The United States Army, in business now for more than 250 years, comprises more than 450,000 soldiers. Of those, about a third are in combat arms, serving in armor, artillery, engineering, cyber, and aviation units. Some 56,000 are in the infantry, the “Queen of Battle,” serving in units such as the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. These are the soldiers who go to battle on foot (or, in the case of Airborne units, by parachute—at least on occasion). Among them are some of the most physically fit humans on the planet—the soldiering equivalent of Olympic decathletes.
These are the sort who choose to attend Ranger School, the grueling 61-day Army course at Fort Benning, in Georgia, that is meant to push the body, and the spirit, substantially past the breaking point. Only about half of those who start Ranger School eventually finish, some after trying repeatedly. The most elite of those who graduate, the 1 percent of the 1 percent, show up each April to compete in what’s known colloquially as the Ranger Olympics.
This event is not well known. It is not televised. Not one participant is sponsored by Nike. But the Best Ranger Competition may be the hardest physical competition in the world. Fifty-two teams of two soldiers each start the Ranger Olympics. Over the course of three days, the field is narrowed as soldiers march and run dozens of miles, crawl through obstacle courses, and navigate swamps at night. They carry 50 pounds in their rucksacks, climb 60-foot ropes, and sleep, at most, for four hours at a time. All told, the average competitor burns more than 30,000 calories.
These soldiers are, pound for pound, the fittest, most trained, and most disciplined the world has ever known. They are also, nevertheless, part of what President Donald Trump has called our “woke military that can’t fight or win.” Trump has vowed to remake the armed forces, eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and excoriating generals (many of whom served in combat) as losers. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has moved to push trans service members out of the military (“No more dudes in dresses,” he said in a speech this spring) and has suggested that women should not serve in combat.
For three days in Georgia this spring, those culture wars felt very far away, in part because what I saw at Best Ranger belies the idea that the Army is weak or “woke”; in part because among the 104 soldiers on the starting line at Fort Benning was a 25-year-old first lieutenant named Gabrielle White, a West Point graduate who was the first woman to compete for the Best Ranger title; and in part because, to her opponents on the course, the fact that she was a woman did not seem to matter. The only thing that mattered to the Rangers I met was that she had qualified for the competition.
I’ve covered the military for more than 20 years and have seen soldiers in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through my travels, I’ve come to realize that the political class and civilians in general have little idea who soldiers are or why they serve. In the past, military service was almost an unwritten requirement of the Oval Office, but the only president to have served in the past three decades was George W. Bush (who did not see combat). And although the U.S. has one of the largest active militaries in the world, less than 1 percent of its population serves in the armed forces, which means that most civilians have little contact with the military.
During the 20 years of war that began in 2001, the military faced numerous crises of public perception. In fairness, the mission the armed forces were given during the War on Terror was near impossible, with an ever-evolving definition of victory in both Afghanistan and Iraq and competing agendas from administrations of both parties, not to mention a public more comfortable with thanking soldiers for their service than sharing the burden.
These days, debates over trans and women soldiers and other “wokeness” wars dominate the discourse around the military, all of which hides the fact that, in my experience, most people volunteer to serve because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Once among the ranks, most consider a soldier’s politics or gender identity less important than their ability to do the job.
The military must now reinvent itself for a modern battlefield where it could face combat against Russia, China, or North Korea—or perhaps more than one at once. In this context, understanding the current force is crucially important. The Best Ranger Competition offers a glimpse of some of the most elite soldiers at work.
A month before the competition, I met the three qualifying teams from the 75th Ranger Regiment, a special-operations unit whose members had won the competition four years in a row. They were training on an indoor turf field with squat racks along one side and cardio machines along the other.
When I arrived, the soldiers were finishing a workout—doing planks with a 45-pound plate on their back and carrying 120 pounds 10 yards after a circuit of squats and bench presses. Speakers blared AC/DC and Johnny Cash. Nick O’Brien, who trains the regiment’s 3,000 Rangers, looked on with his team of nine coaches, trainers, and dietitians.
