In the military, physical fitness outranks gender ‘equity’
BY THOMAS SPOEHR, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 08/03/23 12:00 PM ET
Physical fitness is a cornerstone of military readiness. Historically, this quality has helped American servicemembers fight and win over numerically superior enemies.
Nevertheless, Congress has rarely taken much interest in a service’s military physical fitness testing — until now.
On Thursday night, the Senate approved its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Section 557 of that bill would scrap the current Army Combat Fitness Test and replace it with the old Army Physical Fitness Test. Meanwhile, the House version of the NDAA proposes requiring a gender-neutral fitness test for combat arms positions.
In both cases, the issue is to ensure that fitness standards are not compromised for reasons unrelated to war-fighting.
On the battlefield, physical fitness can be the difference between life and death. For four decades, the Army’s fitness test consisted of two minutes of pushups, two minutes of sit-ups, and a two-mile run. But the inadequacies of this test proved glaring in Afghanistan and Iraq, where soldiers frequently suffered exoskeleton injuries as a result of their lack of holistic fitness.
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4127705-in-the-military-physical-fitness-outranks-gender-equity/
