Is combat making Ranger school unnecessary?

via Stars and Stripes...

After a decade of extended war deployments and with little time back home for training, there is now a “critical” shortage of Rangers needed to fill hundreds of crucial combat leadership positions intended for them across the Army, school officials say.
The dearth is particularly noticeable among noncommissioned officers — the sergeants, staff sergeants and sergeants first class who lead small units of enlisted soldiers through combat — and among all ranks of combat maneuver operators — the infantry, armor, field artillery and cavalry units fighting at the front lines.
Because of the shortage, soldiers without Ranger training increasingly are filling those leadership positions. Officials at the Army’s exclusive Ranger School at Fort Benning, Ga., and elsewhere said lives may be at risk because soldiers are going into battle without the best possible leaders.
“The best life insurance policy that a person can have ... is his leader being Ranger qualified,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Dennis Smith, who heads Fort Benning’s Ranger Training Brigade.
But others, including some who are Ranger qualified, believe that combat trumps training, that the hard-earned Ranger tab worn on the left shoulder after completing a brutal 61-day regimen through mountains, woods and swamps, on minimal food and sleep, is no substitute for years spent fighting real-life enemies in Afghanistan or Iraq.
NCOs with extensive combat experience are good enough for some.
“They’re as qualified as anybody else,” said Sgt. Maj. Thomas Dartez, who earned his tab in 1985, served with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, and taught at the school twice, most recently in 2004.

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Combat is ultimately the best teacher “because you learn from experience,” Dartez said, using roadside bombs as an example. “Having a tab doesn’t prepare you for that.”

Read the whole thing...fascinating.  It makes the massive push by the former SecDef to get the Marines into the Special Ops arena make more sense.