Lol, this year is first time women allowed to try for Ranger School, all 20 women fail who try out, calls now for lighter gear
"On Friday, the Army is expected to announce that all the women who had attempted to graduate from Ranger School had officially failed to meet the standards, according to a military source.
Ranger School, which grooms the Army’s most elite special operations fighting force, opened its doors to women for the first time this year. Eight of the 20 women who originally entered the school's first co-ed class were allowed to recycle through the program after they fell out in their first go-round. The Friday announcement will confirm that this happened again.
To many, this means the system is working as it should: The Rangers are the best of the best, and being a Ranger means passing a physical test that pushes body and mind to the breaking point. If women can’t do it, the argument goes, then they shouldn’t be Rangers.
But there is another opinion quietly being voiced as well: that Ranger School is more akin to a rite of passage – an opportunity for men to “thump their chest,” as one Ranger puts it – than a realistic preparation for leading in war. That women can actually make Ranger units more effective. And that the standards that keep them out are outdated.
It isn't a way of thinking likely to gain great traction anytime soon. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Army’s top officer, made this clear during a breakfast with reporters Thursday. While praising the performance of the women at the Ranger School, he added: “I’m actually fairly adamant about not changing the physical standards.”
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told the Navy Times this week that once women start attending SEAL training, it would make sense to examine the standards. "First, we're going to make sure there are standards. Second, that they are gender-neutral, and third, that they have something to do with the job," he said.
"Of course women don't want to change the standard – they don't want to be accused of lowering it," says Col. Jason Amerine, a Ranger and West Point graduate. "And men don't want to change it either, because it lets us thump our chest." [MUH PRIMITIVE MASCULINITY!!!]
As a result, "women will always fight to meet the male standard, even if it's arbitrary and kind of stupid," he adds. "I'm often pretty horrified at the adversity they face, while they keep their mouths shut and deal with it."
Others agree that the time has come for a conversation.
“I think it’ll be contentious, but I think it’s equitable and sensible to ask the question about what are the [Ranger School] standards that are only related to the fact that only men have ever done it," says retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, who served as the top commander of United States forces in Afghanistan, as well as three tours in Army Ranger battalions.
This argument is less about gender equity than the firm belief that women can make Ranger battalions better. In modern warfare, relations with local populations are crucial, and women Rangers would provide unique value added in places such as Afghanistan or Iraq, where cultural norms often prohibit contact between male soldiers and women. Ranger School also showed women were innovative problem-solvers who offered fresh approaches in the field.
On the battlefield itself, they have proven themselves. While at war, Colonel Amerine says, “I was rarely with female soldiers who couldn’t hang.”
To him, this raises the question of what Ranger School is actually about. As new technologies potentially make raw physical strength less important, the real challenge, many say, becomes bringing women’s leadership skills into the upper echelons of the armed forces.
For Col. Jason Dempsey, a fellow Ranger and West Point graduate, this points to a need for “reassessing what war-fighting is, and what’s really important,” he says, rather than “having 100,000 guys who are essentially pack mules.”
The No. 1 Department of Veterans Affairs claim – made by 58 percent of all claimants – is muscular-skeletal injuries. “If we really are serious about integrating the force, the equipment we carry is going to be one of the things we have to have a hard conversation about,” Amerine says. “It’s in our grasp technologically to make things a lot lighter.”
Take away brute strength as one of the pillars of Ranger School, and its purpose begins to preparing Army soldiers to be excellent leaders, which has long been the promise of Ranger School, he adds.
In that context, the Ranger pass-fail rates look different. After West Point invested four years building the men in Amerine’s class into leaders, “All of us were expected to go to Ranger School, and all of us were expected to pass,” he says. But that’s not true of women, “and I have a problem with that,” he adds. “I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with that structure.”
