US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has previously expressed opposition to women serving in combat, has ordered the military to develop gender-neutral physical fitness standards for frontline troops, a memo released Monday said.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has previously expressed opposition to women serving in combat, has ordered the military to develop gender-neutral physical fitness standards for frontline troops, a memo released Monday said.
It’s not even bending the rules. Unless you make gender a specific disqualifying thing. The standard for combat is not and never has been to be an Olympic athlete. Some women routinely score higher than some men on the Army Physical Fitness Test. What Hegseth’s quotes tell me is they’re going to go on a quixotic quest to find a minimum score that no woman can meet. However that’s going to disqualify a large group of men as well, and require the men that remain to work out multiple times per day instead of train necessary combat tasks.
In short, this administration has no clue what constitutes fighting shape in the military.
Personally, fitness tests is a fitness test and has nothing to do with combat. I’ll always remember our company high PFT in SOI dropping out of the 25k hump. The guy who literally “set the standard” by being the fastest and doing the most pullups was on the ground saying he couldn’t walk. Nice kid, but toughness doesn’t necessarily equate with fitness.
And once I got to my unit I decided there were plenty of Marines who didn’t belong there, and that there were women who could probably outdo them. Of course, this warred with my desire to walk around in my silkies and make homoerotic jokes with my buddies, but perhaps that’s not the whole point.
Haha yeah I’ve always said the real test is the 12 mile march in 3 hours. If you can’t walk, you ain’t infantry. But the Army, (my ex), in all it’s wisdom wants to measure all this other stuff. I could get on board with a weighted drag and a sprint too but it’s really not necessary.
Yeah, I joined the Marines in 2009 and we were the first class at PI to do the Combat Fitness Test. But there’s that word again, and it ends up being another PFT. Even I could 300 the CFT and I was never a PFT stud, just pretty good. But neither tested my mettle like walking really far with a bunch of shit on my back or not sleeping.
They could be using this to boot women who get pregnant out.