I’ve been banging on for a while now about how the US military couldn’t win so much as an egg-and-spoon race at this point, much less an actual shooting war with China or, especially, Russia. Few, if any, of my readers disagree with me – including those who, unlike me, have actually served in the military, and are therefore rather more highly qualified than some jumped-up keyboard jockey to write on the subject. But I’m not sure any of us – veteran or civilian – really understands how deeply the rot runs within the dot-mil. It is probably significantly worse than any of us realise.

And that is for one very good reason:

The US Army has basically taken up CrossShit as its standard fitness programme under the guidance of ACoS and CJCS Gen. Mark Milley.

No, seriously, that’s the truth, I’m not making this up – that’s basically what the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT) is all about, and they’ve had this idiotic scheme in the works since 2018 and implemented it pretty much in full last year. A shill site for the idea has this to say about it:

According the final report of this research, “Since the creation of the U.S Army, physical fitness training has played an important role in combat readiness. However, throughout its history the U.S. Army’s method for conducting physical fitness training has changed and evolved.  Most recently, in the late 1990s, the U.S. Army began to see evidence that its method of conducting physical training was not producing Soldiers ready for the rigors of modern ground combat.”

“This reality began a general move within the U.S. military towards functional fitness programs as many leaders and organizations began to rethink physical training and its relation to combat readiness. In 2006, it was estimated that up to 7,000 members of the U.S. military were using the CrossFit program regularly.  That number has grown exponentially since then represented by the fact that there are now over 58 non-profit military CrossFit affiliates throughout the world, to include affiliates at many major U.S. Army installations like Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Polk, Fort Knox, Fort Meade, Fort Leavenworth, the Pentagon and the U.S. Military Academy.”

This idea of functional fitness is a critical component of the U.S. military training. According to the Mayo Clinic, “Functional fitness exercises train your muscles to work together and prepare them for daily tasks by simulating common movements you might do at home, at work or in sports. While using various muscles in the upper and lower body at the same time, functional fitness exercises also emphasize core stability.”

OK, seriously, I really don’t get why ex-military types like CrossShit so much. It just doesn’t make any sense. As I’ve pointed out REPEATEDLY for the better part of a decade of writing on this site and its predecessor, Didact’s Reach, CrossFit’s programming is not “functional”, it is functionally RETARDED. It is STUPID beyond measure. It is genuinely dangerous and extremely badly planned.

There is nothing “functional” about it – CrossShit programming tries to blend weight training with cardio, and fails, badly, at both, while damaging the central nervous systems and muscles of the idiots stupid enough to waste $120 a month (or more) on a “fitness” programme that has about as much to do with real fitness as your belly lint does.

I would argue, based on what I have seen of CrossShit programming over the years, that if you were to implement that sort of nonsense in an actual military, most people would fail – especially the women – and injury rates would skyrocket.

And, indeed, that is precisely what happened:

The U.S. Army has a readiness problem the likes of which it has not seen since the draft, and one which threatens to undermine the entire institution. This problem is called the Army Combat Fitness Test. The ACFT was designed to improve the physical fitness levels of soldiers. Because it was so poorly planned, however, 84% of women failed it straightaway, and data is scarce as to whether things have improved. This is a big problem because failure of a graded physical fitness evaluation renders a soldier ineligible for promotion, locked out of specialized training that might otherwise improve a soldier’s acumen or skillset, and ultimately, risks seeing them kicked out of the Army entirely.

Meanwhile, military medical staff—surgeons, nurses, dentists, optometrists, general physicians—are, sources tell me, eyeing ACFT standards skeptically and planning to exit the Army as soon as possible. (Congress certainly seems to fear this possibility, according to language in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, signed into law earlier this year.) A surgeon can make a lot more money in the private sector than in a uniform. This has obvious, serious implications for military readiness, as an Army without skilled doctors is an Army in serious trouble should a new war suddenly break out.

The fact that most women failed the test right away is not a Bad Thing. I have been arguing for years, and a number of veterans who read my work agree with me on this, that women have absolutely NO PLACE In a fighting military, and especially not in combat roles.

LTC Tom Kratman (US-A, ret.) literally wrote a book about how you might go about creating an all-female military fighting force based on science and data, not wishful thinking and egalitarian stupidity, and his premise relied on conclusions drawn from extensive field experience in which he realised right away that the only way for women to fight in combat in mixed units would be to lower standards to catastrophically low levels for the most dangerous and serious of all professions. The only way to do it without compromising the entire military would be to create all-female units with very different fighting standards that account for the facts that women are much weaker than men, especially in terms of upper body strength, and cannot take the kind of pounding on their joints that we can.

