In the age of drones and artificial intelligence, the Army is reinvigorating how it teaches troops to kill at arm’s length.
Soldiers in Georgia hoping to earn the Army’s coveted Ranger tab will now start the monthslong school by stabbing their way through Fort Benning’s new bayonet obstacle course, the service announced on Monday.
Candidates for the Army’s premier small unit tactics school will now need to slice into silicone torsos while they navigate through trenches, over walls and under tunnels as smoke machines obscure parts of the quarter-mile course.
“The Bayonet Assault Course allows us to introduce a level of grit, a level of violence of action, very rapidly into Ranger school,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Patrick Hartung, the command sergeant major of the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade, later adding, “If all technology fails, [Ranger students] will have the fundamentals.”
The bayonet course, launched during this year’s Best Ranger Competition, will now precede Ranger School’s Malvesti obstacle course, a grueling set of physically challenging tasks that sleep- and food-deprived students must confidently navigate.
On April 21, the first cohort of Ranger School students tackled the newly integrated course. In a video released by the Army, soldiers with shaved heads heaved themselves over logs and jumped over sandbags before ramming the rifle-mounted blades into the soft, pale flesh of artificial physiques.
Soldiers raised their arms before plunging the weapon into the dummies, allowing gravity to help with the assault. But, pulling the bayonets out before moving onto the next torso seemed equally — and disturbingly — effortful.
The Fort Benning Directorate of Public Works, or DPW, shaped the base’s terrain while the base’s Training Support Center’s fabrication shop built mannequins designed to withstand the violence of trainees and the weather.
William Walker, the support center’s contract lead, said the shop created more realistically positioned enemy torsos. “Originally, the prone targets were just the silicone body laid on the ground,” he said in the statement. But through development, the team created a dummy that was slightly elevated with a rifle attached.
That final product, he said, simulated a soldier lying on their stomach in a firing position.
Instead of impaling a passive dummy, Ranger students instead see a body reminiscent of their enemy in the simulated situation: rifle pointed, but reduced to fighting face-to-face.
Eve Sampson is a reporter and former Army officer. She has covered conflict across the world, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.