Take the Army’s efforts to create gender-neutral fitness requirements, known as the Army Combat Fitness Test. The test, developed over a decade, was designed to be rigorous, requiring soldiers of either sex to meet physical standards appropriate to the roles they might perform — with the toughest requirements for jobs like artillery soldiers, which require a lot of muscle.
But that caused a problem: Women were failing the test at noticeably higher rates, according to a RAND study. Among active-duty enlisted soldiers, the fitness test had a pass rate of 92 percent among men but only 52 percent among women. (Women officers did better, with a pass rate of 72 percent.) Democratic senators, including New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, were also putting pressure on the Army to delay implementation of the test, arguing, as The Washington Post reported in 2020, that it “could undermine the goal of creating a diverse force.”
The Biden administration yielded to this complaint.
The issue flared in a tense May 2022 exchange in the Senate Armed Services Committee between Christine Wormuth, the Biden administration’s Army secretary, and Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican.
“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t unfairly have standards for a particular subgroup that people couldn’t perform,” she said. “We didn’t want to disadvantage any subgroups.”
Wormuth also insisted that the new standards were “much more challenging” than the previous ones. Cotton, a former Army officer, was having none of it. “The new standards,” he said, “are absolutely pathetic.”
Wokeness really is a threat to national security...
