Guest Post by Karl Denninger
This sort of thing is dumb. Really dumb.
WASHINGTON — On Friday, the Army announced 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 confirmed this happened again. Three of the eight were invited to take the course over again in late June.
So what do they talk about? Some are talking about lowering standards.
As it stands today, Ranger School involves, say, “carrying 60 or 70 pounds on your back and walking for 12 miles – it’s not brain surgery,” Colonel Dempsey says.Despite this, “Any effort to change that is ‘changing the standard.’ ”The question, he adds, is: Are these standards a fair measure of the challenges of combat?Dempsey recalls being in violent Kunar province in Afghanistan and hiking up to the rugged Pakistan border. Along for the mission was a male first sergeant who was also a Ranger-tabbed Golden Gloves boxer. The unit had to stop for the first sergeant because he needed to rest during the strenuous march.
So we got a guy who was a Ranger and he got wiped out. You know what? I believe it. I recently did ~35lbs on my back up Blood Mountain in Georgia, then back down and then further down the trail to where we camped. Close to 10 miles total, nearly all of it with serious elevation changes in both directions and it was a bitch. I wasn’t done, but I’m not going to tell you that wasn’t hard. It was. And I wasn’t fighting a war; I was out for a nice stroll in the woods.
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