By William Thibeau, former Army Ranger
Two weeks ago, the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel held a hearing featuring expert witnesses and senior military officers who testified about how the Pentagon’s diversity policies are affecting our nation’s armed forces.
Despite the Biden administration’s hopes of politicizing the Pentagon, not a single officer present could cite evidence proving that a more diverse military organization is a more effective one.
Instead, the hearing revealed a disturbing disconnect between the Pentagon’s public talking points, illuminating the reality of how progressive politics are hindering military readiness.
This disconnect became apparent almost immediately when witnesses were asked about the reality of gender-integrated combat units, and how standards for men and women to serve in combat have been reduced to competencies based only on character and fitness.
While character and fitness are important core military values, they cannot provide an accurate measure of a soldier’s survival skills in combat, a reality that could place lives in danger.
One of the most important examples of the Pentagon’s failed policies is the recent reversal on the new, gender-neutral Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT.
The Army spent 10 years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars building and testing the ACFT as a means to replace the Army Physical Fitness Test. The latter, known as the APFT, used gender-assigned standards.
When the Army started testing the ACFT in 2013, the military was aiming to eliminate gender-assigned standards as a means of accurately assessing how any soldier, male or female, could perform in combat.
After some female soldiers failed to pass particular physical challenges, however, the military under President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin decided to segregate scores by sex, reverting to the same gender-assigned standards previously used in the APFT.
This, after the Army spent 10 years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars of developing and testing the ACFT, with an entirely new series of physical challenges, which rightly tested combat fitness requirements.
For example, to earn an A-plus-equivalent score on the male deadlift event of the ACFT, a man has to deadlift 340 pounds. A woman has to deadlift only 210 pounds.
While this is a significant difference in weight, the vastly different results assign the same “grade” for purposes of promotion and selection.
This does nothing to equalize the reality of units training for real war, since the battlefield does not discriminate between genders. . . . . (read more on the Washington Times)
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