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Men and Women and “Real Combat Arms”
In 2017, the United States Army rolled out a new objective physical standard test to determine eligibility for different job classifications, what the Army calls “military occupational specialties (MOS).” The four-event Occupational Physical Assessment Test (OPAT) applies to recruits and to soldiers seeking to change MOS. The test standards are not scaled for age or sex—the raw performance metric determines your physical suitability for groups of specialties. Another six-event test is being rolled out as a periodic test of physical readiness for deployment, also neutral on scoring and possibly with minimum scores per specialty. All of this intersects with the policy disputes over male-only specialties and men and women working together.
This is in compliance with the 1994 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). No, that is not a typo. Back in the early 1990s, there was great contention over the presence of women in traditionally male military specialties. Young officers, commissioned into Air Defense Artillery (ADA) in 1986, and trained as Patriot officers, had fired some of the first shots in anger in the first Gulf War, answering Saddam’s Scud missiles with Patriot missiles, cued by software hastily modified to detect and respond to this threat inside a limited engagement envelope.
It should not have been news that women could operate missile firing controls as well as men. Nor should there have been any great shock that women can fly aircraft as well as men. Yet, it was disconcerting to many for various reasons.
Now, there was talk of opening further assignments to women. Could this be done without placing our national security at risk? Unfortunately, we had a history of bad faith claims by exclusively white senior military officers, who had lied through their teeth about the performance of African-American combat veterans and their suitability for high status, heroic, military specialties like the infantry and armor. These white men had been especially vehement about excluding black men from the officer corps. So in the 1990s any male senior officers who might testify with chests full of medals, in support of claims that women were unsuited to join their club, would face legitimate skepticism.
Congress responded by putting language into the 1994 NDAA that covered both sides’ bases. The services were invited to establish objective physical standards for various jobs, provided that the standards were gender-neutral, not differential.
SEC. 543. GENDER-NEUTRAL OCCUPATIONAL PERFORMANCE STANDARDS.
(a) GENDER NEUTRALITY REQUIREMENT.—In the case of any military occupational career field that is open to both male and female members of the Armed Forces, the Secretary of Defense—
(1) shall ensure that qualification of members of the Armed Forces for, and continuance of members of the Armed Forces in, that occupational career field is evaluated on the basis of common, relevant performance standards, without differential standards or evaluation on the basis of gender;
(2) may not use any gender quota, goal, or ceiling except as specifically authorized by law; and
(3) may not change an occupational performance standard for the purpose of increasing or decreasing the number of women in that occupational career field.
(b) REQUIREMENTS RELATING TO USE OF SPECIFIC PHYSICAL REQUIREMENTS.—(1) For any military occupational specialty for which the Secretary of Defense determines that specific physical requirements for muscular strength and endurance and cardiovascular capacity are essential to the performance of duties, the Secretary shall prescribe specific physical requirements for members in that specialty and shall ensure (in the case of an occupational specialty that is open to both male and female members of the Armed Forces) that those requirements are applied on a gender-neutral basis.
(2) Whenever the Secretary establishes or revises a physical requirement for an occupational specialty, a member serving in that occupational specialty when the new requirement becomes effective, who is otherwise considered to be a satisfactory performer, shall be provided a reasonable period, as determined under regulations prescribed by the Secretary, to meet the standard established by the new requirement. During that period, the new physical requirement may not be used to disqualify the member from continued service in that specialty.
(c) NOTICE TO CONGRESS OF CHANGES.—Whenever the Secretary of Defense proposes to implement changes to the occupational standards for a military occupational field that are expected to result in an increase, or in a decrease, of at least 10 percent in the number of female members of the Armed Forces who enter, or are assigned to, that occupational field, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to Congress a report providing notice of the change and the justification and rationale for the change. Such changes may then be implemented only after the end of the 60-day period beginning on the date on which such report is submitted.
[emphasis added]
The Army did not take Congress up on the offer, made in 1994, until 2017. That is, they did not get past concept testing to actual testing of new entrants until that year. Here is how the Army explained the Occupational Physical Assessment Test (OPAT):
Army Recruiting Command estimates that the OPAT will be administered to about 80,000 recruits and thousands of cadets annually. Soldiers moving into more physically demanding MOSs also will have to meet the OPAT standard, said Jim Bragg, retention and reclassification branch chief for Army Human Resources Command.
Under the OPAT, there are four physical demand categories, Bragg explained.
