OPINION:
Two weeks ago, the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel held a hearing featuring expert witnesses and senior military officers who testified about how the Pentagon’s diversity policies are affecting our nation’s armed forces.
Despite the Biden administration’s hopes of politicizing the Pentagon, not a single officer present could cite evidence proving that a more diverse military organization is a more effective one. Instead, the hearing revealed a disturbing disconnect between the Pentagon’s public talking points, illuminating the reality of how progressive politics are hindering military readiness.
This disconnect became apparent almost immediately when witnesses were asked about the reality of gender-integrated combat units, and how standards for men and women to serve in combat have been reduced to competencies based only on character and fitness.
While character and fitness are important core military values, they cannot provide an accurate measure of a soldier’s survival skills in combat, a reality that could place lives in danger.
One of the most important examples of the Pentagon’s failed policies is the recent reversal on the new, gender-neutral Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT. The Army spent 10 years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars building and testing the ACFT as a means to replace the Army Physical Fitness Test. The latter, known as the APFT, used gender-assigned standards.
When the Army started testing the ACFT in 2013, the military was aiming to eliminate gender-assigned standards as a means of accurately assessing how any soldier, male or female, could perform in combat. After some female soldiers failed to pass particular physical challenges, however, the military under President Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin decided to segregate scores by sex, reverting to the same gender-assigned standards previously used in the APFT.
This, after the Army spent 10 years and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars of developing and testing the ACFT, with an entirely new series of physical challenges, which rightly tested combat fitness requirements.
For example, to earn an A-plus-equivalent score on the male deadlift event of the ACFT, a man has to deadlift 340 pounds. A woman has to deadlift only 210 pounds. While this is a significant difference in weight, the vastly different results assign the same “grade” for purposes of promotion and selection.
This does nothing to equalize the reality of units training for real war, since the battlefield does not discriminate between genders.
The Army also changed the fitness test in order to move the standards goalposts in the direction of gender parity. In 2021, the Army initially released an ACFT that included a “leg tuck,” in which soldiers would hang from a pull-up bar and raise their knees to their elbows as many times as possible without dropping from the bar.
This test produced disparate outcomes for men and women, so the Army bowed to political pressure and removed the leg-tuck event.
These challenges, however, were initially implemented for a good reason: to assess and train soldiers to save themselves and others in combat.
As a result of removing them, no ACFT event accurately measures the ability of soldiers to elevate themselves to a window, pull themselves over a wall, or pull the risers on a parachute. It is easy to say that women meet the standards of men when the Army changes the test to ensure that result.
The practical application of the Department of Defense’s racial equity efforts is also hard to reconcile with military leaders’ insistence that they do not consider race or sex in personnel evaluation when it is apparent that policies to ensure such discrimination exists.
For avoidance of any doubt, the Air Force published a memo on Aug. 9, 2022, establishing race- and sex-based goals for each class of Air Force officer applicants.
These criteria were reinforced in a July House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel hearing when Air Force Academy and West Point superintendents testified they have their own “racial goals” for each admissions class.
This puts military leaders in a bind. They can either be direct about the fact of race- and sex-based personnel decisions, or they can admit that the “goals” they establish for each subgroup are meaningless theatrical exercises.
If the latter is true, then the Pentagon must cease action to preserve the crumbling respect for the military as an institution of our country. As The Wall Street Journal reported in September, fewer than 9% of Americans even consider joining the military, which is an all-time low.
The fact that no witnesses in the Sept. 20 hearing could cite evidence to support the assertion that diversity improves combat performance should be a red flag that such policies are counterproductive. The burden of proof is on those who want to remake a military along ambiguous lines, which are often disconnected from the concrete realities of our nation’s hard power.
• Will Thibeau is the director of the American Military Project at the Center for the American Way of Life. A graduate of Fordham University who served as an Army Ranger in the Middle East, Mr. Thibeau later testified in front of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel on behalf of the Claremont Institute. He has since worked with The Heritage Foundation and has been published by The American Mind, The American Conservative and The Daily Signal.
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