Cotton: U.S. Army’s Affirmative Action For Women ‘Is Going To Get People Killed’
By: Elaine Donnelly
May 13, 2022
It was gratifying to watch Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton questioning Christine Wormuth, the first female Secretary of the Army, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
Sen. Cotton, a Ranger-qualified infantry veteran, respectfully chastised Wormuth for the “fiasco” that the new Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) has become. For the past three years, the Army has tried but failed to implement “gender-neutral” standards in the new Combat Fitness Test — mainly because of high failure rates among female trainees.
After women in combat rules changed in 2015, the Army designed the ACFT to be sex-neutral, with identical requirements and scoring tables for men and women. The new ACFT would replace the long-standing Army Physical Fitness Test, which was sex-normed with different requirements and scores to allow for male/female physical differences.
At that time, women were not eligible for direct ground combat (infantry) assignments. Now that they are, sex-normed training standards are untenable. There is no sex-norming on the battlefield.
Cotton read back to Wormuth her own 2021 testimony promising that the new ACFT would have sex-neutral standards. When former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter ordered all combat positions to be opened for women in 2015, he and the Army’s official Implementation Plan promised that concerns about combat effectiveness would be addressed by “effective leadership” and “gender-neutral standards.”
more
https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/13/cotton-u-s-armys-affirmative-action-for-women-is-going-to-get-people-killed/
