New Army AFCT set in stone. Again.

Remember when the Army announced (several years ago now) that they were revamping the annual PT test? The goal was to create a gender and age-neutral test. A soldier would be tested not against some chart, but against the needs of their MOS. There would be a physical standard for an MOS. You met it or you didn’t.

That sounds remarkably simple and fair for the something Big Army would come up with. First, the program was beset by delays. The program began in 2013! Along the way, the requirements to be MOS-specific were dropped, then when it was on the verge of implementation a couple years back, Congress got upset that women weren’t given a different test.

Here we are with an “all new” annual PT test, the Army Combat Fitness Test, that took ten years, countless man-hours, and who knows how much money for studies from Rand to arrive at a test that breaks scoring down by age and gender. Old is new again! Naturally the Sergeant Major of the Army is toeing the party line. He says, “I’m really proud we’re moving forward, we’re there, we’re doing it. This is the test.”

Poetrooper and Jeff LPH3 send in the news. From Military.com;

The final version of the test goes live on April 1 with soldiers not having scores impact their record, a grading that can have effects ranging from promotion to expulsion from the Army, until Oct. 1. However, the Army will not immediately boot failures out of the force. Part-time National Guard and Reserve soldiers have until April 2023 before scores are entered into their record.

The most significant changes to the six-event ACFT is that it no longer is meant to prepare soldiers for combat [emphasis added] but instead built as a general fitness assessment. It will also have different scoring standards for men and women across different age groups, in most cases lowering them, following a congressionally mandated report from Rand Corp, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, that found nearly half of the service’s women could not pass earlier standards for the test.

For example, a female soldier between 17 and 21 years old now has to deadlift between 120 and 210 lbs. while a male soldier has to lift between 140 and 340 lbs. In that same age group, female soldiers have to run two miles between 23:22 and 15:29 minutes while male soldiers must perform that exercise between 22 and 13:22 minutes. That minimum run time for male soldiers is a minute longer than the previous version of the ACFT that the Army previously trialed, following data showing the run is by far the most failed event for both genders.

Well, if people are failing it, we should just lower the standard. Brilliant. We need more simple solutions for problems like that.

I await a complete re-write of the PT test in five years when they discover that too many people are being injured by the new exercises, and they just go back to push-ups, sit-ups, and running. Tests that don’t require special equipment, can be conducted literally anywhere, and can be proctored with minimal staffing.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Army, Army News, Government Incompetence