Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has announced a new policy of one standard in combat units for both women and men. This is a vital step in creating and sustaining the most lethal military fighting force our country has ever known. It will ensure that the most qualified people are in the right jobs based solely on merit.
So-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and its array of predecessors allowed people to serve in units and positions they were not qualified to fill. It was disruptive and detrimental to unit cohesion and mission success. Using sex or any other diversity reason for inclusion is no longer acceptable.
I was an Army paratrooper and always thought there should be only one standard: pass or fail. When I jumped from a military aircraft, gravity didn’t care about my sex, and neither did the ground. There was no lighter rucksack or “women’s” parachute. Only those who could pull their weight belonged there, and that applied equally to women and men.
Restructuring the current physical standards will be a massive but necessary undertaking; the military must have a coherent way to ensure the right people are in the right positions. The current general physical fitness standards vary based on sex and continually lower with age. They are not relevant to a service member’s ability to perform the duties required to ensure mission achievement. The best way to ensure lethality is to determine mission-based physical and intellectual requirements and generate an evaluation system accordingly.
The Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) is the initial entry test for military service. It measures a person’s intellectual capability, strengths, and potential. Certain fields and specialties have minimum test score requirements and are used for job placement. The ASVAB is sex-neutral. Military physical requirements should be too.
A cyber warfare specialist in a secure, air-conditioned office at Fort Meade, Maryland, has a very different set of tasks to complete than a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in a combat zone. Physical standards should reflect these differences.
The large array of potential operations for the U.S. military complicates this mission-based standardization. Some deployments consist of creating a home away from home while others may have the barest support capabilities and rely on the unit’s self-sufficiency. It makes sense to differentiate between forward fighting units and the units that provide support from less austere environments.
It might also be time to create one set of standards for combat units and another for support units. This would allow us to account for societal changes that affect available recruits for the military. There is a smaller cohort physically capable of the tasks in a combat unit. Many others, however, would be well-suited and interested in support unit positions if the height, weight, and fitness standards were less rigorous than those of a frontline combat unit.
Current physical tests differ for sex and change for age. Neither is a legitimate determinant of mission success, so why are physical standards lower for women, and why do they continually drop as service members get older? The entire point of a standard is that it should be, well, standard. Either service members can meet the requirements for a specialty and unit, or they cannot. All standards should be age- and sex-neutral.
Military service should be open to all who have the patriotic desire, physical capabilities, and intellectual competencies required. A mission-based standards system is essential for the lethal fighting force we need to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution and the United States.
Samantha Nerove is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former paratrooper who now serves as CEO of WorldStrat.
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