After nearly four months of grueling training, two female soldiers will make history as the first to graduate the Army’s elite Ranger School.
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The two women will stand alongside 94 of their male colleagues Friday when they are recognized for successfully completing the 62-day course at a ceremony in Fort Benning, Georgia.
Alas, there’s a catch: the two female graduates still can’t apply to join the 75th Ranger Regiment, an even more selective Special Operations group that is still male-only. “Each Ranger School graduate has shown the physical and mental toughness to successfully lead organizations at any level”, said Secretary of the Army John McHugh.
These two women are the first to graduate from Ranger training since the Army announced women could participate in January 2015. The students were forced to train with minimal food and little sleep and had to learn how to operate in the woods, mountains and swamplands.
Only 3 percent of the Army earns the elite Army Ranger tab, it is reported that each branch of the Military will look at how they can incorporate women into these roles. The Ranger Regiment is a special direct-action raid force that is currently closed to female soldiers.
The Army had faced resistance to allowing women to serve in combat units, but since such experience is a factor in promotions and job advancement in the military, women have had greater difficulty than men in moving up to the top ranks, officials have said.
“The feedback I’ve gotten with these women is how incredibly prepared they are”, Retiring Army Chief of Staff Gen Raymond T Odierno told the Washington Post. Including them in the course was part of a broader effort to assess if and how women can be integrated into combat operations. The two unnamed women, both from West Point and who will be graduating from the Ranger School on Aug. 21, were able to complete nine weeks of intensive physical training over days that lasted for 20 hours each.
The Pentagon lifted the ban on women in combat in 2012, but kept other front-line jobs off-limits. But senior Army officials have insisted that is not the case, and opened Ranger School to media for a few days during each phase to underscore the point and allow Ranger instructors and others involved in their evaluation to speak. Many women already were fighting on the front lines in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Barno said there has long been resistance to integrating the infantry, but he considers many of the objections to be based on flawed cultural arguments that men and women cannot coexist in a battlefield environment.
