There is little purpose in complaining about the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) anymore. The test remains perfectly emblematic of the post-Global War on Terror Army—bereft of direction and desperate to spend its way out of an identity crisis. If nothing else, the concept of a Cross Fit-inspired physical fitness test with multiple events and lots of gear is never going away. But all the expense and complexity was supposed to be in service of establishing a gender-neutral, age-neutral test that would turn every Steve Rogers into Captain America. That dream is dead and buried.
The question worth asking now is what should the Army have done? Yes, it is easy to be an armchair general. I know this because actual generals have proven for a decade now that there’s nothing to it, actually, and the stakes of failure are nonexistent. So let’s dive in.
WHERE THE Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) CAME FROM
First, how did we get here? In 2013, the Obama administration rolled back the Direct Ground Combat Definition and Assignment Rule. This allowed women to serve in direct combat roles and military occupational specialties that were previously reserved for men. The following year, the Army began implementing the new standard. This was a difficult problem.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) organized a program called the Soldier 2020: Physical Demands Study, designed to inform the way the Army integrated genders into combat roles. It also started a study to determine what a physical fitness test would look like that incorporated basic battlefield skills. This too was a difficult problem.
As if all that weren’t enough, the Defense Department during this time came around to the idea that the next war might not look like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, it might look a lot more like a conventional war against a nation like China or Russia, and everyone—not just infantry or special operations forces—might have to pick up a rifle and follow. It’s an old favorite of theirs: it was also the war they were preparing to fight on September 10, 2001.
That kind of war would have the sorts of soldiers who specialize in finance and dental hygiene grabbing ammo cans, dragging fallen soldiers to cover, and climbing over walls to engage the enemy. Like the other two, this was a very difficult problem.
WHO DOESN’T WANT Military FITNESS – especially in combat?
To solve everything in one fell swoop, the Army unveiled a multi-event physical fitness test that incorporated equipment and a Cross Fit-style ethos. They called it the Army Combat Fitness Test, which was the original sin that complicated everything afterward. Because no physical fitness test was ever going to be the solution to the Army’s gender-integration problems, or the best way to win all its wars. By saying that passing meant you were “combat fit,” however, in the eyes of the press and politicians, the new test’s focus and purpose became unassailable. After all, who isn’t in favor of a “combat fit” Army?
That made the next, important step nearly impossible. Any new physical fitness test was going to need a lot of quiet calibration. Especially this one, whose development was based more on feelings than science. But how do you calibrate combat fitness—something that on first glance seems binary.
As we published previously at ClearanceJobs, when the U.S. Army Center for Initial Military Training (CIMT) came up with the test—with virtually no science behind it but lots of gut instincts—it expected the Operations Research/Systems Analysis (ORSA) team based out of the Studies and Analysis Division at Ft. Eustis, VA. to go back make the math work. ORSA refused to be a rubber stamp, though, finding flaw with nearly every aspect of the test, from muscle groups tested to the ways CIMT wanted to test them.
Ultimately, CIMT pressed onward, and for the next decade, the Army stepped on rake after rake on the way to implementation. They have had to water down virtually every aspect of the test. In 2019, word leaked that 84% of women who took the test failed it. Finally, in 2021, invalidating one of the foundational arguments for the new test, the Army created gender-specific evaluation standards.
IT BECAME TOO EASY
In one of the more embarrassing details of the ACFT, an alternative to the two-mile run is a rowing test. As one Army Reserve officer noted, “If you can’t run due to injury, the row standard is so slow it would put you in the bottom 5% of competitive 10-year-olds. This is particularly concerning since the updated policies mean that a soldier medically disqualified from participating in every event of the test could be deployable based on the row alone.”
And as one scientific study concluded of the test, “the ACFT may undermine military readiness. In moving from the original Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) to the ACFT, the Army has made their fitness test of record 20 times easier for young male recruits and 1.3 times easier for young female recruits.” It’s a very hard test to max out, yes, which is great on the upper end of physical fitness performers. But the test was supposed to improve performance of soldiers on the lower end.
Four months ago, Congress stepped in and ordered the Army to raise the passing standards for combat specialties. It remains unclear whether the women in combat arms jobs will have their own scoring system. The Army is studying the problem.
WHAT THE ARMY SHOULD HAVE DONE
The Army did not have a broken system with the previous Army Physical Fitness Test. If it wanted fitter soldiers, it could have raised the standards for passing from 60% to 70%. If it wanted women to meet the same standard as men, it could have reconsidered scores across the board. If it wanted women to score equally with men to join combat arms, it could have simply eliminated the female scoresheet for would-be 11Bs. If it wanted to introduce new events into the physical fitness test—pull-ups, for example, or planks, or sprints—it could have done so easily, and for free.
If indeed it wanted to transition to a fully Cross Fit-style test, with equipment, it could have done so as a “Ship of Theseus,” one event at a time, collecting data as it went, calibrating carefully, and gradually phasing out the existing APFT events, one at a time, until what remained was the test it wanted.
Instead, the Army did it big, decided to figure it out as they went, and chose the most inflammatory and ill-considered name possible.
The ACFT as intended was never going to work, because men and women were never going to be able to meet the same standards. That’s an issue of biology, and that’s on the White House and Congress. Proving all this in the most humiliating way possible, though? That’s on the Army.
