What gets rewarded gets done.

Like everything in life, this is all about incentives. The new Army PT guidelines, recently published in TC 3-22.20 (replacing FM 21-20), have numerous battle focused PT exercises and programs.

However, the APFT is still the same.

The intent of the APFT is to provide a mechanism (via positive and negative incentives associated with personal and unit scores) to induce soldiers and units to maintain a high state of physical readiness. The problem is the APFT does not incentivize overall fitness. Rather, it incentivizes leaders to get high APFT scores through repetitious workouts centered around the three APFT events.

Any change to how we train physically must start with modification of the test to incentivize performance. The current approach in TC 3-22.20 of "recommending" that soldiers and units do not train to the APFT is wishful thinking.

On a related issue, one of the concerns seems to be that customizing PT tests to individual MOS / Branch requirements will make it difficult to use PT in the promotions process.

I would question the underlying assumption that physical fitness should be used to compare soldiers for promotion. Research has consistently shown that the best predictor of leader performance at increased levels of responsibility is not what the Army looks at, i.e. physical fitness, experience, and evaluations. Rather, it is cognitive ability. Smart guys and gals make good leaders (wow - revolutionary).

We can keep the "points" system on whatever APFT we come up with, but for promotions a simple go or no go should be sufficient. Otherwise, you run the risk of really fast and strong morons getting promoted at the expense of smarter soldiers. In fact, I have heard many of my good friends in the infantry complain the cultural preference for highly fit leaders has resulted in the promotion of poor, but very fit leaders in some cases.

For those of you who may argue that meeting the minimum APFT standard is not enough for leaders, I would argue the issue is with the standard itself. Figure out what the minimum standard should be and raise it as needed. There is a certain point where one can deal with the physical hardships of military duty just as well as the next soldier, despite any difference in APFT score. Weighting physical fitness scores beyond that point is to ignore much more relevant measures of leader effectiveness.