U.S. Army Soldiers practice battle drill movements for the Ranger Training Assessment Course (RTAC) at Camp Butler on Fort Benning, Ga., April 4, 2015. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Paul Sale
All 8 Women Fail To Advance To Next Phase of Ranger School
But all eight, along with 101 male soldiers, earned the right to restart the first training phase next week.
All eight of the women trying to move into the second phase of the Army’s elite Ranger school failed to move ahead to the school’s second, or mountain, phase. However, all qualified to restart the initial, or Darby, phase, Army officials said Friday.
Just under half of the soldiers vying to move ahead did so, according to Gary Jones, a spokesman for the Army's Maneuver Center of Excellence. Tomorrow, 115 soldiers, all male, will start the mountain phase at Dahlonega, Georgia. Meanwhile, 101 male soldiers will join the eight women restarting the Darby phase at Fort Benning, Ga., on May 14. Thirty-five more soldiers, all men, washed out completely and will return to their units, officials said.
This was the first gender-integrated Ranger course, a one-off experiment launched as part of a military-wide effort to assess the remaining barriers to full gender integration in the military. The two-month course, one of the toughest in the military, began April 20 with 19 female and 381 male soldiers, Army Times reported. Of those, 141 washed out before today's reckoning.