Maybe you can make some sense out of all this; I sure can’t. What I do know is that the military -- and the Army in particular -- has been walking a thin, wobbly, and vaporous line between “readiness” and social policy -- including gender issues -- since at least the late 1970s (just to show you how easy it is to solve a problem once you set your mind to it). At that time, in response to political pressure – which was, in turn, a response to the feminist and women’s rights movements (overlapping but not identical) – the Army gradually expanded the role of women from "combat service support" to "combat support" to combat, i.e. actually carrying a gun and being willing, able, and allowed to engage the enemy. And without detailing the myriad issues that came up in the process, I’ll mention a single issue, which was, if you will, the rock which the good ship Women in Combat inevitably ran into -- namely upper body strength. Try as they might, the Army just couldn’t do much about that issue beyond basic physical conditioning. (And don’t bother me about women boxers, wrestlers, and body builders -- #1, there aren’t enough of them to go around, and #2, how many of them are interested in joining the Army? And also, don’t bother me about the heroines in Quentin Tarantino films. That’s fiction. Say it with me -- fiction. OK?)
(And by the way, the upper body strength problem, as obvious as it might seem to the layman, is something the researchers and “medics” hesitated to bring up at first, due to the political atmosphere at the time. It was “close hold” – not to be published or, heaven forbid, briefed to the press. Eventually the Army had to, grudgingly, admit it was for real, and that it wasn't going away. We see the latest iteration of the overall problem in this article.)
So yes, there has been an ebb and flow of this issue for over 40 years now, and guess what, the human body -- of both the male and female varieties -- has not changed, morphed, or evolved in all that time, despite the best efforts of “science”, experts, political activists, politicians, Olympic coaches, Big Pharma, and anyone else with an interest in the matter. The pendulum has swung, basically, between combat readiness and all that it entails, and social change (either keeping up with it or being in the vanguard) -- usually depending on the political party of whoever is president at the time. The social change agenda never really goes away, but it occasionally takes a back seat to the outlandish idea of actually winning wars -- or at least being ready to. At other times, the senior military is required to, with one voice, preach the urgent necessity of social change (of whatever variety is in fashion at the moment), and anyone who dares speak up in favor of war fighting capability is instantly squelched (and relieved of duty if they persist).
So to return to the present iteration exemplified by this article (and I’ve long since lost track of the number of iterations over the decades), the Army is clearly in a new and more extreme dilemma than in the past. It now has to respond to a new gospel, promoted every minute of every hour by the liberal/progressive/”woke” community (you know, the people who are running the government now), namely that not only are there no significant differences between men and women, but that gender doesn’t even exist -- that it has no scientific basis, and that it’s no more than a “social construct” devised by men in order to keep women down and in their place.
But wait -- if gender doesn’t exist, then neither do “men” and “women” -- so who is it that is keeping whom down? It must be people who “identify” as men keeping people who “identify” as women down. But if so, where did these outlandish “identities” come from if there’s no basis for them in reality? Did millions of people all have the same dream? Or did they all drop bad acid?
So we see that the headlong rush to absurdity is already “mission accomplished”. But apparently the Army hasn’t thought these matters through as thoroughly as they should. So let’s, for now, stick with their frame of reference, which is that “men” and “women”, although they are fictional creatures, still have to be factored into policy considerations.
So what the Army seems to be saying, according to this article, is:
“Gender neutral” fitness tests are a good and necessary thing. BUT…
Men and women (those words! Pass the smelling salts!) need separate ranking systems to account for basic biological differences (heresy!). But don't separate ranking systems cancel out gender neutrality? How can you have both?
Equal opportunity is important, BUT…
So is ability to meet combat requirements. And when these two values come into conflict – which they have done repeatedly over the years – it is typically “solved” on a political basis, i.e. one value is promoted and the other is forgotten – at least until the ruling party changes, or there is a Congressional investigation (spurred on by the media).
Fitness of men and women will be measured on the same scale, BUT…
Each sex (I guess they mean gender) will have its own tier. How this differs in any significant way from each sex having its own scale is beyond me.
A “baseline standard” that applies to both men and women is needed, BUT…
It should not force men and women to directly compete. So obviously, different baselines are needed, which means there is no single baseline, which means there is no baseline standard. BUT...
