Surprise! Female PT standards will have to change

Chief Tango sends us a link to a Military.com article which reports speculation that the services will have to adjust their PT standards so that females will be able to qualify for entry into combat arms professions. The article begins with the author’s own speculation with no reference to actual spokespeople from the services being quoted, so I don’t knwo if this is an opinion piece, or what;

The Marine Corps may have to lower its physical standards in order to put females in positions to one day lead infantry platoons in combat.

Both the Marine Corps and the Army continue to wrestle with the mandate that former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued in January, directing the U.S. military to open hundreds of combat-arms jobs that have been closed to female servicemembers.

But the article continues;

The service conducted “proxy tests” this summer, involving 400 females and 400 males at Quantico Marine Base, Va., and at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The tests looked at tasks such as “lifting a tank round and loading it,” Krebs said.

“The data from the performance on those proxy tests will be correlated against the performance of the Marines doing physical fitness and combat fitness test events,” Krebs said.

“And we will kind of see … if a Marine gets a 300 on the PFT and CFT; how well they do on the MOS tasks. So we are looking at that to see … whether or not these physical standards are applicable to these MOSs.

“Depending on what the data says, and what it shows, it will decide whether or not any of the standards for the MOSs need to change.”

Maybe they can develop a tank round that will meet the weight standards instead of exploring the possibility that females can be trained to the standard.

Category: Military issues