” a reference to Trump receiving a Vietnam War-era deferment because of bone spurs.
Democrats want to highlight the fact that many military veterans are appalled by Trump, who has filled his inner circle with retired generals and is planning a huge military parade later this year.
Studies have shown that veterans in office are more reluctant to vote to go to war, but that once war is declared, they back an all-out effort, said Rebecca Burgess, who studies veterans in public office for the American Enterprise Institute.
In half a dozen interviews with female candidates who are veterans, health care was a key reason they wanted to run. Many also talked about the need to improve education, to gain greater gender parity and to institute paid maternity leave. Wanting strong national security, they said, was a given and rarely mentioned first.
“Women look around and see what is happening, and they want to see change,” said Maura Sullivan, 38, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and is a Democrat running for an open House seat in New Hampshire. She said many issues need to be addressed, including child care, mental health and maternity leave.
Sullivan, who worked at the Pentagon in the Obama administration, also said she has seen firsthand the devastating consequences of war, and thinks that Trump “puts the national security of this country at risk” with his “erratic and bizarre” behavior.
McGrath agreed that many veterans are upset with the commander in chief: “A lot of us are saying this isn’t the country we fought for.”
The former combat pilot singled out the need for better affordable health care for her candidacy. She first must win the Democratic primary — a field that includes Lexington Mayor Jim Gray — for the chance to unseat Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr (R). A viral campaign video has boosted her bid. In it she says that at age 13, she wrote to her members of Congress saying she wanted an opportunity to fly fighter jets. Her House member wrote back saying that women were not allowed in combat, and her senator, Mitch McConnell (R), never replied.
McGrath ended up flying 89 combat missions against al- Qaeda and the Taliban.
Several Republican Party officials acknowledged that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and liberal groups, including VoteVets.org, are increasing their efforts to recruit veterans who are critical of Trump.
“Democrats have made a concerted effort because of the stigma attached to them since the 2016 election, which showed them to be out of touch with voters, a party of coastal elites,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
But Hunt said that although military service is admirable, “biography is not everything, and a Democrat is a Democrat.”
Voters are swayed by where a candidate stands on issues such as single-payer health care and tax cuts, Hunt said.
But many Democrats see the effectiveness of having combat veterans speak out on deeply partisan issues, including those involving guns.
Burgess, of the American Enterprise Institute, said veterans have an identity apart from political party. Many grew up in middle-class and rural areas, and that helps them “get away from the hated image of the elite politician,” she said.
Jeremy Teigen, author of a new book, “Why Veterans Run,” said Republicans have had more success in getting their veterans elected. Democrats have a history of backing veterans in long-shot races. But he said there are signs this year that Democrats are being more strategic.
Of 36 veterans who attended a two-day workshop run by the nonpartisan Veterans Campaign in Washington last month, 14 were Democrats, nine were Republicans and the rest were undecided or independents.
Erica Courtney, a former Army helicopter pilot and a Democrat living in Virginia, was one of those who attended sessions such as “Bulletproofing Your Service Record & Avoiding Common Pitfalls.” She said the military taught her to lead by example and to be inclusive, adding, “Now I am embarrassed to watch the nightly news with my children.”
In Arizona, McSally is embracing Trump as she seeks the seat being vacated by Sen. Jeff Flake (R).
Elected to the House in 2015, McSally faces former sheriff Joe Arpaio, another Trump ally, in the Republican primary. The retired Air Force colonel is flying herself to campaign stops, telling voters she will work with Trump on border security, a top issue in her Arizona district.
She also uses “salty language,” as she calls it — just like the guys she served with in the military. She got people’s attention last year when as a House member, she stood up in a GOP conference room during discussions about replacing the Affordable Care Act and said “let’s get this f---ing thing done.”
“Sorry if I offended you, but that is who I am,” McSally said in an interview. She said most voters appreciate her candid, straightforward, “even a little edgy” approach.
“Like our president, I am tired of PC politicians and their BS excuses,” McSally said in a video announcing her Senate bid. “I am a fighter pilot, and I talk like one. That’s why I told Washington Republicans to grow a pair of ovaries and get the job done.”
McGrath, the Kentucky Democrat, said the male-dominated world of politics makes sense for female veterans like her. “Success in combat as a fighter pilot is not gender-dependent,” she said. “A lot of women out there kicked butt.”
mary.jordan@washpost.com