No, men are more efficient for the particular skillset measured. Whether that skillset adequately encompasses what the Army actually needs (and ALL of what the Army actually needs) in modern soldiers is a different question.
Your conclusion is based on facts not in evidence – that is, the AFCT being predictive of a soldier’s effectiveness.
eta: Ninja’d, of course
How relevant are these tests to the actual job? Are they
- meant to enforce “general fitness” or are they
- testing specific things that these soldiers will need to do in their actual roles or are they
- leftover from what soldiers needed to do 50 years ago?
Because the right answer to what they should do with this information depends in the answer to that question. If (1), then they probably ought to have separate tests for men and women. Maybe the tests could be based on weight and height rather than on sex. Maybe some tests would be the same for all, some would depend on sex, and some would relate to height or weight.
If (2) then maybe there should be fewer female soldiers. Or maybe they should have different routine tests for different roles.
If (3) they should change the tests, of course. It’s silly to test soldiers today based on WWII standards and requirements.
Why? If anything, soldiers these days carry more stuff around with them than the soldiers of that era, so they’d need to be MORE fit and strong than their great grandfathers.
And it’s kind of absurd to expect infantrymen to be these paragons of strength and fitness, and let the rest be out of shape, especially considering that they’re all expected to fight when necessary.
30% of the men failed and will have their military careers ruined?
A dumb man once said you fight a war with the army you have, not the army you need or might want. If I were fighting a war, I’d rather have a few doughy infantrymen than have an Army that’s hot shit at exercising across all career fields but I lost 20% of my best people in everything but infantry.
That’s pretty much how it goes now, but it’s worth noting that you don’t get kicked out from a single fitness failure, and most people are able to pull it together and pass. A 30% failure rate (which is probably typical) does not result in a 30% separation rate. Maybe 5% after all the chips fall.
It remains to be seen what that 84% failure rate would do for retention.
This test, the ACFT, at least in the eyes of the Army, is exactly the result of that “redesigned to test realistic conditions” effort. Again, quoting from the Army’s FAQ:
(emphasis mine)
I can see, yes.
The argument for high fitness tests for REMFs is that they might find themselves in a situation where they have to fight as infantry. That’s true. And it has to be weighed according to its probability of actually happening. That probability-adjusted loss now has to be compared to the probability-adjusted loss of sacking high performance personnel for being bad at a job they’re 99% likely not to actually end up doing.
It reminds me of early 20th century rifle designers who said: “Yes, but what IF you need to engage at 800 meters?” even if the vast majority of engagement were within 400 meters. Sometimes requiring more gives you less overall.
The definition of “combat” can be wishy-washy, with different meanings depending on the situation, the service, and whoever happens to be in charge on that particular day. For the VA, combat doesn’t even have to involve combat.
Situationally, there is a difference between having to spend days or weeks at an isolated outpost in the mountains, going out on patrols that routinely come under fire and where the amount of ammo and other equipment you can carry equals life, vs. riding in an armored vehicle that gets disabled by an IED and comes under fire. In one case, “more” (in terms of physical ability) is almost always going to be better. In the other, some cardio would be nice, and it’d also be nice if you could at least drag a wounded soldier out of one vehicle and into another, but in that case you don’t even need everyone to be able to do that (or you could pair up with a buddy and both drag the wounded out of the vehicle). In that case, excess strength is a nice to have, but what is far more important is the ability to keep one’s head, shoot, and apply first aid (not that you don’t need that in the mountains too, but you also need a whole lot more then).
With all that said, most women (and maybe even most men) with combat experience would probably fall into the latter category (armored vehicles, convoy, IED, burst of action, then withdrawal to relative safety). So it’s not enough to just look at “generic combat” performance and apply that as an army-wide standard (one would imagine the infantry would need a much higher standard for those more isolated encounters on foot).
What I wish, what I really wish, is that all the services would put some real thought into the kind of physical demands each particular branch or specialty needs as a minimum threshold, and get some actual PhDs involved (including some who have no military experience whatsoever, to help keep those with a military background honest and force them to back up their assumptions and pre-conceived notions). My personal experience is with the Navy, and my sense is that leadership has no clue what it actually needs/wants from a physical fitness test, and enforcement of standards (whether or not discharges are mandatory beyond a certain number of failures and whether or not unit-level leaders can waive failures without higher approval) seems to vary based primarily on whether it needs to grow or shrink the size of the force. But I’m just jaded like that.
