This week’s Pentagon ordered the elimination of lower physical standards for women in combat units.
order Defense Secretary Pete Hegses announced on Monday, dated Sunday, requiring all physical fitness requirements for combat weapon positions (which are likely to see important battles during wartime). Become “sexually neutral” This could significantly reduce the number of women meeting the requirements. The order directs military leaders to implement new fitness standards by the end of October.
The US military has debated the issue of how to significantly assess women’s physical fitness in tests to determine their placement to physically tough combat work and advances into leadership roles.
After years of internal deliberations on the new annual fitness test, The Army relaxed grading standards For women and older service members in 2022. According to a survey published in the year by RAND Research Corporation Women and senior squad They failed new tests at a significantly higher rate than men and young troops.
Other branches of the military also had different standards for fitness testing for men and women. for example, Marines are undergoing strength tests for all recruits: Men must complete 3 pull-ups or 34 push-ups within 2 minutes. Women must complete one pull-up or 15 push-ups in the same time frame.
These gender-specific standards remain in some military jobs, Hegses said in a statement accompanying the order. However, he argued that women should not be allowed in combat units if they cannot meet the same fitness standards as men.
Hegseth previously opposed the inclusion of women in combat jobs such as infantry, artillery, tank crews and special forces, and wrote in a recent book that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men.” he I later returned to that stancein December, he said, “If there’s the right standard and women meet that standard, Roger, let’s go.”
The struggle against fitness tests began after the military removed some of the last barriers to isolating the military’s gender, and opened up all combat work to women in 2015.
As women were forced to break new ground and proceed to elite combat roles such as infantry officers and special forces, questions have raised about whether women should be bound by different fitness standards. Most elite jobs, such as the Army Rangers and Navy Seals, have always required equal standards for men and women.
In the early limited deployment of the Army’s new fitness test, 65% of small women failed, while 10% of men failed. Later independent reviews by Rand produced similar results. Almost half of the women who joined the military failed the test, but fewer than 10% of male counterparts failed the test.
Written by Major Kristen Grist, the first female army infantry officer and one of the first two women to graduate from the Army Ranger School. Opinion article It was published in 2021 by the Modern War Institute in West Point and sought gender-neutral fitness test standards. She argued that lower standards for women “reinforce the belief that women cannot do the same job as men, making it difficult for women to gain the trust and confidence of their teammates.”