The events are standing broad jump, seated power throw, strength deadlift, and interval aerobic run. You can read further on each OPAT event in an Army Times article. This test is not the same as a physical fitness test given to all soldiers in their units annually or semiannually.
The wheels are also in motion to replace the venerable three-event Army Physical Fitness Test (push-ups, sit-ups, two-mile run) with a much more equipment-dependent test. The new six-event Army Combat Fitness Test will be gender- and age- neutral, unlike the APFT which grades by different scales for age groups in all events, and scores men and women differently on push-ups and the two-mile run. Naturally, the Army has a cool ACFT homepage with illustrations, videos, and apps. A test phase manual suggests that, like the entry qualification test, the ACFT will set minimum scores based on MOS, depending on the level of physical demand of the specialty.
So, for the “heavy” physical demand category, the draft standard is a minimum of: three reps 180-pound deadlift, 8.5-meter power throw, 30 release technique push-ups, two-minute, nine-second sprint-drag-carry, five leg tucks, then run two miles in 18:00. These push-ups require you to dip all the way down, then lift your hands and reset before pushing up again, harder than the current continuous effort form.
Mens’ Work? A View to the Politics of Position
Going back to the mid-1980s, with President Ronald Reagan’s military rebuilding program near completion, the All-Volunteer Force made tentative moves to open more specialties to women. The sticking point was “combat,” more specifically “direct combat.”
This poorly conceptualized term assumed a linear battlefield, with a “front line” facing most of the risk, and risk diminishing with distance from this line. Never mind that everyones’ doctrine and weaponry had evolved to rain precision or lethal chemical fires first onto certain high-value targets in the “rear” areas.
Indeed, it was a recognition of such a risk that sparked the first software refinement of the Patriot Air Defense Artillery (ADA) system to recognize and fire in self-defense against certain Soviet missiles. These missiles were expected to carry chemical warheads to neutralize this new advanced killer of high-performance jet aircraft. This was a real three-dimensional chess match, with air and ground-based pieces.
My female Officer Basic Course classmates went to those units, while I rattled around in a Vietnam-era M113, leading short range, line of sight, ADA soldiers, all of us male. Not that I minded, indeed it was a much healthier organizational and political culture, because we were not operating at the NATO strategic (so political) level. If we had a rough training exercise, we just had to regroup and show improvement in the next iteration.
The big missile set was reputed to be led, to use a term loosely, by a general who flew around with a spare captain and lieutenant. It was said he would swoop down on a hilltop, get out, relieve the captain and senior lieutenant on the Patriot site, then kick the spares out of the helicopter, telling them he’d be back in a week and they had better be passing every drill. On the other hand, in the event of World War III, the lieutenants in the “front line” were alleged to have an estimated 24-hour life-expectancy. Thankfully the powers-that-be never decided to do it live.
Instead, Saddam Hussein started something he wasn’t prepared to finish. In the first Gulf War, the rough and tough all-male short-range ADA units never got to shoot at enemy helicopters or jets. It was an all-Patriot battalion show for ADA.
This only foreshadowed the larger change in the threat environment, with enemy aircraft becoming the prey of Air Force pilots, and ADA withering in much of its capacity, while rapidly growing its missile defense muscles. It was in that context that I watched the following vignette play out one Friday in the very early 1990s.
I had come back stateside, from commanding another all-male battery (think company) in Korea. The 2nd Infantry Division was our nation’s trip-wire but determined not to be just a speed bump if the Original Kim decided to go out with one last grab for glory. It was tough but satisfying duty, generally, training with a clearly focussed purpose. That duty in Korea coincided with Desert Storm.
After back-to-back overseas assignments, I was ready for a nice stateside post. It was also time for this young captain to pay his dues on a staff. I was blessed to be assigned to an operations section with a near military genius leading us. This made for great learning, satisfying duty, and less stress, usually.
On Friday afternoons, at least once a month, it was customary for the brigade’s officers to all go to the bar at the Officers’ Club at the end of the duty day. This venerable tradition was “Officers’ Call.” You were expected to show up, even if you just had a soda and paid your respects around.
As a brigade staff officer, I was not part of the battalions’ clusters. And clusters they were, junior officers of each gathered around their majors. Everyone wore the same Battle Dress Uniform, the old BDU woodland camouflage. One of the battalions had the big missiles, so was gender-integrated. Another battalion was of the towed, short range, smaller missile sort, and so was still all-male.
