WASHINGTON — Two women have passed the Army’s Ranger School, becoming the first females to complete the grueling combat training program and earn the right to wear Ranger tabs on their uniforms.
The Army’s Ranger headquarters in Fort Benning, Ga., says the women and 94 men passed the tough 62-day course that tests their ability to overcome fatigue, hunger and stress during combat operations.
While completing the leadership course lets the two women wear the coveted Ranger black-and-gold tab, it does not let them become members of the Ranger regiment. Neither woman has been identified by the military.
Allowing women to participate in the Ranger course is part of the U.S. military’s push to open more combat jobs to women.
The toughest jobs remain closed to female soldiers. That includes the 75th Ranger Regiment, which requires additional schooling that is physically and mentally challenging before soldiers can join.
But that may change.
The military services are poised to allow women to serve in most front-line combat jobs, including special operations forces, senior officials told The Associated Press.
Based on early talks, officials say the Army, Navy and Air Force likely will not seek exceptions that close any jobs to women. Marine Corps leaders, they say, have expressed concerns about allowing women to serve in infantry jobs and may seek an exception.
The services are wrapping up reviews and must make their recommendations to Defense Secretary Ash Carter this fall. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the internal debate.
Even if Marine leaders object, they are likely to meet resistance from senior Navy and Defense Department officials who want the military to be united on this issue.
Undercutting the Marines’ reservations is that Special Operations Command is likely to allow women to compete for the most demanding military commando jobs — including the Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force — although with the knowledge that it may be years before women even try to enter those fields.
Women have been moving steadily into previously all-male jobs across the military, including as members of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, best known as the helicopter crews that flew Navy SEALs into Osama bin Laden’s compound.
Women also are serving on Navy submarines and in Army artillery units.
In the long term, the uncertainty of the Marine decision underscores the wrenching debates going on within the military over the changing role of women, and it reflects the individual identities of the services and how they view their warrior ethos.
Only a handful of jobs in the Navy and Air Force are closed to women.
Last year the Navy considered seeking an exception that would have prohibited women from serving on older guided missile frigates, mine-countermeasure ships and patrol coast craft. Some argued that those ships, which are due to be phased out in coming years, would need millions of dollars in construction to add facilities for women and it wasn’t worth the expense.
But Navy Secretary Ray Mabus withdrew that plan in a memo late last month that was obtained by The Associated Press.
Officials said Navy leaders concluded that because women can serve in all the same jobs on other ships, no real exclusion existed.
On Tuesday, former Army officers such as Sue Fulton, who in 1980 was among the first women to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, celebrated the news of the two women’s achievement as another milestone toward ending gender barriers in the military.
“This answers whatever questions may still remain about whether women have the strength, the will and the physical courage to become combat leaders,” said Fulton, a former Army captain who now chairs the West Point Board of Visitors, an advisory panel of presidential appointees and members of Congress.
A graduation ceremony will be held Friday at Fort Benning, the Army post near the Georgia-Alabama line.
