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When the Woke Come for the Armed Forces
Men and women are the same and the only thing separating us is our sexual organs. This is the lie we’re being fed every day, all day. In countless ways, this lie has the potential to endanger our safety and our lives, and this is yet another example:
Leaked slides reveal the catastrophic failure of the Army Combat Fitness Test. If 84% of women are failing your physical fitness test (72% in a single, preposterous event!), you're not trying to make a stronger Army; you're trying to force women out. https://t.co/X50qO4EGaM
— David W. Brown 🇦🇶 (@dwbwriter) October 6, 2019
If women want to serve alongside men, they have to prove they are actually physically fit to do so. Weaker women serving in the army don’t just endanger themselves, they pose a risk for everyone around them. This is yet another way the woke Olympics hurts women under the guise of unattainable equality.
Published in General
Men are stronger than women and the Army didn’t cause that discrepancy. If I ever need someone to carry me to safety, I don’t care about their race or gender, only that they are strong enough to get the job done.
It’s nonsense.Â
Want to serve? Pass the test.Â
I still want more midgets in the NBA.
Look, women can man (oh no, forgive me) consoles that control drones, nuclear missiles, combat air traffic control. They can do a lot of things, but when it comes to charging up Hamburger Hill? Ya gotta have dudes . . .
Not everyone who serves is a spear chucker. Not even most. Women can do most jobs in the military. Not every man can do some of the jobs.
Face it, it’s hard enough to get qualified, dedicated people who will put up with the chicken feces, working conditions, miserable pay, and constant betrayal by their “grateful nation” to do the job in the first place.
You ever notice feminists only clamor for prestige positions? Doctors, lawyers, pilots, corporate CEOs, President of the United States? You don’t hear them fighting to become exterminators, crab fishermen off the Aleutian Islands, landfill workers… I guess women are more equal than men.
So, Air Force rather than Army?
The author starts the article by saying that the old Army Physical Fitness Test was far superior to the new Army Combat Fitness Test.
He then laments that only 16% of women have passed the Army Combat Fitness Test.
This begs the question: What percentage of women passed the old Army Physical Fitness Test ?
Not everyone in the Army is an infantryman.
I was in the Army from 98 to 01 and they changed the standard once in that time. I never went to Sargent school (PLDC) but I know women not making the physical part of the class was routine. That was almost 20 years ago. I’m sure they’ve watered down the fitness stuff considerably since then.Â
For some reason, Mr. Brown’s observation reminds me of the old liberal question,”If the crime rate is so low, why are so many in prison?”
Robert, you should probably look into this further before you criticize. Perhaps you have, but you mention no details that would confirm this.
The new ACFT involves 6 events. There are different standards for three different categories of personnel — “heavy” physically demanding units or jobs, “significant” physically demanding units and jobs, and “moderate” physically demanding units and jobs.
Do you have any factual basis for claiming that “women can do most jobs in the military”?
Remember that in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, even non-combatant personnel like drivers could end up in combat, as could anyone at a base that is attacked.
Also, do you have any basis for suggesting that these new standards would create a recruitment problem? Another possibility is that the Army is turning away male recruits, in order to preferentially hire females who cannot meet the physical requirements of the job.
Thank you for that input. It is also true that for the most part, women cannot measure up to men in certain ways. A man can push a heavier load in a wheelbarrow up a hill, but women will push a wheelbarrow that is 20% lighter for a much longer period. Their stamina levels are often greater than a man’s are.
I miss Muggsy Bogues.
Anyone can, in theory, end up in combat, in practice few do. You can not man the military with perfect physical specimens, there just aren’t enough to go around. Different military jobs have different standards and different physical requirements.
(My brain is moving faster than I can type so forgive me please if I don’t make complete sense)
The Air Force didn’t even teach basic hand-to-hand self-defense when I was in even though we had as much, or as little, chance as any to be in combat. My dad was a lineman in the Air Force during Vietnam. They gave him a rifle and told him to protect himself while he was out fixing the lines. It can go both ways, but a radiologist isn’t expected to be able to keep up with a line infantryman, yet can still get killed in the rear with the gear by the same caliber mortar round.
As for recruiting, that isn’t a problem of diversity or afirmative action, it’s a problem of broken promises, poor pay, insane working environments, and too many deployments.
At its primal limit, combat consists of two individuals hitting each other until one of them dies. No amount of planning can prevent the possibility of the situation devolving to that.