Oh, and one last grenade to throw into the discussion, I think in some instances certain factions of the military (factions among its flag and general officer leadership) may use the idea of gender-neutral, perhaps overly rigorous or service-wide, combat fitness tests as an excuse to drag feet on opening up more specialities to women. But that’s just a gut feeling and, again, I’m kind of jaded.
ETA:
Thats a very good way of putting it, and something that too often gets lost in these kinds of discussions.
They did that, or at least they said they did:
I don’t believe them. Or at least I don’t believe they applied the kind of rigor necessary to it, particularly when distinguishing between what it takes to be combat-ready as an infantryman vs what it takes to be combat-ready as a vehicle mechanic. Maybe a better way of putting it is, I think the Army (and the military in general) lacks any sort of peer review process, and that very often no one thinks to (or no one is willing to, in the face of a results-oriented style of leadership) challenge the underlying assumptions that go into fairly major personnel programs. A study gets commissioned, results comes out, and that seems to be the end of it, unless some general or undersecretary has their own pet agenda to advance.
Nothing in the section you quote says what questions they asked the fitness experts. “What are the physical requirements demanded by the 21st-century battlefield?” will yield very different answers than “What tests most effectively correlate to some particular physical requirement we identified in some previous round?”
I am guessing the US military is still shell shocked from the Iraq experience of the last decade when the shortage of troops meant that even non fighting arm types were pulling patrol duty?
I’m not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean you think that service and support troops are less likely to find themselves embroiled in occasional ground combat in future wars? If so, I don’t think that will necessarily hold true. If there is an occupation (or even just an enduring presence, as we have now in Iraq), there will be an insurgency. If there is an insurgency, there will be traditionally “non-combat” troops exposed to combat.
50 years ago was Vietnam not WW2.
As an aside I read that between the time of Gustav Adolph and the Korean War the weight carried by a soldier did not increase much, but since than has grown exponentially.
Physical fitness needs have never been higher.
The FB post does seem to have other motivations, specifically “no women in the Army”.
Which isn’t really germane to the issue of physical fitness requirements.
50 years ago was Vietnam, and a military so strapped for people they were drafting men who couldn’t read, couldn’t remember basic orders, couldn’t tie their shoes, couldn’t maintain their rifle to serve as infantrymen.
Do you think I’m joking? Does anyone in this thread think I’m saying something which is incorrect? Wikipedia has a basic summary but the go-to work is McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War by Hamilton Gregory, who cites many more sources.
My point is that the military will feed. The military will get as many bodies as it thinks it needs. Saying there are people currently in who don’t pass a high bar is quite rich given the kinds of people the military will consume without so much as burping once things get going. You can set the standards anywhere you want and the people running things will game them in order to fill quotas.
It looks like all this speculation is premature, According to The Army Times, the “leaked” slides posted by US Army W.T.F. Moments didn’t come from the Center for Initial Military Training and shouldn’t be taken at face value.
Let’s wait a year and see what the data looks like then.
:smack:
Really no kidding. Gosh no one had ever thought that wartime militaries end up lowering recruiting standards, officially and or tacitly. What an astutre and original observation.
:rolleyes:
Except that is not the point. The point is that exprience has show that peacetime assessments of what a particular military job will entail rarely match actual wartime outcomes.
Lots of ostensibly "rear"and “non combat” troops have found themselves in contact with the enemy, on occassions with some regularity. Not only true in counter insurgency operations in Iraq or Afghanistan but has also occured in conventional peer versus peer battles, see Korea but also WW2 (one of the main actions in the early days of the Battle of the Bulge was supply troops having to hold off the Germans long enough to destroy fuel and supply depots which the Germans were trying to (and needed) to capture).
So the brass may well be thinking well if there is a good possibility they will have to fight like infantrymen on occasssion, may as well be as fit as we require them to be.
So you admit that when things get to the point of actually needing a lot of people to use this stuff, the military will be accepting people regardless of ability.
Note that I didn’t say “lowered standards”, I said “read the freaking cite and see that standards were in goddamned freefall” which, incidentally, makes an absolute mockery of this thread.