The Marine Corps has hit its goal of assigning women to its boot camps the same way it assigns men, recruiting and training officials confirmed to Marine Corps Times.

In fiscal 2024, according to Maj. Hector Infante, a spokesman for Marine Corps Training and Education Command, the service sent 1,471 female recruits to train at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, and 1,484 women to MCRD San Diego, California, a boot camp formerly closed to women.

At Parris Island, women made up 11.3% of all non-prior service recruits last fiscal year, while they made up 10.5% of the total at San Diego, Infante said. In all, 13,003 non-prior service recruits trained at Parris Island last year, and 14,162 trained at San Diego.

In December 2023, Marine Corps Times reported that the Corps was on track to even out the gender balance at its two boot camps by the close of the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. In this, the service met a congressional mandate set in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act to fully integrate recruit training by gender within five years. The service initially projected it would take until 2026 to reach the target.

As officials with TECOM and Recruit Training Command explained, future years may not see such an even distribution of female recruits at the two boot camp locations.

For the Corps, they said, the target was to assign women to boot camp the same way men were assigned: roughly, by geographic region. With some exceptions, those from the Western Recruiting Region, which largely lies west of the Mississippi River, ship to San Diego; while those in the Eastern Recruiting Region go to Parris Island. The Corps could ship according to this same scheme in the future and see a greater proportion of women at one boot camp than the other.

To achieve its target distribution, the Marine Corps said it needed to increase its population of female drill instructors from 134 to 207, a goal it first publicized in 2021.

As recently as late 2022, service officials were expressing concerns about reaching that goal, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a recruiting slump and left fewer female noncommissioned officers available for assignment as drill instructors.

“It’s a balancing act,” TECOM Chief of Staff Col. Howard Hall told the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in December of that year, saying the Corps then projected to reach its target of 207 female DIs by 2027.

A TECOM official said the Marines had been able to meet the integrated recruit shipping goal because they’d established the number of female drill instructors they needed at San Diego. But neither TECOM nor Recruiting Command officials, after multiple queries, could provide details on when that staffing goal had been met and when, precisely, the full transition to geographically-based shipping had taken place. Requests for an interview on the topic were declined.

The Marine Corps, the last of the military services to segregate training by gender, has changed rapidly over the last five years under strong congressional pressure. The service allowed women to train at San Diego for the first time in early 2021. It marked another first at the same time by putting a platoon of female recruits inside a male training company.

In June 2023, the service deactivated Parris Island’s 4th Recruit Training Battalion, previously the only unit in the Corps where female recruits could be trained.

While Marine leaders had long defended the Corps’ gender-segregated training model as helping to forge strong relationships and establish same-gender role models, critics said the separate units allowed male recruits and staff to belittle their female counterparts and view their training as lesser.

And though female and male Marine recruits now train in integrated companies at boot camp, platoons are still segregated by gender. Officials have said they continue to view integrated platoons as bad for the Corps and recruit development. The service has also declined to proceed with recommendations to create mixed-gender drill instructor teams, citing manpower limitations in its female NCO population.

“I’m a one-standard kind of individual,” Lt. Gen. Kevin Iiams, then commander of TECOM, said in 2022. “I don’t want to have mixed DI teams for only portions of the recruit population. … It’s got to be everyone.”

Investigators say a string of break-ins in San Diego’s Tierrasanta neighborhood this past week may be linked to a larger string of crimes.

Security video shows the suspects using a sledgehammer to get inside.

Despite the surveillance camera overhead, the masked intruder went to work on the safe at Roundtable Pizza on Tierrasanta Boulevard just after 3 a.m. on Tuesday.      

“He starts slamming into the safe with a sledgehammer. He was there like five or 10 minutes,” Roundtable general manager Angel Isabel said.

Isabel says he left worn out and empty handed.

“This is our fifth break-in in over two years. It is just insane that it keeps on happening,” Isabel said.

The person behind the mask found a more promising take next door at Tutuli Mexican Eatery.

“Everything was gone. All my savings. My wife and my savings were gone,” owner Alejandro Ochoa said.

Tutuli is the Ochoa family’s first business venture. They’ve been open less than three weeks. Thieves got away with thousands of dollars that Ochoa kept in the safe.

“These people don’t think about the families that are suffering,” Ochoa said.

The Tierra Santa Mexican Restaurant was robbed the Monday before last at about 3 a.m. The owner wasn’t available to speak, but employees tell NBC 7 the whole thing was caught on camera.

The surveillance cameras seem little deterrent. The San Diego Police Department is investigating these crimes and say they are likely connected to others happening countywide.

Surveillance video from Perfect Pizza in Rancho Bernardo shows a hoodie-wearing suspect sledgehammering their way through the front door. NBC 7’s Omari Fleming has more on the string of burglaries in several northeast San Diego neighborhoods.

Video from Perfect Pizza in Rancho Bernardo in the early hours of Oct. 28 shows the suspect use a sledgehammer to break the window. The cash drawer was stolen. The safe had to be left behind. A hooded and masked driver picked up the accomplice. They left in a silver Infiniti.

That same morning, Todo Sushi and the Subway on Carroll Canyon Road were burglarized, possibly by the same people.

Many of these businesses are mom-and-pop operations. Owners poured in everything they must to secure a successful future.

“I was working before at different places, and my wife, to just to save money to see our dreams come true and this happens,” Ochoa said.

Losses in the Tierrasanta burglaries are felt deeply but what was left behind could prove to be of great value to police. It is just a few frames of video, but for the first time a very clear picture of the intruder’s face is seen.

San Diego police detectives say they are still gathering all the video evidence. They expect to release more information about these burglaries on Wednesday.

The U.S. Coast Guard offloaded more than 14.5 tons of cocaine in San Diego Tuesday, which the agency said was seized in recent months from seafaring drug smugglers in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

The crew of the Coast Guard cutter Munro unloaded the 29,000-plus-pound haul of narcotics — which would have been worth an estimated $335 million on the illicit market — at Broadway Pier on San Diego Bay.

“I would put this crew on any mission, anywhere, at any time,” said Capt. James O’Mara, commanding officer of the Alameda-homeported Munro. “They executed everything asked of them with incredible teamwork and persistence, and we are proud of the results.”

The seizures took place during 11 interceptions of drug-smuggling attempts off the coasts of Mexico and Central and South America in September and October, according to Coast Guard officials.