For months, these six men had paused their day jobs with the regiment to prepare under O’Brien, practicing tasks such as assembling just about every handheld weapon in the American arsenal, marching and running for miles, and navigating the woods at night with just a compass and a map, eating only MREs (“meals ready to eat”), rations supplied by the Army that, over time, do demoralizing things to the standard human digestive tract.
First Lieutenants Kevin Moore and Griffin Hokanson, who composed Team 44, were favored to win this year. It was the first time that either man had represented the 75th and the first time they had been paired, but they had competed for other units in the past. Both look, a bit disconcertingly, like action figures. Hokanson, who’s originally from Oregon, is a faster runner and more agile on the obstacles; Moore, from New York, is stronger. Both graduated from West Point in 2021. First Lieutenant Gabrielle White was also in their class, and the three started Ranger School together the following year. Moore had noticed that the leaders he respected all had Ranger scrolls on their sleeves. Hokanson had a battalion commander who was a Ranger, and saw that Ranger School was where lieutenants who wanted more of a challenge than what they found in the conventional army went.
Neither Moore nor Hokanson has faced combat, but they understand, as all Rangers do, that the battlefield in the age of drone warfare can easily become what a former senior Ukrainian commander called a “zone of continuous death.” Networks of tunnels mean threats can come from any direction—above or below. The infantry must prepare for action at night, or underground, to avoid detection.
Still, no other part of warfare is as unchanging as the soldier on the ground, holding the line, defending it, or taking it. The Ranger motto—said to have originated on D-Day, as German mortars and artillery fell down on Omaha Beach—is “Rangers lead the way.” Ranger battalions were deactivated at the end of World War II but called back into action again in Korea, where they executed raids, set ambushes, and led the counterattack during the winter of 1950 to regain land lost to the Communist offensive. The first Ranger School class was conducted around this time at Fort Benning, focused on individual combat skills and decision making under pressure, reflecting lessons learned in both World War II and the Korean War.
Later, as the armed services were becoming an all-volunteer force in the final years of the Vietnam War, generals saw the need for a specialized infantry unit capable of rapid deployment to troublespots around the world. The 1st Ranger Battalion was activated as a permanent unit in 1974. The idea was to build a unit that would act as a benchmark of excellence for the volunteer force. “The battalion is to be an elite, light, and the most proficient infantry battalion in the world. A battalion that can do things with its hands and weapons better than anyone,” General Creighton W. Abrams Jr. wrote in what would become the unit’s charter. “Wherever the battalion goes, it must be apparent that it is the best.”
In recent decades, Rangers deployed during conflicts including 1991’s Gulf War and the War on Terror. Rangers were among the special-operations forces who took part in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 American soldiers, including members of the 75th, were killed. In 2019, Rangers and Delta Force operators killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “I often think how many soldiers are alive today because they were led by a Ranger,” retired Command Sergeant Major Rick Merritt, who served 25 years in the 75th Ranger Regiment, including combat deployments to Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, told me. Ranger School, Merritt said, is “the ultimate life-insurance policy for going to combat.”
This year’s competition started before dawn at Camp Rogers, a training area at Fort Benning, in the pine forest of western Georgia. A crowd of spectators had gathered, a mix of family members, unit mates, and former Rangers. Midway through the first seven-mile run, the competitors picked up a 60-pound sandbag that they would carry for the rest of the race.
The 75th Ranger Regiment teams were among the first to return to Camp Rogers, barely pausing after dropping the sandbags before heading to Victory Pond. There, they dove into the frigid water and made their way toward the boat ramp on the opposite shore, about 400 meters away. Some dog-paddled, held up by their life jacket. Others paddled on their back, hoping to conserve energy. One by one, the Rangers shuffled out of the water, soaked and shivering in the cool morning air.
“This sucks,” one of the paratroopers of Team 34 said as they scrambled up the concrete boat ramp and a subsequent hill.
Without stopping, his partner answered with the universal infantry rejoinder, “Embrace the suck.”
That meant a day of marching with 50-pound rucksacks as the teams navigated from task to task, earning points for each. In the past, the competition had been linear: Each team followed the same sequence of events. This year’s wrinkle—called “Ranger Reckoning”—left it to the soldiers to complete the remaining objectives in any order.
