Correction accepted. If and when a woman makes it thru the training, she can be a Ranger. If she can meet the same standards that Rangers have to meet.
Close. We are talking about the factors that lead to Rangers being successful. Whether or not women can meet those factors is irrelevant, because the only criterion is success at the kind of missions the Rangers are intended to fulfill. Not the sex ratios - only if you have the best.
You seem to be going back to the idea of ranking the factors, which I previously rejected. Why should we consider one factor, surviving on low rations, as more important than carrying a 50 lb. rucksack for twenty miles and managing a boat and mountain climbing and close combat, just because women might be able to do that one thing?
You need Rangers who are the best at all the relevant factors that make for success in the mission. Not just one - a team of Rangers who can live for weeks on low rations but sucks at everything else is not likely to succeed at their mission.
Sure it’s possible. All you need to do is show that there are lots of Ranger missions where surviving on low rations is more important than any other factor.
It’s Normandy in 1944. You got two teams of Rangers. One is the best you can find at handling boats, climbing mountain walls, shooting, and close combat. The other is really good at dieting. Who do you send in?
The various military branches have determined that a person needs to be able to perform such and such physical tasks and pass such and such psychological tests and maintain such and such metrics. Any person, regardless of sex, should not be allowed into the military until they can meet these standards. The corollary, though, is that any person, regardless of sex, should be allowed into the military as long as they meet these standards.
We shouldn’t have women in the military just to have women in the military. Neither should we keep women out of the military just to keep women out of the military.
This is a profound misunderstanding of what I’m saying, but I’m not convinced you even want to understand my argument. Do you, or do you just want to win?
If it’s the latter, give yourself the trophy. If you want to understand what I’m saying, lemme know, and I’ll try to explain it one more time.
Some years ago, I was reading one of the outdoor magazines in which the writer, an active outdoorsman, was imbedded with some type of special forces trainees for a week. He participated in most of the training with them, but I recall that one of the instructors told him that the demands of much of the training was more about separating the people would would not quit, no matter what, than the actual task.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the difference between being able to ruck, say, 90# for 90mi, and 100# for 100mi was less mission critical that the difference quitting before you drop, and dropping before you quit.
No, women should not be given special treatment in order to become Rangers.
All jobs should go to the person most qualified. You know, because that’s how everyone who is not a white male is treated when it comes to important jobs. Said no one, ever.
To me, the question is why the requirements are there and that tough.
If that is what is required to do the job, then no, the requirements shouldn’t be lowered.
However, if there is an element of “well, this is what the requirements have been, and they were written for men in order to weed out other men - and it isn’t really necessary to carry that much weight or be able to write 'God Bless the USA in the snow with your pee” then the requirements should be reviewed.
Firefighters, for instance, have to carry a ton of weight - their equipment, plus being able to lift people out of burning buildings - the weight requirement is there for a good reason. Now, no firefighter is going to be able to carry himself, all his equipment, and a 300 lb man out of a burning building, but its reasonable that you be able to lift some amount of weight, even with all the equipment on.
Women have physical gifts (as a rule) that men don’t have (as a rule) - higher pain tolerance. They are usually more flexible. They tend to have better balance. If the ranger requirements were doing backflips on a balance beam with a hairline fracture in the ankle, there would be more female Rangers than male Rangers. The question would then be “why do we make that a requirement - is it because they need to be able to do that - or is it because they can do that so we’ve designed the job around the capability.”
Under the current regime, however, we consider being able to carry 50# for twenty miles, all by itself, as more important than being able to survive on 1000 calories for a month. The latter, in fact, is never even considered. Why not? (Further, as has been pointed out above, if a soldier can survive on a third less food, then the burden the group must pack is corresponding less.)
Similarly, the current regime doesn’t test for “best able to negotiate successfully with non-enemy combatants in order to achieve objectives more quietly and efficiently”; we’re looking for the best negotiators who can carry 65# for 16 miles in under 5 hours and 20 minutes. In other words, we’ve prioritized the packing ability above the negotiating ability. Why?
And as noted repeatedly, there’s a difference between “has Ranger tab” and “serves in elite special ops unit.” For those graduates of Ranger School who will never be part of the 75th Ranger Regiment, is the ability to tote 65# that distance in that time more important than other aspects of leadership, such as negotiating? On what evidence has the Army made that determination?
In 1940, for example, Henry Stimson, at that time Secretary of War, discussed with Roosevelt the demands of civil rights leaders for integrating the armed forces; he urged the President not to place “too much responsibility on a race which was not showing initiative in battle.” While that is not an argument based on physical incapability, it’s certainly asserting that this entire group of people lack what it takes to be combat soldiers.
For that matter, as late as 1949, the Chamberlin Board (a panel of senior officers appointed by Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray to consider racial policy, headed by Lt. Gen. Stephen Chamberlin) recommended retaining a rigid policy of segregation with a careful regulation of the percentage of blacks, because to do otherwise would cause a deterioration in combat efficiency and force blacks into competition they were unprepared to face. Does that sound sort of familiar?