In the early 1990s, officers were very worried that if they had not gotten a combat patch, the visible token that they had been to the big show, they were doomed to fall short of their patched peers. This is long before 2001, and people largely believed we would not have another significantly sized combat deployment in many years.
Now the smaller missile unit male major had no patch, and the bigger missile unit female major did. The male major had entered the military with no female peers in his branch. The female major would have had to transfer over when the branch opened. The male major, a good-looking fellow, was also fond of referring to his own wife as “the pick of the litter.”
One Friday afternoon, I found myself positioned between the two battalion clusters. Naturally, as a good staff officer, I observed our units. The combat-patched female major, was having a good time with her officers and a cold beer by the dart board. The male major with no patch had his foot up on the bar rail, drink in hand, when he loudly proclaimed to the young men around him:
Of course, we know who the real combat arms unit is!
Yup. Major “Married to the Pick of the Litter” Little Missile was setting his young officers up for not so subtle resentment and career failure. At best it was a weak organizational-rivalry jibe, weakened by the universally understood subtext of cold mid-career fear. The man was hooked, well past the halfway mark to retirement eligibility. He would have to sweat making lieutenant colonel, and then fear he just wouldn’t get a good command, prerequisite to a bid for colonel’s eagles.
Jumbled up in that career anxiety was his sense of self, his concept of manhood, challenged by the presence of a peer who was female—with a coveted combat patch, and a Harley, if I recall.
Over the decades since then, I’ve seen my share of interpersonal dramas in units large and small. I’ve relied upon some amazing, competent, professional women of every rank. I’ve also seen some seriously messed up situations involving men and women in the military workplace, with fault variously attributable. I dealt with bad behavior inside units I commanded and was called more than once to investigate allegations in other units involving a senior person and subordinates.
I also have the academic and hands-on background to look warily at claims that every position and every unit should be open to both men and women. We have all seen news or opinion pieces making claims about women entering infantry units, as infantry soldiers. You can see the establishment of gender-neutral physical fitness metrics interacting with the political and social battle over “women in combat,” “gender integration,” and “military readiness.” I understand that it may be simultaneously true that:
- leftists wish to hijack the institution to further their identity politics goals and their long desire to make the military less militarily effective…and
- some conservative culture warriors, including a small professional crew focused on this issue, view almost any opportunity for women in the military to be an assault on womanhood…and
- there are many people, including some great soldiers I have known, muddling through the mess of life as it is.
And? Feel free to add your own branch or sequel. As you do so, I hope the facts, my memories, and my musings, help you frame your own thoughts on the subject of men and women in the military.
Published in Group Writing
Yes. This is why you should always assume, such as with the loser Senator McSally, that any woman given a military command, any woman flying an aircraft, and especially any woman commanding a military aircraft squadron is a token officer who has not done half of what her male counterparts have done. There are likely exceptions to the rule, but observing the rule and assuming the worst is the safest approach.
@misterdog The boys will be boys Army was much more fun. I won’t get into what was accepted as normal behavior. I will just say that such behavior today would result in jail and or rehab. If you were in formation all was OK.
Yeah, the Marines are nowhere near the same. When I came in the Marines in the mid 80’s, it was a totally different environment than when I came back in the Corps in 2004. Nobody would go to the officer’s club because drinking was frowned on. The club system had failed so completely that the officers and enlisted clubs were combined into one building with different entrances.
Heck, back then you had separate barber shops for officers and enlisted. College degrees are a whole lot easier to get now too, so the only real difference between officers and enlisted was the amount they were paid and the level of responsibility assigned to them. I’m not sure that’s all bad, but I do like the discipline involved in keeping a distance between officers and enlisted. When we were in work ups to go overseas in 2011, I once found a corporal wandering around the officer’s quarters. When asked WTF was he doing there, he explained he was the corporal of the guard and he was tasked with inspecting all the barracks for the battalion. I realize that he was uniquely stupid, but the point is that the bright line has eroded quite a bit.
I’ve read some big brain stuff that blames the born again Army on people like General Colin Powell, the FORSCOM CDR General Palastra, and General Thurman, Recruiting Command and then the Panama thing. They were given credit for bringing the Army back from the Vietnam era. I think they over corrected but it was not unusual to walk in the barracks and find people shooting up.
I knew one of the aides to The Squeamish Loser Colin Powell back when he was the chairman of the JCS. Nice guy. The aide, that is. But I detested TSLCP. Powell has been nakedly ambitious politically and has too many times jeopardized our nation’s safety with his nancy-boy unwillingness to fight to win. But even though he tried to stop us from winning in the Gulf War, he made sure his name was at the top of the list of General Officers responsible for what limited success there was, even though he was not a combatant commander and he countermanded Tommy Franks to prevent him from exploiting our initial military successes.