And what is the ACFT, exactly? Well, here are the criteria which people must meet in order to pass it, from the same source:

• Strength Dead-Lift (140-340 pounds)
• Standing Power Throw (10-pound medicine ball)
• Hand-Release Push-Ups
• Sprint-Drag-Carry (sprint, drag a 90 pound sled, and then lateral shuffle then carry two 40-pound kettlebells)
• Leg Tuck (hanging from a pull-up bar, pull yourself up and bring your knees or thighs to your elbows) or planks (2:09 to 4:20 minutes)
• 2-Mile Run (minimum: 13:30 minutes, to maximum: 21:00 minutes)

So basically, you have to do a CrossShit WOD to pass your Army combat-readiness certification.

What a joke.

I have no idea what “hand-release push-ups” are, nor do I understand what a “leg-tuck” is. And given my dodgy knee and jacked-up back, a 2-mile run sounds like my idea of Hell. But I could probably still do all of that, even though I’m old, my joints creak and pop when I move, and I have considerable amounts of grey hair. Hell, for me a 225lb deadlift is what I call a warm-up, and that’s FAR beyond what most women, and quite a lot of men, would consider to be their max.

But, here’s the thing: I can do all of that because I do powerlifting and martial arts. And you need some level of equipment to do those things. You need a gym, and barbells, and space to go berserk like an angry gorilla in need of an attitude adjustment. It’s great fun, to be sure, and it gets you fit and strong like nothing else can. (To be clear, I’m talking about powerlifting, not CrossShit, which is basically just competitive exercising.)

Here’s the thing, though: nobody in his right mind would consider me to be a soldier.

The basic requirements for soldiering, at least in terms of physical fitness, have not actually changed that much since the days of the foot-sloggers of Sargon the Great when he made the Sumerians say “Uncle!”. Line infantry spend an awful lot of time marching, even today – so they need to be able to march and carry heavy shit from one place to another. They also need to be familiar with their weapons, which in modern terms means spending time shooting stuff.

These tasks require strength and fitness, to be sure. But you will not get that kind of strength from doing CrossShit. Doesn’t happen. CrossShit isn’t about carrying 40lb rucksacks for 20 miles on foot. It’s about pretending to be Olympic lifters, sprinters, rowers, and wall-climbers to stroke people’s egos.

(You won’t get the necessary fitness results from doing powerlifting, either, to be clear – there is a REASON why most powerlifters look like this:

… and not like this:

But you will get strong from powerlifting. You won’t from doing CrossShit. Doing that crap will result in losing gains.)

The ACFT is a perfect example of what happens when a military begins to pride innovation for the sake of innovation over tried and proven methods. The old Army Physical Fitness Test demanded recruits and active-duty personnel alike to demonstrate actual field-ready fitness according to standards that would make them lean, mean, and ready to fight. But then, to accommodate women and an ever-fattening population, the Army lowered its standards to allow girls and lardasses to pass them.

The result is the modern, kinder, gentler Army:

The issue of obesity in the U.S. has been causing major problems for the U.S. military for years. In 2010, upon entering basic training, 47 percent of males and 59 percent of females failed the Army’s entry-level physical fitness test, according to the report. To solve this problem, the study recommends looking beyond the military itself and recognizing the positive impact government policies aimed at improving public health could have on the military.

Department of Defense data from 2016 found roughly 7.8 percent of the military––roughly one in every 13 troops––is clinically overweight, according to Military Times. This endangers U.S. troops, according to current and former military officers.

In September 2016, Army Command Sgt. Maj. John Troxell said, “If I have to climb up to the top of a mountain in Nuristan, in Afghanistan, and if I have someone who is classified as clinically obese, they are potentially going to be a liability for me on that patrol.” Troxell is the senior noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Armed Forces, making him the top enlisted adviser to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford.

Welp, that’s the modern US military for you – too politically correct to keep its ships from running aground, too obsessed with idiotic flying Swiss Army knives to build aircraft that work, and too obsessed with being all inclusive and diverse to notice that its enemies are falling off their chairs laughing at their stupidity.

And now, as it happens, too involved in faddish, badly thought out, idiotically implemented, pointless, useless, stupid, and ridiculous trends like CrossShit to build an Army capable of performing the actual, y’know, FUNCTIONS of an ARMY. Which is to say, hoofing it to places where drones can’t fire missiles, tanks can’t go, and Humvees can’t venture, in order to fight enemies on the ground with hot lead fired with lethal intent out of guns that actually shoot straight.

Oh well. We’ve already seen CrossShit cripple professional exercisers in their annual “games”. Now we get to watch as it cripples an entire standing army.

Say what you will about these Clown World times we live in, they ARE at least interesting.