Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 43

WOMEN IN COMBAT

average, women suffered nine times as many
shin splints as men, five times as many stress
fractures, and more than five times as many
cases of tendinitis.3
By this time, the Army was further along with integrating women but was faced with a problem. There
were no standards based on MOS requirements, so
recruits were assigned to jobs based only on passing
the physical fitness test in basic training. The Army
had the right number of females allotted to recently
opened heavy-lifting jobs. However, the women could
not do the heavy lifting, they suffered higher rates of
injury, and their attrition rates were higher.
Therefore, the Army developed an objective
standard to test recruits and “match the physical
capacity of its soldiers with military occupational
specialty requirements.”4 Introduced in 1981, the
Military Entrance Physical Strength Capacity Test
(MEPSCAT) tested lifting capabilities based on MOS
demands as light, medium, moderately heavy, heavy
(over 50 lbs.), and very heavy (100 lbs.). “In the heavy
lifting category, 82 percent of men and 8 percent of
women qualified.”5
This is catastrophic in terms of mission readiness.
According to a 1985 Army report entitled Evaluation
of the Military Entrance Physical Strength Capacity Test,
“if MEPSCAT had been a mandatory selection requirement during 1984, the Army would have created
a substantial shortfall in the moderately heavy category (required lift is 80 pounds) by rejecting 32 percent
of the female accessions.”6
In her 2000 book The Kinder, Gentler Military:
Can America’s Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win
Wars?, Stephanie Gutmann reports that a member of
the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the
Services responded to this data by casting the familiar
pall of unfair discrimination and sexism: “The Army is
a male-oriented institution and officials are resistant to
changes that will allow women to be fully utilized. …
Those [strength] standards reeked of that resistance.”7
The proposed MEPSCAT testing standard was never
adopted because it exposed women’s lack of qualification for the jobs newly opened to them and to which
they were already being assigned. Using that standard
would have resulted in significantly less female representation in newly opened MOSs, so MEPSCAT was
derided and summarily dispatched.
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

Those pushing women into combat today are no
more able than their predecessors were to show that
women can meet the men’s standards, let alone the men’s
combat standards. The Center for Military Readiness
(CMR), an independent public policy organization, published a report in October 2014 confirming this conclusion. The report cited testing by the U.S. Marine Corps
Training and Education Command (TECOM) in 2013.8
The command tested 409 male and 379 female Marine
volunteers in several combat-related tasks.9 The test data
highlighted in the CMR’s report include results of the
clean-and-press, the 155 mm artillery lift-and-carry, and
the obstacle course wall-with-assist-box.10
According to the CMR, “the clean-and-pr