No, someone has become adept at using spackle, duck tape, glue and Photo Shop to convert a “man” into a ghastly simulacrum of the shell of a female doppelgänger.
Yes as to the early “Race Relations” program, which was scrapped for the unhelpful reverse bias built into it and replaced with Equal Opportunity Advisors trained at DEOMI, the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, a far more helpful program. EO not only folded in more than just race relations, it changed the focus.
You also have hit on part of the dynamic driving demand for access to all assignments. Because the very top assignments in all the services have been almost exclusively filled by “combat arms” generals, being a logistician or a signal officer, say, means you will never make it to the top. It has therefore been female officers who were most interested in access to combat arms assignments over the decades, while enlisted women, non-commissioned officers, have been more focussed on assignments that provide a good career followed by easy translation of skills and experience to a civilian job.
Bitter nonsense.
This problem of discipline, with drug use, race riots, even occasional violence against NCOs and officers, post Vietnam has been blamed on the near destruction of the NCO corps. If you were a sergeant in the 60s, you, as a career soldier, were going to face repeated Vietnam tours. The argument goes that we lost so many to getting out when they could that there was a shortage of experienced NCO leadership, the bedrock of organizational discipline.
It took time to grow their replacements, during which decade things got very ugly. When I came in in 1986, my sergeants would talk about the bad old days.
Pizza and beer for lunch in the basement of the Fort Bliss O Club. Exotic dancers on Friday at the club annex by the hospital. Train hard, play hard.
Must be a Marine thing, never saw that. Unless you mean that some Officer’s Clubs had barbers, which I do remember seeing somewhere. I sure do miss getting a haircut for $3.00 and tipping the barber a dollar.
You can’t separate the problems of the Army from the problems of society. The problems of the society WERE the problems of the Army. Just concentrated.
This too is a real issue. The EO and Sexual Assault/Sexual Harassment response and prevention system has been misused for just this purpose. Once the complaint is filed, the command is on eggshells, as any adverse action might then be grounds for a retaliation charge, a separate offense. I saw a senior female officer’s career ended because she got cross-wise of an enlisted woman who was alleging sexual harassment by a male officer. The female officer became collateral damage.
I saw a young female soldier almost destroy a male soldier’s life with a false accusation of rape, when her aim was to get out of her contract, to get an early discharge without penalty. In such cases, the penalty should be as heavy in the other direction, and pursued as vigorously.
I also knew of a handful of men who had absolutely no business in the same uniform I was proud to wear, based on their conduct. The first I recall was the report of a First Sergeant, the senior enlisted man in an all male company, sexually assaulting a young male soldier sleeping in the barracks of a unit next to mine in Korea. And that was before it was legal for gay men to serve, so “social engineering” had nothing to do with it, and women were not in the equation.
I recall the wisdom of a MP lieutenant colonel, the first time he came to the battle update brief at Balad, Iraq: “There are now 10,000 soldiers in and around this base. That is a small town. Small towns have crime. We will have crime here.”
All of these, though, seemed the exceptions to the rule of soldiers doing their duty with some degree of professional pride.
That started to die out in the late 1980s. The officer club and the NCO club died due to both the deglamorization of alcohol (get busted for DUI and lose your career) and the change to a more married demographic. None of my OBC classmates at Fort Bliss, who were women, complained about the go-go dancers in the club annex. By the time we rotated back for OAC, we heard a senior officer’s wife had complained and that was that.
Dee Dee the engineer was just fine, but the young lady whose complaint launched the whole brouhaha got the silent treatment too, and that did not return to the status quo ante. It wasn’t vindictiveness; it was self-defense. You couldn’t (yet) be charged for what you didn’t say.
Oh, and the primary target was “laterally promoted.” He was told that his reassignment was temporary. It wasn’t temporary enough to suit him, so he went to work for the customer — as the procurement specialist for the project that he had been managing.
Karma can be a bitch, but she’s pretty good at irony.
I was joking! Any time a study is published showing a positive benefit to smoking, the tobacco companies are usually accused of financing it . . .
Amazing to think about those days after the past 18 years. I remember in 1994 the jump for Haiti getting cancelled literally minutes before boarding the bird and everyone being so upset at the thought of not getting a combat scroll and mustard stain. Wow, so different now from those days. Completely different world.
