It is what it is. Over the years we laughed at the use of this phrase, a catch-all Marine Corps-ism that regularly worms its way into briefs, emails, and conversations around the Corps. Even as young Marines, “It is what it is” stood out to us for its inanity. During endless staff briefs, annual training sessions, and mandatory safety standdowns, we would play bingo with common Marine Corps catchphrases, and “it is what it is” was an easy one to get. Alongside other ubiquitous sayings like “where the rubber meets the road” and “needs of the Marine Corps,” “it is what it is” is often used to represent practicality, realism, or the acknowledgement that funding, imagination, and time are all scarce resources, a la Rumsfeld’s “you go to war with the Army you have.”[i]
But that’s not what “it is what it is” really means in today’s Marine Corps. Instead, its default, knee-jerk use has come to symbolize bureaucratic laziness and ignorance, the epitome of the Corps’ default response to any request that demands a difficult choice, any observation that strays from the norm, or any attempt to work smarter versus harder. “It is what it is” represents an institutional shrug and a yearning for the path of least resistance. Each use, nearly incontestable by individual Marines, reflects and strengthens the Corps’ aversion to change.
But what happens when the needs of the Marine Corps – those very needs cited to justify outdated personnel policies, training requirements, or performance evaluations – aren’t actually being best served by an institutional shrug? For exhibit A, we’d like you to direct your attention to the importance and relevance accorded a Marine’s family, particularly his or her spouse.
The Marine Corps loves its families. It tells us this over and over again, in big banners hung on bases, in the Commandant’s FRAGO, and on www.marines.mil. We even have Family Readiness Officers, those nice individuals who assess the needs of Marine Corps families in order to ensure that each unit is ready to deploy if the balloon goes up. We’ve come a long way from those sepia-toned days when a young Marine was advised that if the Corps had wanted him to have a wife, he would have been issued one.
Or have we? Actions speak louder than words, and many personnel and family policies still reflect that narrow, obsolete mentality today, despite evidence that military families have decidedly changed from the 1950s. And when actual, real-life Marines and their families push back against those policies, they often get told, “it is what it is; the needs of the Marine Corps take precedence.” This is where “it is what it is” gets stupid.
In the world according to the Marine Corps, the (generally male) breadwinner earns the living wage for the family, and the family obediently follows in support. Spouses (generally women) function to support their Marine, and any outside work or career that they have should be flexible, uncontroversial, and secondary to the primary career of the Marine. Spouses’ careers and educations are viewed as subordinate, as a “personal choice” that the Marine Corps does not need to consider in its personnel policies and moves. Despite recent lip service to the contrary, that Corps-wide ideal is still the gold standard: attendees at the most recent commander’s conference this past spring were reminded of this fact by the Commandant and his wife.
The life of a Marine simply has to be this way, we are assured. The Marine Corps demands constant readiness, so the message to spouses is to show up, shut up, and support your Marine. The Corps pays enough to support you, and if you stick around and pay your dues long enough to retire, you’ll be taken care of. So stop complaining, that’s just the life of a Marine. It is what it is.
Except…that is not the way it is. Families today don’t look like they did back in the 1950s, economic realities are radically different than they were even thirty years ago when our senior leaders entered service, and a military career does not have to be the inflexible, cookie-cutter, unimaginative template that it is today. But the Marine Corps doesn’t want to hear this. Acknowledging such heresy would invite drastic changes, making things messy and unpredictable. The Corps’ bureaucracy would prefer things to remain stagnant, enabling personnel assignment, command selection, and everything in between to remain as it is today…forever. It is what it is. Existing policies best serve the needs of the Marine Corps.
Well, let’s talk for a minute about what “it” truly is. “It” is the fact that the cost of raising and putting a child through college has grown by as much as 500% since 1980,[ii] so families today must earn more and work harder for longer than they did three decades ago, so spouse employment and education is a necessity for many families today. “It” is the fact that 90% of military spouses who do work are underemployed or overqualified for positions they hold, which not only hurts families today but will continue to hurt them for decades post-service.[iii] “It” is the fact that on top of that, given similar careers and qualifications, military spouses earn 38% less than their civilian counterparts and are 30% more likely to be unemployed.[iv] And “it” is the fact that in 2016, economic necessities aside, the odds are high and growing that a spouse will have their own career anyway. As time passes and those crazy Millennials fill all of the ranks, Marines and their families will be increasingly unwilling to conform to the mold that presently exists. As if they aren’t already.
Basically, “it” is a world that’s a far cry from the one that codified the male breadwinner ideal, that world of unicorns and rainbows where a Marine Corps wife works only because she wants to in a career that is traditional and flexible. In Darwinian fashion, the reality that families face today, the reality that “it” is, directly affects the retention of members with professional spouses, creating a near-homogeneous collection of senior leaders with little empathy or understanding for those they lead. The gap between the male breadwinner ideal and the reality that families face today will continue to grow unless the Marine Corps acknowledges this fact and acts now.
Our own personal “it is what it is” moment recently surfaced, and we are struggling through it right now. To be accurate, it’s far from the first such moment in our 17+ years of marriage and combined 36 years of Marine Corps service, but it’s the one that will hurt us the most. Time and again over the past year, we were told “it is what it is,” that we were outliers. But that’s just it. That isn’t what it is, we are not outliers, and more of us are rising up through the ranks. The Marine Corps fails to see reality and the impacts of demographic changes on its families and its future recruiting pool, which dangerously limits its appeal to an ever-shrinking, homogenous group. Take a look at any gathering of senior leaders – you’ll hear and see it firsthand. While “it is what it is” hurts our family and families like ours today, in the name of serving the needs of the Marine Corps, it really hurts the Corps more.
The irony is that while telling families like ours “it is what it is,” the Marine Corps doesn’t recognize what it is. The Corps’ stance ignores the reality families face today, where holding down a job or earning a degree is overwhelmingly not a personal choice for a spouse but a necessity, and personnel policies that risk spouse employment and education will increasingly limit the appeal of the Marine Corps to the very demographic it should most target. The Corps’ incessant tendency to fight personnel reform efforts like the Military Family Stability Act (S.2403), the expansion of the Career Intermission Pilot Program, and every individual Marine family’s effort to survive and flourish in competitive world merely serves to cripple its future.
The bottom line? If the Marine Corps wants a diverse force that can chart our future and navigate our complex world, it must change to capitalize on the broad base of human capital that it spends so much energy to recruit. Holding the line on decades-old retention, promotion, education, and assignment policies does not best serve the needs of the Marine Corps, and that is what it is.
[i] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A132-2004Dec14.html
[ii] http://www.collegechoice.net/the-rising-cost-of-college/
[iii] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/90-military-wives-jobless-underemployed-acceptable/story?id=22720559
[iv] http://www1.moaa.org/main_article.aspx?id=301
