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Old 03-26-2005, 06:24   #11
brownapple
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They talked about that back in the late 70s, early 80s. And canned the idea. Because if you reduce the number of troops going through jumpschool by too much, Congress will (or at least that was the concern then), cut off the funding for it all together. Of course, that was at a time when the last combat jump had been more than 10 years before, the last contested combat jump about 30 years before and there was a great deal of question of whether parachute operations were a viable method for getting troops into combat anymore. Anyway, the solution at the time given the reduced number of troops requiring jump school(remember that the 101st as a whole came off of jump status when they returned from Vietnam and the 1st, 3d, 6th and 8th Groups were all stood down) was to open jump school up to more people, and so we ended up with women attending, lots of cadets, used at a recruiting/re-enlistment incentive, etc.

Instead of downsizing jumpschool, maybe some of those support units should be made up of 5 jump chumps... graduates of jump school who are thereby familiar with airborne operations, who are not legs, but whose units are not on jump status because they will not be inserted by parachute into combat.
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