Each task presented a different problem. One was an urban-assault course where teams attacked a two-story building; after throwing a grenade into a makeshift bunker, they would rush forward to a yellow line and perform 20 burpees (an exercise in which a single rep includes a push-up followed by a squat jump). The exercise raised their heart rate, mimicking the stress of combat. Once the burpees were done, the team shot red balloons attached to two targets before moving inside a cinder-block house, where they then faced other targets meant to represent both enemy fighters (to shoot) and civilians (to avoid shooting).
In past years, completing events faster meant more time to rest between events. But this new format turned the first day into an endurance competition, O’Brien told me. In all, the teams marched about 35 miles to complete the course. Every task was graded by instructors from the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade, which runs Ranger School.
Retired Lieutenant Colonel Blain Reeves, a two-time competitor who won the Best Ranger competition in 1993 and served with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, told me that the first day was a “smoker.” (Ranger School is meant to “smoke”—exhaust—its students each day.)
Team 38—White and her partner, Captain Seth Deltenre—had a 20-person cheering section that followed them from station to station. White did not agree to an interview; it seemed that she wanted her achievement to speak for itself. Among her supporters was Kris Fuhr, a 1985 West Point graduate who recalled coming of age in a very different military. West Point “made it very clear that they did not want us there,” she told me. “We didn’t have the protections of equal opportunity” or resources around sexual harassment and assault. “We had no advocates.”
Fuhr has tried to take on that role for younger women in the military, and has run a mentorship program for women attending Ranger School since they were first allowed to do so, in 2015. Later that same year, then–Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that all military positions would be open to women. (Although women had served near the front lines for years, this decision removed the remaining formal barriers to direct-combat roles.) The Army reports that 367 women have attempted Ranger School since 2015; 160 have earned the Ranger tab. In recent years, upwards of 1,000 men have earned a Ranger tab each year.
In my months of contact with the Army’s event organizers leading up to the Best Ranger Competition, no one mentioned Team 38 or Gabrielle White. In different times, the Army might have celebrated White’s history-making presence. But under Trump and Hegseth, mentions of historic achievements by women and minorities have been removed from military websites. As of this writing, trans service members have been banned from the military, and the Pentagon has taken the name of the slain gay leader Harvey Milk, a Navy veteran, off of a supply ship.
In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth wrote that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men,” arguing that they will mother soldiers in their units. “Dads push us to take risks,” he wrote, but “moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.” On a video podcast last year, Hegseth said: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective; hasn’t made us more lethal; has made fighting more complicated.” (He has since walked back some of his earlier remarks. On the Megyn Kelly Show in early December, he said, “If we have the right standard and women meet that standard, roger. Let’s go.”)
During his confirmation process, Hegseth echoed President Trump’s desire for a Pentagon focused on “lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability, and readiness.” It is worth noting that Gabrielle White was given no accommodations or special treatment, and at no point did the Ranger instructors adjust her score because she was a woman.
Waiting to start the Malvesti Obstacle Course, Moore and Hokanson bounced from foot to foot and shook out their arms and legs. Both knew they had no more than four minutes of suffering before a break. When they got the order to go, Moore and Hokanson easily knocked out the six chin-ups and shimmied up the 30-foot rope. Jumping down a log ladder with nearly six feet between each rung barely slowed them down. Finishing the monkey bars over water put them on the edge of the notorious “worm pit,” a shallow, muddy trench covered with barbed wire that would-be Rangers must crawl through—sometimes submerged—on their belly.
Hokanson went first. Moore was next, slipping past the last rusty strand of wire and meeting Hokanson on the chin-up bar. Six more chin-ups and a run to the finish line later, they’d completed the obstacle course in three minutes and 35 seconds—a respectable time for rested soldiers, and an astonishing one for people who’d been going for almost 13 hours. They hadn’t caught their breath before it was time for a pop quiz, which instructors give after some events to test competitors’ cognitive powers. In which three conflicts did Army Colonel Richard Malvesti—the Ranger for whom the course is named—serve? (The answer, which Hokanson and Moore got right, was Vietnam, Grenada, and Operation Just Cause in Panama.)
