5 women drop out of U.S. Army Ranger School after second chance

All five women who were given a second chance to complete Army Ranger School have officially dropped out and will not move forward to the next phase of the course, officials from Fort Benning, Georgia said Friday. 

A total of 195 students from the class — all of them men — will move on to Dahlonga, Georgia, for the mountain phase of the program, Army Times reported Friday.

Three women and two male students were given the opportunity to start Ranger School over with the next class on June 21, officials said, Army Times reported. This is referred to as a Day One Recycle, a normal course procedure that’s used when students struggle with one aspect of the course but excel at others. 

The other five women, who started Ranger School April 20 and were recycled back into the Darby Phase along with 101 of their male classmates on May 8, will return to their units and will not be recycled back again, the newspaper reported.

A total of 29 students were dropped from the program for failing to meet the standards of the first phase. Nineteen female and 381 male soldiers started Ranger School on April 20, the newspaper reported.

The women were part of a one-time integration experiment for the notoriously difficult program. The assessment is part of a wider effort to determine whether and how to open combat arms jobs to women. Until now, Ranger School has only been open to men. 

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But Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said Thursday that the Army is considering conducting more assessments in the future. 

“We’ll probably run a couple more pilots,” Mr. Odierno said, Army Times reported. “It’s been a real success for us, and we’ll see how it goes from there.” 

The students that were cut Friday did not meet the standard for a number of reasons, including leading patrols, poor peer evaluations, too many negative spot reports, or a combination of all three, Army Times reported.