Davidson: Band of sisters: Elite group of female Army Rangers battled under harrowing conditions

There is an article in the New York Times written by Janine Davidson entitled “Band of sisters: Elite group of female Army Rangers battled under harrowing conditions“. Davidson claims to be a Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Air Force C-130 and C-17 pilot. She writes about a book, Ashley’s War about Army Lieutenant Ashley White and the “cultural support teams” (CST) in Afghanistan. The team were a group of women who accompanied special operations forces on their “hearts and minds” missions among Afghans.

Davidson calls the CSTs’ training “an abbreviated Army Ranger course”. For someone who claims to have been in the military, that’s a pretty ignorant statement. There’s no such thing as an abbreviated Army Ranger course. It may have been an introduction to infantry training, but it didn’t approach the intensity of Ranger training – and there’s no way to abbreviate Ranger training. I know Davidson want to slowly immerse the culture into the idea that women are Rangers, even though there aren’t any female Rangers yet.

I don’t deny that the CSTs trained hard. I know at least one of the women who went through that training – she’s rock hard and she had already been awarded a Purple Heart for her time in combat before she went to the CSTs. But, I’m sure that she wouldn’t claim to have been through “an abbreviated Army Ranger course”.

Davidson complains that women were sent into combat with ill-fitting equipment designed to be worn by men, and she complains that the women weren’t as well-trained as the men making them a “burden” on the male troops with them.

It is appalling that the CSTs were asked to conduct such missions without the tactical training that would have prepared them to defend themselves. Inadequate training made them, by design, a “burden,” since they needed to be defended when the team was attacked. Such scenarios artificially reinforce arguments about how women in combat will undermine “unit cohesion.”

Well, as the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course experiment has demonstrated, women aren’t made that way. Combat training is necessarily demanding physically – it’s how the casualties of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War have been kept relatively low, compared to past conflicts like Vietnam. The objective of the whole CST program was to get American women face-to-face with Afghan women, it wasn’t to make American women hard body, lean and mean life-takers.

The men in those units knew their job was to protect the women on CSTs while they did their cultural thing – not to reinforce stereotypes. Just like when politicians go among the masses they are protected by personal security details which allows those politicians to perform their function in relative security. Should we require politicians to go through the same training as their bodyguards? No, it would distract from their particular function, just like requiring CSTs to go through Ranger or Special Forces training would distract from the CSTs function.

But, Davidson’s main concern in this discussion, of course, is the social engineering aspect. Being a veteran herself, she should know that the mission should transcend the petty arguments among the activists, but, obviously, the money and the politics are more important to her than the obligation that veterans have to the currently engaged force. She called the CSTs “Rangers” for all the wrong reasons.

Category: Military issues