By Ray Starmann

US Defense Watch and other media outlets have been covering the Ranger School records story since late September.

Here’s a summary of the story until now:

Congressman Steve Russell (R, OK) contacted the Secretary of the Army on September 15, 2015, and requested the Ranger School records for the first two female graduates, Captain Kristen Griest and First Lieutenant Shaye Haver.

Russell, a Ranger School graduate, who served 21 years in the Army and earned a Bronze Star with Valor device, was elected to Congress in 2014. He led 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment during its deployment to Tikrit, Iraq.

The Secretary of the Army, John McHugh, stalled Russell for nine days and then asked for an extension to obtain documents readily available.

The Army waited another two weeks to tell Russell the documents had been shredded.

The Army still refuses to tell anyone what the school’s policy is for the storage and destruction of Ranger School records.

The Army still refuses to tell the media why they shredded Griest’s and Haver’s records.

The Army refuses to tell the media what they are doing with the third female graduate, Major Lisa Jaster’s records.

The Army now refuses to send Congressman Russell the so-called “Green Cards” for the female Rangers. The Green Cards are basically a report card on how any Ranger School graduate performed, in a practice dating back to 1952, the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade keeps a Ranger student’s Green Card, which verifies their attempt or successful completion of the course.

McHugh, who stepped down as secretary Nov. 1, likened it to a university transcript, which does not include “every test or paper that a student completes within a course.”

McHugh also wrote that the Army cannot provide the Green Cards for the Ranger students “outside of a formal request from an appropriate oversight committee, as the Privacy Act would require almost full redaction of all information on each document, rendering them effectively useless.”

Russell is working with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the House Armed Services Committee to take necessary steps and obtain the records, according to a source in the congressman’s office.

In an interview last month with The Oklahoman, Russell stated what he had received from the Army by late October.

“Have you gotten the records that you sought?”

Russell: “Not from the Army. I’ve gotten nothing from them. In the second letter I got (last week) the Army said they can’t provide the records just yet and they reasserted the fact that the bulk of what I requested had been shredded and they were disappointed that I would suggest that they were up to nefarious activities.”

“Then they provided me an information paper that would try to get at some of what I requested. And this information paper provided a sampling of records. And then they provided an analysis of this sampling.”

“But they didn’t provide me the records to verify that sampling or verify their conclusions or even examine it.”

So, we have records shredded and now the Army refuses to send the Green Cards to Russell. Instead, Russell was given some type of half-baked white paper showing that women were performing just like men at Ranger School.

You don’t have to be Columbo or Sherlock Holmes to smell a rat. Something is rotten down at Fort Benning and the trail of stench leads all the way to the Pentagon.

It’s more than obvious that the Army is clearly hiding something, in order to placate the White House and their social engineering agenda. Think this couldn’t happen? Read the news today about the military doctoring intelligence reports to create the fiction that ISIS was on the run.

The Pentagon is chock full of moral cowards and lackeys these days.

The idea that the Army could be deliberately pushing women through Ranger School is not a popular topic among many currently serving military officers and even some veterans. I’ve been asked, “Why am I covering this story?” “Don’t you know it’s 2015?” Ah, 2015, as if female human beings have been given some altered DNA. Perhaps, Keanu Reeves met aliens that handed him some new technology to turn women into Xena Warrior Princesses. I’ve also been told that “I’m old school and things are different now.” They sure are; on a level that’s disastrous for the nation.

It’s senior officers who are driving the feminist train wreck, because they are simply too worried about their jobs and their retirement packages to speak up.

The troops know better. They always do. A sergeant in the Ranger Training Brigade at Fort Benning told me that the politically correct atmosphere in the Army was “suffocating.”

Any person who has knowledge of Ranger School, or current and former Ranger ops knows that what is happening at Ranger School is a complete farce. Yet, the Army expects us to believe that women are making it through one of the hardest military schools in the world. They also expect us to believe that 37 year old mommies are blood and guts Ranger School graduates.

Everyone has seen “Saving Private Ryan.” Tom Hank’s character, Captain John Miller, was a company commander in the 5th Ranger Battalion, which landed on Omaha Beach. Do you think any 37 year old mommies could handle that? Could 99.99% of women in the world handle that?

If 37 year old mommies had hit the beach with the 5th Ranger Battalion, “Wir alle werden Deutsch sprechen jetzt.“ We’d all be speaking German now and every Jew in Europe would have been murdered in the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler would have had the time to roll out his wonder weapons and Southern England would have been reduced to rubble by V-2 rockets. The fate of the free world was in the hands of the men of the 5th Ranger Battalion and others on D-Day. There will be other days like June 6, 1944, and this nation needs to be prepared.

Of course this argument is met with the usual “wars are high tech now” fallacy. Sure they are, just ask the guys who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones and nerds in front of a computer don’t find, fix and kill the enemy; period.

This country needs to understand that the White House has an agenda to allow women into the combat arms and special operations, even if it means destroying our national security.

The Obama administration is not a friend of the military. The Obama administration seeks to weaken our military. They may not understand how they are weakening it, but have no doubt about it, they are destroying the US military piece by piece, in a death of a 1,000 cuts.

This country cannot get a straight answer from the White House about anything. Have no doubt, the Boys at Benning are part of the conspiracy to persuade a nation ignorant of military policy into believing this nonsense.

Congressman Steve Russell and the House Armed Services Committee are the last hope for sanity to prevail and for our national security to remain intact.

Obviously, the Army’s plan is to keep stone-walling Russell until January, when Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will undoubtedly march in lockstep with the White House and authorize females to serve in the combat arms and special operations units.

When the day of reckoning comes and it will; it always does, the American public will demand to know the truth of why the US Army was destroyed on the field of battle.

By then it will be too late.