The Army’s yearslong fight over its controversial new fitness test isn’t over yet

It’s understandable that the Army has faced difficulties in adopting a new fitness test that is intended to ensure that all soldiers are prepared for combat, said Taren Sylvester, who researches military and veterans issues for the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C. Indeed, the service has found that it needs to set different standards for soldiers’ fitness levels based on their gender and military occupational specialty (MOS). .

“Women have a harder time with upper body strength; people who are in more support MOSs like cyber don’t necessarily focus on the same kind of fitness as people who are in combat MOSs,” Sylvester said. “So, trying to strike a balance between those competing priorities is not easy. Incorporating any kind of new science or standards into a military service is, by definition, going to take a while just because of how bureaucracy works.”

One major lesson from the Army’s initial attempts to create a gender-neutral combat fitness test is that equal standards are not necessarily equitable, Sylvester said.

“Just because the standards are different for women does not mean that their fitness is not up to requirements,” Sylvester said. “For example, women’s lower center of gravity means they tend to excel better at fitness aimed at core and lower body strength, which the new combat fitness test is more geared towards.”

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