This week's Pentagon ordered the elimination of lower physical standards for women in combat units.
The orders by Defense Secretary Pete Hegses were announced on Sunday and on Sunday, requiring that all physical fitness requirements for combat weapons positions (which are likely to see important battles during wartime) should be “sexually neutral.” The order directs military leaders to implement new fitness standards by the end of October.
The US military has debated the issue of how to significantly assess women's physical fitness in tests to determine their placement to physically tough combat work and advances into leadership roles.
After years of internal deliberations on the new annual fitness test, the Army relaxed rating standards for women and elderly service members in 2022. That year, it was found that women and older troops failed new tests at significantly higher rates than men and younger troops.
Other branches of the military also had different standards for fitness testing for men and women. For example, Marines are undergoing strength tests on all recruits. Men should complete three pull-ups or 34 push-ups in less than 2 minutes. Women must complete one pull-up or 15 push-ups in the same time frame.
These gender-specific standards remain in some military jobs, Hegses said in a statement accompanying the order. However, he argued that women should not be allowed in combat units if they cannot meet the same fitness standards as men.
Hegseth previously opposed the inclusion of women in combat jobs such as infantry, artillery, tank crews and special forces, and wrote in a recent book that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men.” He later betrayed the attitude, saying in December, “If there's the right standard and the women meet that standard, Roger, let's go.”
The struggle against fitness tests began after the military removed some of the last barriers to isolating the military's gender, and opened up all combat work to women in 2015.
As women were forced to break new ground and proceed to elite combat roles such as infantry officers and special forces, questions have raised about whether women should be bound by different fitness standards. Most elite jobs, such as the Army Rangers and Navy Seals, have always required equal standards for men and women.
In the early limited deployment of the Army's new fitness test, 65% of small women failed, while 10% of men failed. Later independent reviews by Rand produced similar results. Almost half of the women who joined the military failed the test, but fewer than 10% of male counterparts failed the test.
Major General Christenglist, the first female Army infantry officer and one of the first two women to graduate from the Army Ranger School, wrote an opinion piece published in 2021 by the Modern War Institute in West Point. She argued that lower standards for women “reinforce the belief that women cannot do the same job as men, making it difficult for women to gain the trust and confidence of their teammates.”
