We are disagreeing on the fact, that in MOST instances, people have to go through the Ranger school in order to serve in the Ranger regiment.
You seem to think that they don’t, when it has been shown, even by your own cite, that in MOST cases they DO have to attend the school in order to serve in the Ranger unit.
The criticism has been that letting women get ranger tabs is going to endanger the mission of the Rangers. My point is that Rangers School is not how we pick Rangers. We pick them using Ranger Assessment and Selection Program - Wikipedia
Ranger School is no more a part of the selection criteria for Rangers than Jump School.
Ranger School is a leadership school not a commando school.
I agree, jocks respect jocks in a way that they do not respect unathletic people. And I mentioned earlier in the thread that Army Infantry seems to be more macho than most other elements of the army but there surely there are women like private Velasquez in the Army who are sufficiently physically fit to earn the respect of the average infantry grunt.
I don’t diagree with that at all. I was pointing out that some rangers don’t have their ranger tab to show that ranger school is not a prerequisite to becoming a ranger. It is not part of the selection process.
But not to join.
IOW, ranger school is not really part of the selection process.
Basically, ALL the arguments we have been hearing about how horrible it is that we let women get their ranger tabs has been based on the erroneous assumption that Ranger School is how we select Rangers and letting women get ranger tabs will lead to dead soldiers or something. My point is that these people are wrong, Ranger School is not part of the selection criteria. Ranger School is a leadership school. We make Rangers go to Ranger School but that is not how we select Rangers. We have a separate process for that.
At the risk of introducing actual research into the discussion 
Load Carriage in Military Operations: A Review of Historical, Physiological, Biomechanical and Medical Aspects (2010) (8.9 MB pdf) - “This monograph presents a comprehensive overview of research on soldier load carriage.”
There’s a lot of interesting data on what has been a pretty important area of study for light forces for a very long time. There’s a two paragraph section on gender differences (emphasis added by me):
It offers some prospect of improving female Soldier performance through improved equipment design and fielding to support their different physiques. That’s a way to potentially increase the pool of female Soldiers that can meet standards without a lowering of the current standards. Still men are faster and walk differently (even correcting for size and body composition) under the same loads. It might be too much to correct completely through different equipment.
How many decades do you suppose it will be before we have some type of robot that can traverse any environment a human soldier can? Boston Dynamics has all kinds of locomotion designs that are most of the way there today, and the latest models are far more efficient and use batteries instead of noisy engines.
With machine vision - as demoed in the real world with the Tesla autopilot and google’s prototype autonomous vehicles - you could quite feasibly make the robot be able to recognize weapons held by enemy fighters and thus follow the RoE by only engaging those who are actively fighting and not surrendering. You could presumably develop reasonably good automated base mobility, where it can put it’s feet in the right locations on stairs and open doors.
Yes, for the foreseeable timeline, human operators would still be needed to oversee these land-drones, communicating via mesh network and satellite radios - but that’s what you need.
That’s what you need instead of airborne soldiers. You need a weapon you can parachute in after a flight aboard a missile or plane, and essentially it storms enemy held areas, killing anyone meeting RoE conditions with superhumanly quick reactions. It’s a 1 way mission - the moment it runs out of munitions or battery life or takes significant functional damage, it would self destruct, melting the key components with thermite to prevent recovery of the technology.
How long do you suppose it will be before we have something like this. 20 years? 50? It would be pretty ignorant to say never. So airborne soldiers are just a temporary job, and so what if only men can do it?
[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
We make Rangers go to Ranger School
[/QUOTE]
So…which is it?
I thought the argument was that there are certain standards that had to be met in order to graduate Ranger School, and people feel those standards shouldn’t be lowered in order to allow women to graduate?
My head’s spinning now too. I’m not sure what Damuri Ajashi is saying, but everyone saying the word “Ranger” over and over again is making things confusing when it’s referring to a battalion, a couple schools, a tab, and soldiers.
I am a former Special Operations soldier (Not Ranger qualified or Special Forces qualified, to clarify) and I have no problem with allowing women to become Rangers. I hope standards aren’t lowered to allow women to pass but I’m not all bent out of shape by some girl making it into some He Man Women Haters Club either.
Rangers are graduates of US Army Ranger school and are authorized to wear the Ranger tab and are called Rangers. They also get an Identifier on their MOS to designate this status.
