Can you describe a combat mission where doing differential equations in your head is more important than carrying a rucksack and shooting people? I’m coming up blank.
Regards,
Shodan
What if the group of people who are best at 1-7 are men, but the group who are best at 8-14 are women?
And what about a mission that requires surviving weeks on a low-calorie diet, moving very quietly, staying still for hours at a time, and making instant, correct decisions about whether a person presents a danger? A group of female Rangers can achieve that mission. A group of male Rangers would not - they don’t have one of the requirements.
I think it would be nice if we let the Rangers, with their expertise in the area of what-it-takes-to-be-a-good-Ranger, decide the appropriate requirements. Is that too wild of an idea?
FWIW, I’d be shocked if they prioritized able-to-survive-4-weeks-on-1,000-calories over able-to-ruck-15-miles-with-200-pounds-of-equipment. I suspect they have to do stuff along the lines of the latter far more frequently than the former.
I think a better analogy is that it’s sort of like professional sports. You can certainly find a group of women who can do all the requirements required to play football. But you aren’t going to find a group that can do it as well as the New England Patriots.
Russian snipers decided the appropriate requirements for being snipers, which included “not being female”. Until losses to the Germans made it important for the women to start fighting too. And then (surprise!) it was discovered that women made very good snipers.
I posted figures above showing that female snipers were several orders of magnitude more effective than male snipers. But if you’d asked a sniper team prior to WW2 if women would make good snipers, they’d have said something like “hurr durr, tampons”
People stick with what they know until they’re forced to change. Sure, upper body strength was important in the days when we beat each other to death with sticks. Probably less important nowadays.
A Presidential commission after the Gulf War found that female soldiers were three times more likely to be un-deployable, largely due to pregnancy. I did some research and men don’t have that problem.
Regards,
Shodan
I agree. I’m having a hard time understanding the outrage. Never in my lifetime have I lay awake at night worried that our armed forces were unable to do their job. I’m sure female Rangers, SEALS, and pilots will be able to get the job done at about the same percentages as their male counterparts.
Interesting paper. I only skimmed it, but I noticed the following:
The Army has no official position on the issue, but unofficially an Army readiness officer says that pregnancy does not impact readiness in the aggregate since less than 1% of the Army is non-deployable due to pregnancies at any point in time. … A recent Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) research paper also concluded that pregnancy does not impact military readiness
So…
Oh, so now you’re interested in ranking them according to utility? I thought all you wanted to do was to say that having all qualities was better than not having them all, which is both obvious and trivially true. If you recognize that a person isn’t going to have all traits at maximum ability, then we’re back to my point, which is that the current priorities built when only men were eligible may not truly reflect the best priorities for skills for the mission.
I would say it seems to me as if the Russian army effectively had a higher “entry requirement” for women to become snipers than men in WW2. If you consider the total pool of Russian men and women who might have become snipers, I’d assume that they were roughly equal, and both produced 2 “top 10 deadliest snipers.” But many more of the women who were less-deadly shots didn’t become Russian army snipers, that’s all.
Part of the problem here - beyond the issue of which are the correct criteria for success as Rangers - is that some of the criteria you’ve apparently inserted (post #33) as possibly favoring women are not easily testable. You’ve picked some criteria that women are stereotypically assumed to be better at on average, but it’s very difficult if not impossible to test individuals for these things.
So use of those criteria - again, even assuming that those are the more important ones - is more likely to be along the lines of “let’s ease up on physical standards for women because they’ll be better at negotiating with non-enemy combatants” than a gender neutral test for negotiating with non-enemy combatants that both men and women would take.
Really, you don’t think that being caught in hostile territory with limited supplies is something that Rangers need to worry about? Yes they do test food deprivation.
The thing is that it is possible that both are equally important, but we have a choice as to where to place the limits.
Suppose we have the following options of where to set limits
Task ruck sacking:
Option A: 200 lbs pack 1% males succeed 0% females succeed
Option B: 150 lbs pack 10% males succeed 1% females succeed
Deprivation survival:
Option A: 1000 calorie diet 0% males succeed 1% females succeed
Option B: 1500 caloire diet 1% males succeed 5% females succeed.
If both tasks are of equal importance and you just want to choose the top 1% for the job which limits do you choose. Sure you wold like it if the recruits could survive on a 1,000 calorie diet but if all your recruits are male and you set the bar so high you wouldn’t get any recruits. So you are forced to only require Option B for the deprivation. But as far as Ruck sacking goes, you can push the limits and require 200 lbs to get the very best recruit.
