Biden is pushing hard for “wokeness” in our military, lowering standards in the name of equality and crippling its combat readiness. We must pray that our military is strengthened, not weakened.

From The Epoch Times. As the U.S. military rolls out its new Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT), which imposes different physical standards and requirements for men and women, longtime defense analysts and observers say that the military’s push for diversity and inclusion—a trend that accelerated under President Barack Obama and that the Biden administration aggressively carries forward—undermines combat training and readiness.

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“The Biden administration has assigned priority to diversity, inclusion, and equity as the primary criteria. That is a key decision and from it flows everything else that is problematic” in the military today, said Elaine Donnelly, founder and president of the Center for Military Readiness, a public policy organization in Livonia, Michigan.

Donnelly views the Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan 2021 released by the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as providing a good measure of the new priorities. The plan’s “Strategic Objective 2” is “Educate USSOCOM professionals and leaders to help facilitate and sustain a diverse and inclusive culture.” Another of its goals is to “Increase hiring rates of diverse applicants.”

The plan sets forth a far-reaching plan “to address and remediate bias” and calls diversity and inclusion “a strategic imperative” numerous times in the course of just 20 pages, Donnelly noted….

Abandoning Traditional Requirements

The new ACFT is undergoing implementation just as controversy develops around gender-integrated training in another area of the services, namely the Air Force. An unnamed female trainee who recently left the Air Force’s Combat Control School reportedly wrote in an April 2021 memo that instructors lowered fitness standards to accommodate her.

The new ACFT, which has lower physical standards than its predecessors—requiring the ability to do nine push-ups instead of 10—and different requirements for men and women in categories such as strength, endurance, and running speed, did not come into being overnight. Rather it is the end result of a long-running effort to scrap standards and expectations that men were likelier to be able to meet, observers say.

In December 2015, then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter ordered the opening of all combat roles in the military to women within 30 days, denying a request from the Marine Corps for a partial exemption from the order for certain roles such as infantry and fire support reconnaissance. By the end of the 30-day period, all branches of the armed forces had to present Carter with their implementation plans for gender integration.

“Fully integrating women into all military positions will make the U.S. armed forces better and stronger,” Carter stated at the time, though he acknowledged that “there will be problems to fix and challenges to overcome.”

The official response to those who expressed concern about the realism of Carter’s plan was to offer assurances that standards for physical fitness and ability were and would remain gender-neutral, Browne said. But physical differences between the genders, in areas such as upper-body strength and stature, meant that things did not always play out as the advocates of diversity hoped….

The new ACFT that the Army is now in the process of implementing does not impose standards that anyone hoping to be a soldier must meet, as in the past, but instead sets forth varying standards for men and women and for people of different ages, Browne noted. Browne sees the name of the test as something of a misnomer given that it does not really seek to gauge how well people can perform on combat tasks, but rather to measure general physical fitness. It sets maximum and minimum scores on the basis of percentiles within the category or “cohort” in question. It sets a passing score at the fifth percentile for an age and sex cohort, which Browne considers a low bar, and the maximum score at the 96^th percentile.

One illustration of the problems inherent in the new test, in Browne’s view, is the “sprint-drag-carry” test, which purports to measure not just a single aptitude but strength, agility, endurance, and aerobic maneuvering. The test allows an 18-year-old woman to pass with a time of three minutes and 15 seconds, but a man must take no longer than two minutes and 28 seconds to pass….

Double Standards

Among Keating’s findings were that Griest and Haver were able to take a special preparatory two-week pre-training course that male trainees were not able to take; that they received direct personal counseling and encouragement from an experienced Ranger that was not available to their male peers; that they were allowed to repeat patrols after making mistakes that disqualified male candidates; and that Griest herself expressed surprise that she and Haver passed the course after failing a key segment of training at Fort Benning not once but twice….

The New Priorities

Besides the effects on what happens during training and the standards and requirements involved, the cultural shift within the military in favor of diversity, inclusiveness, and equity has caused far-reaching changes in how candidates for military service spend their time. In Browne’s view, the time that trainees spend learning about critical race theory, implicit bias, politically correct pronouns, and micro-aggressions—instead of traditional things like firing with precision or scaling obstacles with full-body gear—comes with a steep price….

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(Excerpt from The Epoch Times. Photo Credit: Getty Images)