Problem solved! A minimum score of 360 will apply to all genders (no matter how many official genders there are now or are in the planning stage). That sounds eminently fair. BUT…
Biological reality (heresy!) kicks in and requires that a five-level system be brought into play. This “separates the top-performing women from the men”. How? This is where the discussion drifts off into La-La Land. What they may mean is that, even though 360 is the minimum fitness score for any gender, the assignment of levels will be based on a percentage within gender.
So let’s see… 360 is the minimum, which applies to all. But there is a separate tier system for men vs. women, based on percentage? This is kind of what we used to call, in college, grading “on a curve”, which means that rather than absolute grades (A, B, C, etc.) based on the number of correct answers, you decide that a certain percentage of students are going to get an A, or a B, or whatever, no matter what. And as you might guess, the arguments as to the fairness of this have been going on for decades, if not lifetimes.
But to return to La-La Land: If levels are defined by percentages, how can it be that “the respective percentages of male and female soldiers across the five levels could be significantly different in terms of actual fitness test scores.” In other words, the levels defined by percentages may turn out to have different percentages. Huh ??
And yet… and yet… “men and women are technically scored the same”. And “it is still age- and gender-neutral”. (How did age get into it all of a sudden?)
Oh, and then we have the sidebar item dealing with body fat and pregnancy. (Wait until they find out that men can get pregnant!)
BUT... it turns out that none of this matters, because soldiers of the future will not be doing battle on a muddy, dusty battlefield or in a mosquito-laden swamp using hand-held weapons. Instead, they'll be sitting in air-conditioned bunkers operating robots by remote control. That's what it means when someone says “some so-called 'cyber warriors' may not necessarily need to meet the same requirements”... and “we're not really worried about their physical capabilities”... and “wars of the future are not going to be fought like wars of the past.” (That last statement is the ultimate truism. No war has ever been fought precisely the way prior wars were fought. There have been incremental advances in the technology of warfare throughout recorded history.)
So which is it? Is combat readiness about physical fitness or is it about “what's between their ears”? Can we relax about physical fitness because all the really important jobs in future conflicts will be done by people double-timing it on a keyboard? And for that matter, why can't the “cyber warriors” be morbidly obese, if all they are required to do in the way of physical exertion is sit in front of a screen all day?
So... if you're head's spinning about all of this, join the club. Frankly, I feel sorry for the military leadership at times like these, because they are answering to just too damn many people – a president, an administration, a secretary of defense, a secretary of the army, Congress, the media, the public, ordinary soldiers who never tire of complaining about things... and think, this is just part of their job (in most cases). They also have to think about little things like weapons procurement, logistics, training, strategy and tactics, regulations, inter-service rivalries... and, at the top level, politics and foreign relations. The list is pretty much endless. And this is all while, unlike other citizens, the military leadership is hesitant to come out and publicly opine that the people setting the ever-morphing and conflicting priorities are idiots and fools. This has to have a negative impact on their blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood sugar, muscle tone, and what not. But hey, they volunteered for this – “You're in the Army now, you're not behind the plow”, etc. No one now in the military joined at the point of a gun (so to speak).
I imagine that there are plenty of military commanders who wake up in the middle of the night and think, “Of course men and women are different! Who are these maniacs who think they're the same – and who put them in charge of the government?” But then they reflect that if they go to work the next day and express this thought out loud to anyone, it's bye-bye military job, hello trailer park in Ozark, Alabama. (Or – maybe the ones who figured this out have already bailed and taken a job with a firmer grip on reality.)
And to call this particular dilemma intractable is hardly an exaggeration. It's been going on for decades now – let's say two decent military careers' worth of time – and it's no closer to being solved than it was back when hippies quit burning draft cards because the draft had been suspended. A cynic might say “If there's no solution, there's no problem” – true in one sense, but then why does it continue to be such an obsession, not only within military ranks but in Congress and the media (whenever it comes around in the endless whirlpool of Section B stories). So with or without a solution, the amount of sheer waste and stress cannot be dismissed, and continues to eat away at real readiness – and rest assured that many eyes around the world are watching, and in between chuckles are plotting ways to take advantage of our collective neuroses.
So anyway, here it is – and good luck making any sense of it:
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