I don’t want any woman experiencing that on my behalf.
This should really be a whole separate post.
I read awhile back that the Army was adopting a more Cross Fit approach to fitness training and testing. That’s a huge change and I would expect a very steep period of adjustment. An army doesn’t get stronger by accepting more weakness.
Of course, the woman who has that kind of stamina has to want to be in the armed services and do what she does best. A couple of weeks ago, Sarah Thomas swam the English Channel 4 times non-stop https://www.si.com/more-sports/2019/09/30/sarah-thomas-swimmer-english-channel-four-times-breast-cancer-survivor, but would she pass the fitness test or would she even consider enlisting?Â
But when women can only do the easy jobs, the only jobs left for men will be the hard ones.
I remember my dad complaining that when they let women serve in the navy (yes, he’s that old) beyond nursing and a few other very select jobs, that it was very hard for men to get shore duty.  Men spent a lot more time at sea when women took a  larger share of shore billets. Â
I guess they solved that by letting women on ships. Â Brilliant. Â Now ships have to make special arrangements for the women who get pregnant during a cruise. Â Oh, wait, we’re told not to concern ourselves with that because women never have sex when at sea. Â
All these issues would go away if we’d just keep women pregnant and in the kitchen. Â There. Â I said it.
You forgot barefoot in the winter.
When my inlaws visited us while we were stationed in North Dakota, the apartment entrance was right next to the kitchen entrance. When my mother in law came into the house she saw my wife waiting to greet her in the kitchen doorway. Bare foot. And pregnant. The first thing her mother said to her was “You better get you so shoes on.” Â
I still crack up at the memory.
Striking poses on this is easy. You need to actually understand the Army and a bit of history to intelligently comment.Â
The Army, along with the other armed forces, was invited by Congress to define physical standards by what the Army calls military occupational specialties (MOS), way back in the early 1990s, just after the end of the Cold War. The all volunteer force, AVF, had already matured to the point of needing to recruit women into more than clerical jobs.
Some members of Congress, the exclusively old boys club that comprised the senior uniformed ranks at the time, and a small cadre of professional female advocates, who saw women in the “real” military as a leading edge of threats to social conservatism, dressed up their objections to any regular, “real Army” female participation as “social experimentation dangerous to our national security,” actually meaning all their other organizational, political, personal interests.
The Army, and the other services, simply declined the invitation, not a command from Congress. They rightly worried that many men would not meet any one-size-fits-all [fill in your specialty here] test standard. Instead, they all opted for variations on a general fitness test, one that roughly measured whether you were “fit” for your age and sex.Â
Note that a 50 year old man, even if he is supposed to be the leader of all the younger men, did not have to run as fast, or do as many pushups or sit-ups (to cite the Army test for decades, starting in the heart of the Cold War).
So, while this makes for a great emotional hit, and lets everyone strike the pose of their choice, what no one knows from this hype is whether the brand new and supposedly objective test actually measures anything close to actual capability to do the actual military specialty.
I’ll go look up the post I wrote on these specific tests a while back. Oh, found it.
Â
Perhaps you read it here:
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Except that “combat” has almost never been conveniently linear, so the sentiment has little substantive meaning.
Here’s the thing: drivers are not “non-combatants.” The only “non-combatants” are chaplains and medical personnel. I had a former infantry captain as one of my company commanders in Iraq. He trusted his life to one of his more senior mechanic sergeants, who doubled in convoy operations as his machine-gunner on his command vehicle. The basis for asserting that “women can do most jobs in the military” is over two decades of them doing just that, under all conditions.
So, while this makes for a great emotional hit, and lets everyone strike the pose of their choice, what no one knows from this hype is whether the brand new and supposedly objective test actually measures anything close to actual capability to do the actual military specialty.Â
Someone actually wrote about this around 6 months ago here:
Â
What does that mean, “conveniently linear?”
And if my objection is that I, personally, don’t want a woman (or child) defending me in a combat role, what does your observation have to do with that?
Don’t you watch NCIS? Haven’t you learned that a well-trained 85 pound female can easily best any 200 pound man in a fist fight? And besides that, the bad guys are very poor shots, missing almost every time while the heroes, male and female get perfect kills with a single shot while standing exposed. You know, reality TV for the masses. Or clever re-education for the masses. Don’t think this has no agenda nor impact.