Official: All five women fail physical assessment of Ranger School

All five women who started Ranger School this week failed to meet standards during the four-day physical assessment period and were dropped from the course, a senior Army official said Friday afternoon.

It was the first class to include women since three officers graduated from the course earlier this year during a gender-integration pilot program that included 19 females. The Army opened the combat leadership course to all soldiers in early September, after the first two of three women to pass had earned the tab.

The most recent women were in a class that started with 417 soldiers. By the end of the grueling Ranger Assessment Phase that measures physical skills and endurance, 197 soldiers remained. They move to Camp Darby on Fort Benning this weekend and begin the first of three patrol phases in the course that takes 62 days if a soldier does not have to repeat any apart.

Students must meet a number of standards during Ranger Assessment Phase -- commonly called RAP week -- including:

49 pushups

59 situps

6 chin-ups

A 5-mile run in under 40 minutes

Land navigation test

Water assessment

A 12-mile march, carrying a rucksack and water that weighs about 50 pounds, in under 3 hours.

The men and women are held to the same standard. The difficult Ranger School standards remain high, the senior Army official stressed, pointing to the high dropout rate.

Of the five women who were dropped from the course on Friday, only two attended a pre-Ranger School training course. All 19 of the original females who started the course on April 19 had attended and passed a pre-Ranger course conducted on Fort Benning. The Army had made that a requirement for any woman wanting to attend the pilot program.

"We want to stress the importance of these pre-Ranger courses whether it is RTAC or a unit-level course," the Army official said.

During the pilot program, Fort Benning officials regularly released data to include women on the class performance. They said earlier this week that they would no longer provide updates on how women perform on the course, which is similar protocol for other courses including Airborne School.

Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to earn the Ranger tab in the six-decade history of the elite combat leadership training. Maj. Lisa Jaster earned her tab last month. All three women completed the initial physical assessment twice. They failed to pass patrols on the first two attempts and were offered a chance to start the course over from the beginning, which they did.

Once they restarted in June, Griest and Haver went straight through without having to repeat a phase. Jaster, a 38-year-old mother of two, repeated phases in the north Georgia mountains and Florida swamps before graduating.

This story was originally published November 6, 2015 at 10:03 PM with the headline "Official: All five women fail physical assessment of Ranger School ."