The Army’s Combat Fitness Test begins a long-awaited major realignment this month, after a congressionally-ordered Rand Corp. study revealed numerous gaps in its scoring and preparation.
The fitness test began development in 2013, based on a set of essential “warrior tasks and drills,” as well as feedback from soldiers who had served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But after reviewing 630,000 test results, Rand highlighted weaknesses in the physical exam’s ability to predict success in combat.
Because retention or promotion in the Army can be affected by failing the test, lawmakers expressed concern that women were failing the new test at alarming rates – the study found that 48% of active duty enlisted women and 28% of active duty women officers were not passing. And almost 60% of enlisted women in the Army Reserve and Army National Guard failed the fitness test.
Additionally, several military occupational specialties were seeing higher failure rates, regardless of gender, including non-combat medical specialties, human resources, cooks and animal care.
The Rand study highlighted that “some events have not been shown to predict combat task performance or reduce injuries, and justification is needed for why all fitness events and minimum standards apply equally to all soldiers.”
An non-commissioned officer grimaces while she carries kettle bells during training for the Army Combat Fitness Test in 2020. A Rand study found that a high percentage of women were failing the gender-neutral test.
The study found that scores and pass rates could improve with training and that soldiers want more access to the right training and equipment. It recommended that the Army establish a permanent, institutionalized process for overseeing and refining the fitness test.
The biggest impacts were observed for women, Rand reported, but there were also differences in pass rates by age, with older soldiers passing at lower rates. There was also a noticeable lag across components, as the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard lagged behind the regular Army. Although Rand did not imply the test was flawed because of these differences, it stressed further investigation is needed.
As a result, the Army has dropped a gender- and age-neutral fitness standard and revised scoring tables to take both into account, and the Army is now classifying the test as a general physical fitness assessment instead of a prediction for combat success.
The much-maligned leg tuck, where a soldier has to perform a chin-up and finish by bringing knees up to the elbows, has been dropped from the set of activities to complete, because the study revealed it was not useful in predicting performance on combat tasks. Additionally, for soldiers who have medical conditions that keep them from running, a 2.5-mile walk has been established as an acceptable aerobic alternative.
The Army’s director of training, Brig. Gen. Scott Naumann, told the Army Times that the Army “decided to implement the test as a general physical fitness assessment, as opposed to one designed to predict performance on a set of tasks.”
Rand recommended that the Army “should institutionalize a formal senior-level management structure to guide and oversee [fitness test] implementation, use and revision.”
The Army announced that the changes will be phased in gradually so that soldiers can train and adjust to the new scoring, and there will be no administrative consequences for failing the test until Oct. 1, when test scores become on-the-record for active duty soldiers.
Reserve and National Guard soldiers have another 18 months to pass the physical before facing possible separation by April 2024.
