Ah! Not that surprising, actually. Having been married for 35 years, I long ago gave up the notion that females are the weaker sex. I think I read somewhere that women who are in comparable physical condition to men have more stamina than men have.
As for the argument that a 23-year-old PFT should be able to do the same PT test as an 18-year-old PFC, that’s how it was when I was in, but that was the mid-1970s. I know things have changed. The only thing I can think is that older troops are harder to retain, so the Pentagon makes it easier for them to stay in. It would be interesting to track job performance in a physically demanding profession like, say, professional football, hockey or basketball and see whether the older pros perform as well as, not as well as or better than their younger counterparts. It’s possible that performing “smarter” makes up for not performing “stronger.”
Purely anecdotal, but when I was in the Army I played raquetball with my commo section leader, a staff sergeant in his early 30s. I was 23. I was faster, stronger, and quicker than he was, but he beat me every time because he was more experienced. I was no slouch, mind you, but I couldn’t overcome his killer serve and his eye for angles.
Because the job has nothing to do with push-ups and sit-ups. They really don’t care about the number and type of exercises someone is doing in a direct sense. However, it is the military and they need to have some fairly rigid physical fitness standards that can be easily measured. A great way to do this is to judge each person’s fitness level against their own, easily definable cohort population.
You are looking at this in terms of raw numbers when you need to be thinking in terms of normal curves. The requirements reflect a point on the curve (say the 50% percentile) where they expect each person to be compared to similar people. You are making the mistake of thinking that the number or push-ups and sit-ups are important by themselves when they are not. They are just a measurement that can be used to plot a person’s relative position on a normal curve that also takes age and sex into account.
Not getting snotty. My mind went to that place because that is the single most obvious disqualifier for combat infantry. Women are not allowed in combat arms in the US. If a female goes to the recruiter to be in the infantry, he’s not going to ask how many push-ups and sit-ups she can do or see how she physically measures up. He’s going to tell her no because she has a vagina. Sorry, not my policy.
As for the rest of your posts, things have obviously changed since the days of the overhead ladder and .45 cal.
I have to say that the bottom of the PT chart is adjusted for retention purposes while the upper part of the chart is a reflection of expected performance increases until age 32.
The argument for a single standard regardless of age or sex will cause a HUGE portion of older (sorry… age advanced) service members to fail. The APFT isn’t in the business of failing soldiers. A single standard would cause younger soldiers to under-perform while having unrealistic expectations of older soldiers. It cannot be adjusted for MOS because ALL soldiers must be have a fair and all encompassing scale by which to measure physical performance.
So it is basically a matter of pragmatism? It is an easy way to quantitatively measure “fitness” – whatever that is – combined with a need to retain older (and female) soldiers that makes the PT standards different for so many classes of soldiers?
I guess I can live with that. I still don’t like it on philosophical grounds, but now I recognize that it may be the best possible solution.
Sorry for the hijack, but I must try to understand this:
Why are PT scores so important in regards to promotion? Why is it that some MOS’s do not require a 300+ PT score in order to get promoted, but others do? Especially the jobs in which you should never have to do 55 push-ups to survive the enemy.
I guess related to that is why the jobs that will never have to fire in combat would also require a near perfect score on the weapons range.
(Just a short hijack, and a quick couple questions)
AD USAF chiming in. I guess I can twist my brain into giving a different standard for women in pushups, situps, and BMI, but I just can’t understand the idea behind giving them SUBSTANTIALLY longer times for the 1.5 mile run. Doesn’t make sense. Women routinely get 100% on their PT test because the time required for max points on the run is like 10 or 11 minutes when for guys its around 8.5-9 minutes for the young ones. It’s much harder for men to score 100 on their PT test than women.
Here’s an even odder one for you. On AF PT standards ALL men, regardles off age OR HEIGHT have the same waist measurement requirement. 32" for max points. No accomodating for age or height. I’ll concde age I gues, but height? I have a friend who is 6’6" and he only weighs like 220, looks skinny, but he can’t get lower than a 34 on his waist so he can never max the test.
Sgt Schwartz, don’t get me started on all the things I don’t like about the “promotion points” system of promotion in the Army! That’s another whole can of worms. All this talk reminds me why I decided not to re-enlist, though.
The idea is that the Army needs X number of SGTs, SSGs, etc, and they just rank promotable soldiers by promotion points and promote the top X soldiers. (If you are a Sgt in the Army currently, I’m sure you know all this, I’m just laying it out for clarity.) Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I don’t think there are any required PT scores per se, simply that in some MOS’s the competition is such that you have to max your PT test and weapons qualification if you want to get promoted. Unless you have knowledge of certain MOS’s actually requiring a certain PT score above passing to get promoted, in which case I know nothing of it.