![]() Instead, exercise requirements and test scores will be gender-normed and different for men and women, with some standards lower than before. Due to persistently high failure rates, primarily among female trainees, the Army has decided to scrap the concept of gender-neutrality in the ACFT. The ACFT was supposed to have “gender-neutral” standards identical for men and women, but the structure of gender equality has crumbled under the weight of reality. Shortly after the Obama Administration opened combat arms units to women in 2015, officials decided to create the ACFT as a replacement for the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT). Army reversed course on the much-anticipated Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT). Misguided social policies are rarely reversed, but this just happened when the U.S. When a military social experiment collapses, “social engineers” and “experts” who designed the experiment never admit their mistakes. "The goal is about a having a more combat-ready army.If structural engineers design a bridge that collapses, they figure out what went wrong before they replace the bridge. Malcolm Frost, commander of the Army's Center for Initial Military Training and the officer in charge of developing the new fitness test. We had a high number of nondeployable soldiers that had a lot of muscular/skeletal injuries and medical challenges because we hadn't trained them from a fitness perspective in the right way," said Army Maj. "We needed to change the culture of fitness in the United States Army. The scoring is divided into three levels that require soldiers with more physically demanding jobs, such as infantry or armor, to score higher. Townsend said the new test was designed based on scientific research that matched specific exercises to tasks that soldiers in combat must do: sprint away from fire, carry a wounded comrade on a stretcher, haul cans of fuel to a truck. Unlike the old fitness test, which graded soldiers differently based on age and gender, the new one will be far more physically demanding and will not adjust the passing scores for older or female soldiers.įor example, in the current test - two minutes of situps, two minutes of pushups, a 2-mile run - younger soldiers must do more repetitions and run faster to pass and get maximum scores than those who are older or female. ![]() Reaching the new fitness levels will be challenging. The new test, "may be harder, but it is necessary," Townsend said. In addition, there has long been a sense among many senior officials that the existing fitness test does not adequately measure the physical attributes needed for the battlefield, said Gen. Officials also say about 12 percent of soldiers at any one time cannot deploy because of injuries. Nearly half of the commanders surveyed last year said new troops coming into their units could not meet the physical demands of combat. ![]() "I am prepared to be utterly embarrassed," Sampson said on a recent morning, two days before he was to take the test.Ĭommanders have complained in recent years that the soldiers they get out of basic training aren't fit enough. ![]() The Army is developing a new, more grueling and complex fitness exam that adds dead lifts, power throws and other exercises designed to make soldiers more fit and ready for combat.
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