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The New
York Times June 25,
2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final They
have been administering a fitness test drawn from the Army's 1946 training
manual, a document honed during World War II to prepare soldiers for the
physical requirements of battle, and the results have confirmed what old-timers
have been saying for years. "I can't say we were surprised," said Dr.
Edward Thomas, a specialist at the Army's Physical Fitness School who created,
or more precisely rediscovered, the test. "But we were intrigued by how
poorly our soldiers did compared to the soldiers of World War II." The
military is one of the few -- and certainly the largest -- areas of American
society where physical fitness remains something more than recreation or a
craze. It is a mantra, literally a matter of life and death. For that reason,
the fitness of America's military has faced increasing scrutiny from those who
fear it is going soft. In
recent years, critics inside and outside the military have bemoaned the
declining rigors of training, especially at boot camp. The results of the test,
which proved difficult for even some of the fittest units, and anecdotes from
around the Army and other branches of the service, appear to support their
point. In the Army, recruits are allowed to run in "ability groups" that account for physical disparities. For a time in the 1990's, the Navy even allowed its new enlistees at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center to hold up blue cards when the stress of training became too much to bear. Problems
with fitness have become so pervasive that even the Pentagon has taken note, two
years ago launching an awareness campaign -- Operation Be Fit -- to remind
service members of the need to stay in shape. It has also ordered the services
to toughen their physical standards. At the
same time, in an all-volunteer military that is struggling to hold on to people
in uniform, the services have eased the rules that automatically discharged
those who were overweight or failed their twice-a-year fitness tests. Dr. Thomas and other officials at the Army's Physical Fitness School here respond by pleading "No excuse, sir!" -- though they might not put it quite that way. It's not
that soldiers today are necessarily unfit, they say, but that the focus of the
Army's physical training doctrine has shifted away from the "core
strengths" required for what is surely the most strenuous human activity:
ground combat. "Peacetime
has a tendency to make the doctrine less focused on what is needed on the
battlefield," Dr. Thomas said. Now the
school has launched an effort to rewrite the Army's doctrine. And what they are
proposing is, by Army standards, nothing short of radical. Since
1980, the Army has required all of its soldiers to pass a fitness test twice a
year. The test represented an effort to consolidate a multitude of tests --
including different ones for men and women -- into a single, simple measure of
their fitness, which is graded according to age and sex To pass,
a man between 17 and 21 has to do at least 42 push-ups and 53 situps in two
minutes each and run two miles in less than 15 minutes, 54 seconds. A woman in
the same age group has to do 19 push-ups and 53 situps and run two miles in
18:54. By the time soldiers reach the middle or end of their careers -- from 42
to 46 -- the men have to do 30 push-ups and 32 situps and complete the run in
under 18:42. For the women, the minimum is 12 push-ups and 32 situps and 23:42
for the run. The
problem is that the test has become the overriding focus of physical training,
especially since the results are used in promotions. And the tests simply do not
measure the skills the school's experts believe necessary for combat --
particularly agility, strength and quick bursts of movements, or what the
school's officials call anaerobic exercise. "When I jumped out of an airplane, I landed, I bundled up my chute and moved to cover," said Lt. Col. William Rieger, a former paratrooper and now commandant of the Physical Fitness School. "It was all anaerobic exercise. It was not running two miles." The
school's new approach is actually an old one. The Army's 1946 fitness manual
includes 12 conditioning drills that emphasize not only strength, but stamina,
flexibility and other body mechanics. The
Physical Fitness School plans to include the 1946 exercises in a new version of
the physical training manual, a first draft of which is due in August. But even
before it appears, the school's ideas are trickling down to units here at Fort
Benning, known as the Home of the Infantry and training ground for some of the
Army's elite combat troops. On a
recent morning here, Sgt. Randy D. Duncan, 23, led his squad from the 3rd Ranger
Battalion through a two-hour workout that included pull-ups, rope climbing,
hand-to-hand-combat drills and a quarter-mile obstacle course. He also used one
of the fitness school's latest "innovations" -- a medicine ball (a
large, weighty ball) -- which his troops heaved backward over their heads in a
sort of relay race. "You've
never felt the muscles in your lower back until you've done that," Sergeant
Duncan said, still breathing heavily afterward. Dr.
Thomas said that the Army's physical training has always reflected the fitness
trends in society more generally. He cited the fitness programs created by
Herman J. Koehler, who served as Master of the Sword at the United States
Military Academy from 1885 to 1923. Under his direction, the Army focused not on
individual training, but on group exercises that emphasized motor skills,
coordination and explosive strength. Medicine
balls, dumbbells and wooden clubs were commonplace in military training, but
eventually disappeared from Army posts as quickly as they did from civilian
gymnasiums, as the focus shifted to team sports in the middle of the century and
individual fitness by the end of the century.
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