I don’t think this has changed. It doesn’t matter which war as long as it was the last one. I showed up at Ft Hood soon after they had returned from Iraq. I was so unwanted, I volunteered to go to GTMO as 1SGT of a JTF HQ. At the JTF I found some very pissed off Marine and USN officers who had been caught up in Tail Hook.
I remember standing in front of brigade HQ when the bus from 21st Rep Bn dropped off the latest crop. Two kids, young PFCs barely needing a shave, stepped off wearing 82d Abn patches on their left shoulder. Grenada vets.
My favorite story about Grenada, which is probably apochrypal, was about the Rangers loading up for their parachute jump into Grenada. Some old sergeant telling the Rangers, “Don’t worry bother with them reserve chutes men. We’re dropping from 500 feet”.
Attack the messenger? Weak response.
There is a well known term for judging someone solely by their ethnic group, or race, or gender. Why would you go out of your way to prove the worst stereotypes that people on the left hold about conservatives?
Since my wife flew aircraft both in the military and outside of it for over 30 years, I’ll take it personally and withhold the code of conduct violation for Ricochet, but the comments you make here (and in a previous thread about McSally) say way more about you than they do about women (and all minorities in the previous thread).
On a center right site it’s surprising and very disappointing. And the previous poster is right – this is the same stuff I heard from bitter losers for years. I didn’t get my pilot slot/command/assignment because some under-qualified woman/black/Hispanic was awarded it without merit. The clarion call of underperformers.
I’ll take the risk of being called a COC violator. I know nothing about piloting a jet. So, allow me the space to change the scene a little bit. I think NBA and WNBA athletes are the best athletes on the planet. The difference in athleticism between the two leagues is day and night. One can say that without being branded a bigot. Now onto a part where I’m guessing in ignorance. Men generally are better athletes, more aggressive, and more risk takers than women. I suspect those characteristics are required for fighter piloting. That’s not to say women should not be fighter pilots. I don’t know but I think one can argue the point without being a shameless bigot. I also think, man or woman, one need not be the best. One simply needs to be good enough as there are ranges of abilities among both sexes. I also suspect the very best male pilot is much better than the best female. But if you randomly pick one of each they will be very close in fighter piloting.
I didn’t mention your wife. I know nothing of your wife. I would normally assume, based on your word as her husband that she did not benefit from affirmative action, EEO programs, or even shameless flirtation to achieve whatever she has or hasn’t achieved.
But if you want to put her out there, then I will say that without your recommendation otherwise, that I will always assume that a woman has had that leg up and did not do what would normally be required of men. This is the evil nature of EEO, et al., because it is the natural conclusion when people are not held to the same standards. Don’t blame me for noticing what’s happening in the world. The “well known term” doesn’t apply when the government is the one requiring the special treatment.
My best to your darling bride. I’m glad that you tell me that she is one of the few that didn’t get coddled. There are exceptions to every rule and I will believe that your wife is one of them based on your say so.
I can’t help but wonder. Is there a female fighter pilot quota to be met? Are better qualified males turned away? Are these questions not to be asked w/o being ID’d as a bigot? I suspect that one should prefer ignorance rather than ask. I think I’ve beaten this dead horse enough.
Your explanation looks correct as to Sec. 543(b), which you quote here, but Sec. 543(a)(1) is different, stating:
This applies to all members of the armed forces, and the plain language seems to prohibit the use of differential physical fitness standards for males and females. It is my understanding that all branches have used such differential standards for the past 20 years.
Where no timeline is set, I would think that ordinary statutory interpretation would require immediate implementation.
Am I missing something? Is the argument simply that the physical fitness requirements don’t apply to any specific “occupational career field,” but rather to qualification to be in the military at all?
In 1994 there were still restrictions prohibiting women serving in direct combat roles. I don’t recall if that was a law or accepted policy.
It was a law that has since been repealed.
The argument would be that the old fitness tests were not linked to any “occupational career field” fitness. They were taken as indicators of general physical fitness and were scaled for age as well as male/female. So, a senior sergeant in his mid-30s faced a lower standard than the 19 year olds he was leading in the field. Clearly, there was no real connection between the push-up/sit-up/2-mile-run test and “occupational career field” fitness. Here is the verbiage read at the start of all APFTs:
And I can hear the DI delivering this in the voice indicated by the allcaps. Except, of course, for the word: cardiorespiratory.