Now a woman who could do 150lbs of ruck sacking and but manage survive on 1,000 calories might be just as good a ranger as the other guy but there is no way to test it given a system that is designed to find the best male candidates.
Here’s an article from Army Times that describe women doing as well or in some cases better than their male counterparts.
They claim they are going through the exact same course. So if that is the case, I wonder what that does to some people’s argument.
I’m surprised it’s only 3x then.
Although there’s certainly an element of selection bias in these numbers, that can’t account for all the difference. Consider that the vast majority of Russian males were required to serve. Since snipers have higher survival rates than infantry, and therefore there would be competition for those positions, it makes sense that the group of Russian male snipers would include the best male snipers in the country.
On the other hand, only a tiny majority of Russian women even attempted to join. Sure, many of the women who attempted to join would include those who thought they would be good snipers, but the total talent pool wasn’t nearly as deep as the male talent pool.
Given the disparity in outcome, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that women have an advantage as snipers (though I’m willing to consider alternative information).
I don’t know that there was as much competition for those positions as you seem to think. I’m not even sure snipers have a higher survival rate than infantry. Do you have a cite for either of those assertions?
The bias is in how you present the numbers of the top 10, which isn’t composed of only Russians.
You could also say that from the top 10, 8 are men and only 2 are women.
I am not interested in ranking them at all.
You identify a mission or set of missions that you want the Rangers to do. You identify the qualities that are necessary to fulfill that mission. Then you find the people with the highest level of those qualities. When it turns out that only men have those qualities at the highest level, you do not then complain that maybe women are better at qualities that have nothing to do with the mission.
That’s why I asked for an example of a combat mission, of the sort you want an elite group of soldiers to achieve, where differential equation-solving would increase the likelihood of success. Maybe women are better at things that don’t make for a good Ranger. So what? We are talking about who makes the best Rangers, and it turns out it ain’t women. Because they can’t do the things that are relevant.
If those priorities are wrong, one would expect that in training for the real thing, and war-game simulations of the real thing, women would succeed more than they do. Do you have any evidence for this?
Regards,
Shodan
From your cite
Regards,
Shodan
The standards, if they are fair, should not be adjusted. Does that mean most women won’t cut it?
Probably.
So, either train harder, or accept that you won’t be a Ranger.
A quick point that I don’t believe has been mentioned yet in the thread. We need to differentiate between two somewhat alike-sounding terms that aren’t interchangeable.
The course we’re talking about here is the Ranger Course or School. (I’ve seen both used.) From the horse’s mouth, “The Ranger Course is a mentally and physically challenging school that develops functional skills directly related to units whose mission is to engage the enemy in close combat and direct fire battle.” Per that link, passage is about 40%. I’m not sure how they count recycled students—students who have to repeat one or more of the Phases within the Course. Many successful graduates of the Course nevertheless for a variety of reasons, had to repeat one or more of the Phases before finally graduating.
Graduating is a de facto (and controversial) requirement for promotion to high rank within the Infantry Branch of the US Army, and that’s the reason why women have petitioned to be able to attend the Ranger Course. Graduates who are in the Army have earned the right to wear the "Ranger Tab"on their uniform. Members of other Services like the Navy or from foreign armed services are also allowed to attend, space permitting, and those graduates may or may not be allowed to wear the Tab on their visible uniform. Someone like Bear Nenno (who I’m surprised hasn’t chimed in here yet) can explain what weight other US Army Branches like Armor or Artillery place on successful completion of the Ranger Course.
All of the preceding dealing with the Ranger Course is different from membership in the 75th Ranger Regiment, a US Army Infantry unit within the Joint Special Operations Command. Graduates of the Ranger Course get to wear the Ranger Tab, but aren’t “Rangers.” Members of the 75th Ranger Regiment are known as “Rangers” and wear, among other things, a “Ranger Scroll.” Interestingly, passage of the Ranger Course is not absolutely required for membership within the Regiment, though my understanding is that in practice nearly every member within the combat arms sections of the Regiment does pass the Course either before entering the Regiment, or shortly thereafter. Membership within the Regiment, like every other part of Special Operations, is very selective, demanding, and expensive. Ranger School is usually part of that selection process.
So, just because these women passed Ranger School doesn’t mean they’re Rangers, per se, and IMHO it is highly unlikely either of them will ever become members of the Regiment or other Special Operations units. Of course, five years ago, I would’ve thought it unlikely that women would pass Ranger School, so who knows.
Anyway, it does mean though they passed one of the most grueling leadership schools the US Army has to offer. And it would be a shame if the Army watered down the standards of that school in order to gain a victory for social justice.