The real issue here appears to be that the course is being used as a feeder/gate in to senior leadership.
I know next to nothing about the Army, but if senior leaders regularly have to perform feats of great strength, maybe that make sense. If senior leaders are mostly sitting behind desks, however, they need to either make it so that women are able to pass it, or remove it as a barrier to rising up.
Also, for goodness sake everyone, periods can be managed in a way that doesn’t require hauling tampons around. Contraceptives can stop a period, and menstrual cups weigh nothing and require maybe 30 seconds of maintainence a day.
Should women be given special treatment in order to become Rangers?
I think, no.
No one should be given special treatment.
The job requires certain things, no ifs ands or buts, male or female you either meet all requirements or you do not.
That would be like me asking them to give special treatment to me because i’m not tall enough to do the job.
My feelings or perception of fair mean a whole lot of nothing when someone dies because an exception was made for me.
Let me ask this question, which I have seen touched on but not directly answered in the thread (if I overlooked it, I apologize).
What percentage of the graduates of the Ranger School actually go on to serve in the Ranger Regiment (or indeed in any special ops or “elite” unit)?
From preceding comments, they don’t all do so, but are we talking 5% or 95% or somewhere in between? As the percentage declines, the relationship between the extreme demands of the school and the actual duties of graduates becomes more tenuous, so do we know real figures?
Here’s a rephrasing of what LHOD was saying, I think:
At some point the standard became “you must be able to carry X pounds Y miles”. Where did that standard come from? Did it come because someone reviewed typical ranger gear and typical ranger missions and added in some safety margin and decided that carrying X pounds Y miles was essential for successfully completing ranger missions? If so, that seems reasonable to apply fairly to men and women.
But it’s at least possible that the origin of X and Y was not the above. Rather, someone just came up with very very tough X and Y to weed out all but the most dedicated, strongest, toughest men. That is, they just wanted the 1% of “toughest” men, so they looked at some charts and graphs of how far average men could carry weight, stuck a line way out near the far right of the bell curve and said “OK, let’s only accept guys better than this”. In that case, revisiting the standard makes a lot more sense.
And someone asked what team of rangers to send to scale the cliffs on D-Day. And I think the answer to that question is that ideally you’d have different teams with different skill sets. Your best squad of cliff-face-climbing rangers might be all men. But your best squad of month-long-trip-through-occupied-France-to-rendezvous-with-the-resistance rangers might include some women.
All of that said, it certainly should not be the case that standards are changed not after considerable thought by experts; but simply to appease the sensibilities of a higher up who happens to be visiting. And, frankly, I’m somewhat skeptical that that’s what happened.
(For instance, suppose that a woman is just barely on the edge of able to qualify. Well, she’ll probably fail a particular test a bunch of times before passing it. That’s just how things like that work… it’s not a sign that when she finally did pass it it musta been rigged.)
Because on the kinds of missions the Rangers are expected to fulfill, you are a lot more likely to shoot people than to bargain with them. For those missions, we want Rambo, not Dale Carnegie.
Besides, if you kill some people, it’s easier to negotiate with the rest.
Let’s start by defining what kinds of missions graduates of Ranger School (which is NOT the same group as members of the Ranger Regiment) are actually expected to fulfill, and is it necessarily the same group of missions that previous graduates were expected to fulfill?
To be 100% clear: I don’t have intimate knowledge of Ranger protocol, by any stretch of the imagination. My posts in this thread lay out a theoretical framework, and a way to ensure that sexism isn’t hindering mission success. I completely acknowledge that, after conducting the sort of analysis I’m calling for, it may turn out that priorities don’t need to change.
But if this analysis isn’t conducted, mission success may be unnecessarily impacted.
The fact that higher-ups in the military are keeping a very close eye on this makes me think they’re doing the sort of analysis I think is important. I’m not super-impressed by people who deny that such analysis is important.
This sort of flip comment is something that I suspect is a common actual belief among rangers, who aren’t selected much for their ability to negotiate with non-combatants. While in the short term it may lead to success, the US (and other powerful militaries, admittedly) has a long history of making enemies through just such thinking. If ranger school emphasizes not pissing off people who don’t need pissing off, that might be better for national interests, and for the next group of US soldiers who come through, or near, the same community.
It’s a fact of nature that women can’t perform on the same level physically as men, and women should be barred from entryto ranger school for that reason alone. However, there’s a deeper problem that I don’t see getting much attention- the fact that women dissolve social dynamics in all-male groups. When you integrate women into all male groups, that group will become less cohesive and operate less effectively. The men will become less cooperative and more hostile towards each other. Also, inevitably, the women will start demanding for rules and policies to be enforced that make them feel more “comfortable,” and further their own interests. It happens every time. But in the 21st century Western wold, and especially America, we’ve reached a point of total confusion and delusion about the nature of the sexes. We deliberately lie to and delude ourselves to protect women’s feelings and to prop up the fantasy of “equality.”
Placing women in combat roles is an unwise move, even if they can meet the physical standards. A soldier cannot be reduced down to a set of numbers on a PT chart.