Designed to prevent injury and improve combat readiness, it tests along a number of different physical modalities, to include power, muscular strength, muscular endurance, speed, agility, cardio-respiratory endurance, balance, coordination, flexibility, and reaction time.
The ACFT is a test of combat fitness that has been six years in the making. Preliminary ACFT testing conducting from 2015 to 2017 supported this reality: The test had an 80 percent success rate in predicting performance on the most common individual combat skills. It is instead designed to test the general muscular and metabolic pathways that combat regularly stresses. This fact has not stopped the more cynical dissenters from quibbling over how many medicine balls it will take to defeat the Taliban or how often one has ever had to “throw kettle balls” while in a firefight - sentiments that have appeared in various forms on Army online discussion forums. And it is plagued by a “more work is better work” mentality, which ignores current literature on the importance of recovery and periodization in effective physical training.įinally, the ACFT is not a direct simulation of the conditions of combat. It inhibits variety by limiting soldiers to an unchanging menu of movements and exercises, thereby distorting soldiers’ perception of what constitutes physical fitness. Current Army PT culture neither teaches nor incentivizes proper movement mechanics. For those who are familiar with what this culture is, this is also a good thing. The ACFT is also not something that is intended to fit seamlessly into the Army’s existing physical training (PT) culture. Its ineffectiveness as a measure of fitness was not redeemed by its simplicity. This is a good thing, as that was less a test of comprehensive soldier fitness than it was a measure of how often one performed pushups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run. The ACFT is not its predecessor, the Army Physical Fitness Test. To be sure, there are kinks to be addressed and plenty of testing still ahead, but on the basis of our experience at West Point, Army leaders would do well to give the ACFT a chance. Instead, the ACFT is a meticulously researched, well-thought out, and extensively vetted test of comprehensive physical fitness that will go a long way towards replacing a broken fitness test that has led to a broken fitness culture. It will not, as they suggest, result in chronically broken soldiers, or in units so bogged down by the logistical demands of accounting for extra gym equipment that they are unable to find time to execute their mission-essential crosswalks.
Contrary to the authors’ assertions, our experience with the test pilot in West Point’s Department of Physical Education suggests that the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) is not a disaster in the making.
(ret.) David Barno and Nora Bensahel recently authored an indictment, which, while compelling on its surface, did not sufficiently ground its arguments in any substantiating data or corroborating evidence. There has been much ado lately over the Army’s decision to implement a new physical fitness test.
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