Before a night ruck march, the field would be narrowed to 32 pairs. In the holding area, Moore pulled off his boots and propped his swollen feet, chewed up with blisters from his wet socks, on his rucksack. He was exhausted, but he and Hokanson were in first place and Moore knew all eyes were on them.
“I’m going to act like this is the first thing I’m doing and I’m fresh,” Moore said. “Everyone’s going to look at me and realize that we are here to do business.” Competitors had deliberately not been told how long the ruck march would be, but at least they were hydrated and had gotten something to eat.
When it was time, Moore laced up his boots once more. “You look strong,” Hokanson told his partner. “I don’t know if you’re faking it or if you’re being serious, but you look strong.”
Moore admitted afterward that he’d been faking it a little. Nevertheless, Team 44 took the lead and tore through the first four miles. Hokanson and Moore soon dumped their rucksacks to face the next test: They were each to carry two 45-pound water jugs for an unknown distance using only grip strength—no carrying the jugs on their shoulders, no wrist wraps, no resting the jugs on their feet, no setting them on the ground. As soon as one jug was set down, both men would have to stop and return to the starting line. The test, as the Ranger livestream commentator said, had a steep price for failure.
Team 44 came in second, but had the most total points for the competition. Team 38—White and Deltenre—sat near the bottom of the table.
Before the second day’s events kicked off, the Rangers lay on the grass outside Doughboy Stadium, their boots and socks off. When they walked, they tended to do so with a grimace or a limp.
Inside the stadium were six stations, including one where the soldiers had to breach doors with a torch, a saw, and fire-rescue tools. At the first station, teams would toss a 100-pound medicine ball over one shoulder between burpees—30 in all—before hauling a 290-pound yoke 50 meters. Then they’d each climb a 15-foot rope 10 times. Later they’d sprint to a dummy, bandage its fake wounds, and haul it roughly 50 yards on a stretcher sled back to the starting line. At the last station, they would throw axes before they retreated to a neighboring baseball field to throw practice grenades.
For Team 44, this was light work. Moore, in particular, seemed to have a well of energy, and the men left the stadium area before lunch, giving them time to rest.
More was at stake for White and Deltenre as they entered the stadium to cheers from their supporters; only 16 teams would advance to the third and final day, and Team 38 would need good scores to make it. After each burpee and medicine-ball throw, White and Deltenre encouraged each other to press on. They skipped the rope climb, incurring a penalty but saving energy for other events, and went on to win the axe throwing, which moved them up to 17th place.
By the end of the afternoon, they were the only team that still seemed upbeat. They waited for the order to head toward the field where a Black Hawk helicopter would take them to Camp Darby for a mystery event before the night land-navigation test—historically the most difficult part of the competition. Once they got the order, White and Deltenre trotted to the helicopter.
For the night event, each team would have five hours to find five points in the tangled swamps near Hollis Branch Creek without using any roads or trails.
Hokanson took the lead on navigating for Team 44. Moore followed his partner’s chem light as they bushwhacked through the swamp, in mud up to their knees, to the first point. But when they got across the swamp, Hokanson didn’t see what he’d expected. Checking the map again, he realized they were going the wrong way.
“Kevin, I love you, but we’re going to have to go through this again,” Hokanson said.
“Griff, I’m going to kill you,” Moore said. “I’m going to wring your neck.”
They had planned to hit one point each hour, but it took them almost two hours in the thorn brushes and mud to find the first one. With their bearings finally set, the men found two more points in under two hours and a fourth before the five-hour cutoff, leaving them with a lead of more than 100 points going into day three. (No team found all five points in the allotted time.)
Team 38, meanwhile, ranked second in the night navigation event, securing themselves a spot for the final day.
At 7:30 the next morning, as the first streaks of light came through the pine trees, the 16 remaining teams prepared to take on the Darby Queen, one of the toughest obstacle courses in the U.S. Army. The course comprises 24 stations made mostly of wood and rope set over a mile of rolling terrain. Some are as tall as three stories; others require crawling through trenches. Hokanson, who scored the fastest official solo time during the regiment’s training period this year, moved effortlessly through them all, encouraging Moore as he went. They finished first, extending their lead.
