William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[former_0302]

The above is nonsense in assessing suitability for military labour because strength criteria are already - and necessarily - used to exclude men at about the 95% percentile.

I'm going to pile onto Compost's point here a little bit. Our physical standards are misleading in several ways. Let's take the USMC's PFT as a benchmark, since it's what I'm most familiar with. The perfect score for a male Marine is achieved by doing 20 pullups, 100 crunches, and running three miles in 18 minutes or less. The perfect score for female Marines is currently achieved by doing a flexed-arm hang for 70 or more seconds, 100 crunches and running three miles in 21 minutes or less. They're trying to change the female standard to pullups, and when they do, the perfect score for them will be eight pullups.

What, however, does this test exactly quantify? I said upthread somewhere that performance on the PFT has little in common with being a good infantry Marine. As to why, Napoleon said it best:

“The most important qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only second; hardship, poverty and want are the best school for a soldier.”

The PFT does absolutely nothing to measure this. NOTHING.

So let's bring this back to IOC. Without giving anything about the curriculum of the school (it's not exactly fight club, but...), it is absolutely designed to make you deal with privation of several different kinds. I don't know whether or not IOC has specific standards for the sort of privation they expect graduates to be able to endure, but I do know that whatever those standards are, are the sort of thing we should be talking about when we speak of standards as related to combat units.

[Compost]

I'm going to pile onto Compost's point here a little bit. Our physical standards are misleading in several ways. Let's take the USMC's PFT as a benchmark, since it's what I'm most familiar with. The perfect score for a male Marine is achieved by doing 20 pullups, 100 crunches, and running three miles in 18 minutes or less. The perfect score for female Marines is currently achieved by doing a flexed-arm hang for 70 or more seconds, 100 crunches and running three miles in 21 minutes or less. They're trying to change the female standard to pullups, and when they do, the perfect score for them will be eight pullups.

What, however, does this test exactly quantify? I said upthread somewhere that performance on the PFT has little in common with being a good infantry Marine. As to why, Napoleon said it best:

“The most important qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only second; hardship, poverty and want are the best school for a soldier.”

The PFT does absolutely nothing to measure this. NOTHING.

So let's bring this back to IOC. Without giving anything about the curriculum of the school (it's not exactly fight club, but...), it is absolutely designed to make you deal with privation of several different kinds. I don't know whether or not IOC has specific standards for the sort of privation they expect graduates to be able to endure, but I do know that whatever those standards are, are the sort of thing we should be talking about when we speak of standards as related to combat units.

Napolean’s statement and perfect PFT tests are straw targets in every sense of that term. Napolean may have stressed fortitude and courage as his most and 2nd most important criteria. He did not declare that physical attributes were of zero or little concern.

Similarly obtaining a perfect PFT score is not a prerequisite for recruiting or posting to most parts of the USMC. Passing at some level is - with the possible exception of ‘elites - good enough to indicate current and future acceptable performance in that particular criterion.

It is of course possible to obtain a different type of perfection. Totally discard a prerequisite and hence accept absolutely every applicant as suitably qualified. Less perfectly, reduce a current standard and accept a wider span of applicants.