Quote Originally Posted by Compost View Post
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.