Next, the teams retreated to a field where they packed their gear and wrapped it with their ponchos to create a raft before boarding a helicopter for a short flight to Victory Pond. Sitting in the door of the helicopter with his legs dangling, Hokanson was shivering uncontrollably. After two full days of competition, he couldn’t wait to complete the final tasks.
The helicopter swooped past a rappelling tower and hovered over the middle of the lake. As the crew chief signaled for Team 44 to jump, they pushed their raft into the water before following it out. They swam their rucksacks to shore, then ran to a launch point where inflatable boats waited and paddled against the current, across the lake to the rappelling tower.
One more water event and Team 44 could rest before the final run, whose distance the competitors did not know. The Combat Water Survival Assessment, which also must be completed during the beginning of Ranger School, starts at the bottom of a 35-foot-tall metal ladder. From the top, with no safety harness, Moore calmly walked across a log suspended above the pond. He shimmied across a rope, plunged into the water and swam to a dock, then ran back and tagged Hokanson, who started up the 35-foot ladder to the suspended log. Moore, meanwhile, headed for a 70-foot tower. At the top of the tower’s staircase, he slid down on a pulley attached to a suspended cable, and crashed into the pond. All of these tasks were timed. Even though their lead was insurmountable this late in the competition, Hokanson and Moore ran through the course at full speed; they didn’t want to leave any doubt. They came in fourth for the event, all but assuring their victory.
Now the only thing left to do was run the final road race. Team 43—another 75th Regiment team, made up of Sergeants Emerson Schroeder and Tyler Steadman—was in third place but wanted to use this last event to push for second. When it was time to run, they kept a near-superhuman pace after having been almost constantly active for three days, and won the 4.1-mile race in about 30 minutes, becoming the first team to raise its rifles at the finish line.
Team 44 came in third in the race, and first in the overall competition. As they approached the finish line, Hokanson was so tired that he couldn’t lift his rifle above his head. Tears welled up in his eyes as blood ran from his face onto his bib.
The loudest cheers were for Team 38, which finished the run second to last. Overall, though, White and Deltenre ended the competition 14th out of the 52 teams. After raising their rifles, they hugged and went to get checked by the medics, a standard safety precaution.
Kris Fuhr was at the finish line with the other Team 38 supporters. Watching White raise her rifle at the end of the race felt like validation, she told me, for the work she and her peers had done to make the military a more hospitable place for the women who came after them.
For their part, White’s opponents seemed to respect her. “Anyone who makes it to day three and finishes the competition has achieved a standard far beyond anything in the Army,” Hokanson said.
In his speech at the awards ceremony, General Randy A. George, the Army chief of staff, asked a question that had hung over the whole three days: Why does the Army put so much time and so many resources into the Best Ranger Competition?
“Our Army is the best in the world,” George told the audience. “When tested in battle, we prevail time and again. Rangers are the best of our Army.”
Later, I asked George whether he thought that this generation of soldiers was less lethal than those that came before.
“I don’t buy that,” George said, shaking his head.
In fact, he said, if you compare Rangers over the past three decades, today’s are at least as capable as their predecessors—maybe even more so. “Everybody’s going to have to shoot, move, and communicate on the modern battlefield,” George said. “They’re going to have to be absolute experts at that. And that’s what you get with any Ranger formation.”
Toward the end of the awards ceremony, George challenged every Ranger onstage to take what they’d learned and use it to inspire excellence among their peers. “Go back to your units and build Rangers,” he said. “Challenge your troops. Test them and push them. Send them to school and set expectations that they come home Ranger-qualified. Hold them accountable to being tough and lethal.”
In my conversations with the competitors, I saw this ethic firsthand. The Rangers had trained for months not in the hopes of attaining fame or fortune but for the chance to exceed even their own expectations. Perhaps this is why, after the competition ended, none of the soldiers I spoke with brought up the fact that this year’s Best Ranger Competition had made history by being the first to include a woman—not because they did not want to draw attention to White or her performance but because the days-long physical and mental challenge demanded everything they had, leaving them no time to think about anything but putting one foot in front of the other.
