This the third “Lines of Departure” column in a series about women entering Ranger School. Read the first two essays here and here.

Some of the heroic dishonesty coming soon is going to involve the idea of standards, usually of physical standards, because even among soldiers who know better – or who, at least, ought to know better – that’s the thing they find easiest to explain to the great unwashed masses of civilians and politicians, in or out of uniform. Some of that dishonesty is going to come from both sides, too, from the mindless ignorance of feminist “anything you can do I can do better” to the contrary mixing up of individuals and average I find on my own side of the debate.1

We’re really talking about three things here. There are physical standards for individuals that cannot be gotten around. There are physical standards for individuals that can be gotten around by use of the group or changing the group. There are physical standards that are used as stand-ins for character or for health.2

For an example of the latter, imagine taking one hundred reasonably fit, men and women, each, forming them into segregated groups, and running them, in ranks, for the distant horizon, at a fairly slow, long endurance, pace, maybe eight minutes per mile for the men, nine for the women. At some point in the run two-thirds of the men will have dropped out. At some point in time, two-thirds of the women will have dropped out. The distance covered by the women will be less, but insofar as a death run can measure character, the character of the remaining men and women will be similar.

“What? Women drop out sooner on an easier run?” Yes, they will, and that is the primary reason why the APFT, the Army Physical Fitness Test, has a lower standard on the two mile run for women than for men. Indeed, Google around for the Army Physical Fitness Test Scorecard, DA Form 705, May 2010.3 Flip to Page 5 and look at the left hand column. A 20-year-old man, to max the run, must do two miles in thirteen minutes. A 20-year-old woman, on the other hand, need only run the two miles in 15:36 to get a max, and can get a very respectable 95 out of 100 if she does it in 16:06. A 16:06 time, for a 20-year-old man, garners less than sixty points, hence is abject failure. Pushups are similar, with a max score for a 20-year-old women being exactly the same as a minimum passing for a man. Indeed, one pushup less and the man fails, while the woman gets awarded a highly commendable 98 out of 100. Only on sit ups does the Army presume equality.

If our objective is to measure health and strength for a sex, subjectively, and not for objective combat, that’s probably fine. If women are inherently weaker (PC pieties aside, they are weaker, overwhelmingly, and this is not a social construct), and we’re looking to measure character, insofar as it can be measured by endurance, then different standards are all right, too, because the objective conditions are different.

But that’s not all we’re trying to do. A machine gun or mortar weighs X or Y. Ammunition sufficient to feed them through a fight and until they can be resupplied weighs W or Z, plus or minus. These are objective things that are not responsibly changeable by any reference to any liberal piety whatsoever. What can be changed, though, is the size of the unit to increase their ability to carry X, Y, W, and Z, either by splitting the load more or by allowing more frequent passing off of heavy loads to allow the troops to rest.4

Not everything, however, can be gotten around that easily. There are places where it isn’t possible to increase the numbers of soldiers to spread the load. An artilleryman once explained to me that a ninety-eight pound 155mm shell still has to be lifted into storage racks even on the most up to date self-propelled howitzer we have and getting two people to lift one shell overhead in the space allowed is not that easy (read: no way). No, please spare us mention of the automation in the M992 ammo carrier; there the shells must be lifted even higher to get them into the storage racks. And that’s not counting when the rounds must be power lifted from flat racks on the ground to feed the insatiable maws of the guns, where it really isn’t practical or even possible to use a two person lift. Similarly, a tank’s loader must pump the more than fifty pound projectiles into the breach at an odd angle, at a very fast rate, or die along with the rest of the crew. There’s no room for a second loader. Only so many people can get close enough to a filing cabinet to lift it to the back of a five ton. That’s one of the reasons why, at one point in time, an Army program to assign people to jobs and training by their physical strength was strangled in the cradle; under an objective evaluation, women couldn’t even be clerk typists without men to do the heavy lifting.5

That last kind of problem will not generally arise in Ranger School.

*****

What do those things mean to Ranger School and women in Ranger School?

The first is that, because they’re physically weaker, they don’t need to go through exactly the same program as men for the same leadership and character development. It is my considered opinion, in fact, that no woman alive could go through the course I went through, or the somewhat changed course that came along later. I might concede the possibility as an intellectual matter, but, in fact, I do not believe it. Therefore, while the cruelty and hardship to which male Ranger students are subjected is needful, for women it will be pointless and excessive. THEY WILL ALL FAIL IF THEY ARE SUBJECTED TO IT. Therefore, the women will not be subjected to the same experience as the men standing in ranks on either side. The men will despise them for that. Indeed, I can think of no surer way to make men who might previously have been somewhat open to the notion of female military equality simply toss that idea as so much dangerously PC nonsense.

The Army, for reasons of progressive aesthetics unburdened by truth, facts, or reality, is probably not going to assign women to a squad in Ranger School by weight or by APFT scores if scored as male. So, unless the course weakens for everybody, the men of the squad that gets two women in place of two men is going to hate those women. I don’t mean dislike. I don’t mean look down on. I don’t mean despise, though they will despise them, too. I mean hate.

There will be reasons, sound reasons, for the hatred, too. They’re going to hate the women for the extra burden placed on the men in what is already a maximum feasible misery and burden experience. The peer reviews, which is where the students get to punish those they think are not pulling their weight or endangering their own chances to pass, will reflect that hate. Therefore, the peer reviews must go and will go, never mind what a valuable tool they are.

Except that none of those things will happen more than once or, at most, twice. After the first class or two, what will happen is that the “advisors and observers,” supported and egged on by radical feminists and leftists in general, will recommend all kinds of changes to advance the cause of female military equality, most or all of which will be acted upon. Everything I wrote about in the first column in this series, on Ranger School as the soul of the Army, will be changed to accommodate women. Loads will be lightened. Rations and sleep will be increased. PT standards will be reduced to the not very impressive. Distances will be reduced. Harassment, even the horribly friendly kind, will change to positive but gentle nurturing. No one will wake up from a nightmare in a war zone and feel relief that, at least it’s not as bad as Ranger School. No leaders – male or female – will be prepared to lead in war nearly as well as they could be.

So we will lose. We will lose battles and skirmishes we didn’t need to. We will lose men and women we didn’t need to. And if we finally hang the tabless bitch responsible, like Twain with regard to Cecil Rhodes, I’ll buy a piece of the rope, for a keepsake.

__________

1 I say, “debate,” but be serious; where women’s rights, prerogatives, and advantages are concerned, no meaningful debate is permitted.

2 There’s a fourth nobody wants to talk about: There are physical standards that can be gotten around by either abusing or bribing some members of the group. My favorite example of this was reported to me by a friend. It seems a US Army female truck driver in Germany couldn’t change her flat tire, so she offered to blow and, in fact, blew two infantry privates from my friend’s platoon and they changed the tire. I understand the tire got changed, but that’s no way to run an army or select people to drive trucks.

3 Or I can save you the trouble: https://www.apd.army.mil/pub/eforms/pdf/a705.pdf

4 Note, here, that I am not addressing the justifiability of paying five or six women to do the work of four men, as has happened with female firefighters in the Air Force.

5 I refer to MEPSCAT, go Google it.

Tom Kratman is a retired infantry lieutenant colonel, recovering attorney, and science fiction and military fiction writer. His latest novel, The Rods and the Axe, is available from Amazon.com for $9.99 for the Kindle version, or $25 for the hardback. A political refugee and defector from the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, he makes his home in Blacksburg, Virginia. He holds the non-exclusive military and foreign affairs portfolio for EveryJoe. Tom’s books can be ordered through baen.com.

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