Rangers aren’t necessarily assigned to a Ranger regiment. Rangers can be helicopter pilots (I know one), assigned to other SOF units (I knew some), sent back to their current unit, or sent elsewhere. If a soldier gets a tab, that soldier is a Ranger and gets to be a Ranger for the rest of his/her career.
Graduates of Ranger Assessment and Selection aren’t yet Rangers but need to graduate this before being assigned to a Ranger regiment.
Ranger regiments, aka the 75th Ranger Regiment is a Special Operations unit with a commando mission that includes light infantry, recon, airborne, and air assault operations. Soldiers who are not Ranger tabbed can be assigned to the battalion but there is a requirement for them to pass Ranger school to remain there. I am not as familiar with the requirements here as I’m not as experienced with them but assume that the non-tabbed soldiers assigned there will get a lot of guff until they graduate.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that without lowering standards it is impossible for all but 1 woman in a million to pass. Remember, the top 10% of women just barely intersect with the bottom 5% of men in most measures of athletic prowess. If you need to be in the top 50% of men to pass Ranger school, the number of women on the far extreme right edge of their bell curve is going to be vanishingly small.
So small that it doesn’t even make sense for the government to bother, remember, it does cost them money to let women participate in a selection, especially since they are probably going to fail. Separate facilities, etc, and a high failure rate also costs money. If it costs the government, say, $25k per student they send to selection (might be more), and 50% of them pass, that means the number of ranger tabbed soldiers they can assign to units costs them 50k each. If only 1% of women pass, it means that it costs them 2.5 million dollars per ranger tabbed soldier resulting from the process. Not an efficient use of taxpayer dollars.
My estimate might be a little low - basic training is ~3 months and costs the government about 16k per soldier, but the Ranger school is going to have a lot more cadre per student, and some of the exercises are probably far more expensive in supplies and logistics. Also, every time someone gets hurt, that’s a medical bill the government has to pay to fix em.
So how do you feel about lowering standards if it’s impossible to pass for all but 1 in a million? After all, like posters north of here have said, the stated goal of the school is combat leadership, not “who’s the toughest man, worthy of fighting for our cause”.
That’s a very good point, I get that, and I’m with you on that. How can the Army say “This is a leadership course, you need to pass this leadership course to be an elite Army leader” yet disqualify many viable candidates based on gender.
So if they lower standards they get a bunch of people (not all who are against having women be Ranger qualified, mind you) say “Hey, I passed X, that’s not fair that they lower it to Y.” The correct answer to that is “Too bad, suck it up and drive on,” but that’s not an answer that will make anyone happy.
I see both sides but I am in favor of allowing anyone to take this school if he or she wants it. The trick, I guess, is to make it equitable but not necessarily equal. Which is something that everyone in favor is already arguing for.
First of all, I’ve said this a few times in the thread. But, nearly everyone alive in the population of the USA is unable to pass Ranger school. People are too old. Too young. Too short. Too tall. Too fat. Too thin. Hates sleep deprivation and cold/heat. Virtually everyone already is excluded - a tiny fraction of young male soldiers in peak condition who want the honor extremely badly can do it. No one else.
Since everyone is already excluded because they can’t pass, excluding a gender because they can’t pass isn’t really much of a step…
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Not sure what this has to do with Ranger tabs for women.
I’m sorry I mean Ranger assessment and selection program.
Can you point to a post that says we ought to lower standards?
ISTM that a lot (if not all) the arguments are coming from people who think that Ranger School is how we pick Army Rangers for the 7th Battalion Rangers.
I think I agree with everything you said.
Half to two thirds of the candidates for Ranger School pass.
If a woman can’t meet the standards then I agree but I don’t think anyone has said, we should apply different standards to women than men. Some have advocated taking another look at the program in light of its mission to train leaders and see if there might be more important elements of leadership than upper body strength. I don’t think anyone has advocated some sort of affirmative action for women in the military.
I am positive that there are women that can meet the physical requirements in every way. If we relaxed some of the upper body strength requirements, I bet the number gets a lot bigger. The question is whether that upper body strength is important enough in some way that you want to overlook extremely capable female leaders for the sake of upper body strength.
Isn’t the title of the thread “Should women be given special treatment in order to become Rangers?”
Doesn’t “special treatment” equate to lower standards for women?
This site Ranger School Stats says that the graduation rate from 2011-2015 was only 40.5%.
Yes I agree the question in the OP was a little bit of inadvertant well poisoning. AFAICT, noone has actually promoted lowering standards for women. The closest I have seen is a proposal to reevaluate whether the current standards are the right standards.