Posted on 01/03/2016 8:54:11 PM PST by pboyington
BJ Clinton hailed a female Navy pilot for breaking ground, then she crashed her plane & died.
That statement is false. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) qualification is much more difficult.
Also, this Ranger course gets you a (highly sought after) sleeve patch. It does not get you into the elite 75th Ranger Regiment, which is part of Special Forces.
Let me check with Paul Ryan on that and get back to you.
What is involved in “land navigation”? Do they perhaps have to carry a heavy load and navigate their way through obstacles?
“This is nothing new. When I went to OTS way back in 1985, we had a female in our flight who failed the fitness test three times.”
That was nothing new either. I took an Army MOS producing class in the early 70s. We had a black 2Lt in the class who failed the first phase three times. This phase was basic electricity which covered about what you would cover in the first two weeks of an electrical engineering class in college.
The failing 2Lt had a degree in electrical engineering from a major black university. He was granted the MOS but with non-troop duty annotated in his files. The school was told to pass him since he would be the first black to hold that MOS.
I just looked it up for myself:
Standard: Combined (Night into Day) land navigation test: Must find 4 of 5 points in five hours during examination in the Ranger course. Uniform is ACUs, Boots, Patrol Cap, with camelback and a 10 pound DSTARs (GPS) tracking system.
The key to passing the Land Navigation test is practice. Your training must be realistic. You must conduct your training in the same uniform during practice sessions as you will be tested in Ranger School. The Ranger School land navigation test is a combined Night (two hours) into day test approximately 10 kilometers in length. The start time will be adjusted to ensure the Ranger Student has 2 hrs of limited visibility (night) and 3 hrs of daylight. The test starts with the night portion first. Therefore, you must train until you can successfully locate at least 2 points during 2 hrs of limited visibility or you will not make 4 out of 5 points in 5 hours. Most of the Land Navigation failures do not make the time standard. The only way to get faster is to practice.
Ranger School Preparation
Route planning is a skill commonly overlooked by Ranger School’s land navigation failures. Keep it simple by using checkpoints (road intersections, streams, prominent terrain, etc) along your route to keep you on track. Another good technique is to pick a backstop to let you know you have gone too far on a given leg of your route. Examples are improved roads, railroad tracks, trails, creeks, and prominent terrain. Picking the furthest point away from your start point during hours of darkness may not be your best bet. Unless you are experienced with land navigation, you should attempt to locate the closest points first. Remember, keep it simple.
“What is involved in “land navigationâ€? Do they perhaps have to carry a heavy load and navigate their way through obstacles?”
Don’t know. When I took the infantry officers basic course at benning in 1971, it did not. We took the class in soft caps and the heaviest thing we carried was a compass.
We still had about 10 in our class of 100 who had difficulty with the course. Some folks just don’t get land navigation. The tests were conducted in a two mile square with hardsurface roads all around the perimeter. If you got lost, all you had to do was walk in a straight line until you hit hard surface and sit down and wait. There was always cadre driving around looking for the lost sheep.
Still, every time we did the course, we would have to go back out and look for the same 10 or 12 lost souls. There would also be the same 20 or so who would ace the course in a third the allocated time. Some get it, some don’t.
I was the Officer in Charge of Land Navigation for Camp Buckner at West Point (Summer field training) and I taught Terrain Analysis in the old Earth, Space, and Graphics Science Department. I also supervised Land Navigation training at ROTC Summer Camp at Ft. Riley. Females were includes in all of this.
Some females have trouble with spatial reasoning. They have problems translating the abstract information on a map to the real lay of the land. Studies have shown that female drivers largely navigate by landmarks and ignore direction, distance, and terrain. At night, when landmarks are hard to see, things can get really ugly. Female brains and male brains tend to be different. Of course, there are some males who have the same problem, but the distribution is really skewed to the female population. Extra training, not just retesting is usually required.
Before I ran the Land Nav committee, West Point allowed cadets to take the tests in pairs. Cadets, being incredibly smart people, invariably paired females with a male. We changed the course to require the tests to be taken individually. Female completion rates (and overall as well) plummeted and many cadets spent their treasured weekends doing land nav retraining. This got me on the radar of the Secretary of the Army, but the Superintendent backed me and we held firm.
In addition to this issue with females, the introduction of GPS devices to the Army has caused a drop in Land Nav skills among all leaders. Take away the GPS and many of them are in trouble. This will be a big problem in combat when the Chinese or Russians take out our satellites.
Let’s pull our heads out of our collective asses. This has been going on for over 40 years. It started with opening the academies to women, whereupon all of the standards were changed to accommodate women - even though “they could meet the same standards as men.”
The military has become a test tube for liberal experiments, which doesn’t bode well for the country if we need the military for a real war. We tend to belittle government bureaucrats (and rightly so), but forget that the military leadership is every bit as political as the civilian leadership - and the more stars a man or woman pins on his/her shoulder, the more political they become.
As recently as 18 months, Marines training at Quantico were not using GPS. It's good to have that tool, but this Dad is glad that my son has another tool in his box, should the need arise.
Thanks for an interesting post.
> Good point! GPS is a lady’s friend...
That GPS unit you’re dependent on has a battery that will work for about 10-12 hours, after that you’d better be able to read a topo-map and use a compass.
I can follow a map and compass, but I have zero ability to do it intuitively. I get lost trying to navigate a parking lot.
Those of us with a military background have known for some years that the senior Generals are putting career ahead of country. We have also known that these women were given social promotions to get out of Ranger School based on lies, deception and cover ups. I can assure you that the people they are working around know what happened too but of course would be instantly discharged if they said anything out loud.
Ash Carter, the man demanding women take on full combat roles? Much better than Staff Sergeant Hagel? That’s saying very, very little.
If it were up to me, I would train and test with lensatic compass and then have a second round with GPS. I don’t know what the Army is doing, but land navigation is a pre commissioning individual requirement no matter what source of commission (the docs and lawyers get it in their basic course). All leaders must know how to navigate.
Were I incompetent in combat, and untouchable by leadership, I would expect my men would frag me for the good of the unit, like it or not.
“Because Hussein knows if he refuses to leave he will be dragged from the White House, then tarred & feathered.”
No he won’t, and we all know that. There would be rumblings of a “constitutional crisis”, then loud blustering on the internet, and finally most of the populace will quietly accept it as the best thing for the people, the government’s stability, or even “for the children”. Proof of what I’m saying is evident in the mere fact that this THING was elected at all, not once but TWICE.
Ping.
I don’t have a GPS in my car (I have an old hand-held hikers GPS from Geocaching years ago). I still have my sight, so I’m OK with maps & road signs...
The topo maps for hiking in the NY/NJ area are incredibly detailed.
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