In the summer of 2018, the US Army unveiled its first physical fitness test revamp since 1980—the Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT). Comprising six events ostensibly correlated with common soldier tasks such as extracting casualties on a litter and throwing equipment over obstacles, the new age- and gender-neutral test was a major departure from its three-event predecessor, the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT).1 The ACFT epitomized a “generational, cultural change in fitness for the United States Army” and was to become the “cornerstone of individual soldier combat readiness,” according to Maj. Gen. Malcolm Frost, who oversaw the test’s final stages of development as the Center for Initial Military Training’s commander.2 The ACFT’s introduction culminated more than six years of research, fueled largely by a drive across the Department of Defense to improve “lethality,” and it bore significant implications for day-to-day training and service member promotions. For all the fanfare, critical reactions were also loud and widespread. Detractors argued that the test was problematic to administer, that it required too much specialized equipment, that its technicality made training for the test difficult, and that it would produce too many injuries.3 Army leaders’ responses framed the ACFT as a vehicle for ushering in a more holistic and combat-centered approach to fitness that would reduce injury rates, improve readiness, and save lives. “This fitness test is hard. No one should be under any illusions about it,” then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley stated, “but we really don’t want to lose soldiers on the battlefield. We don’t want young men and women to get killed in action because they weren’t fit.”4
Seen another way, the ACFT was an artifact representing the latest evolutions of the Army’s official physical culture. Placing the test in historical context helps explain its character, the discourse around it, and the strong reactions the ACFT engendered from boosters and critics alike. Take the pivot to “combat” physical fitness, for instance. During the world wars and the Korean War, Army leaders felt compelled to reorient physical training toward practical preparation for combat. Given that the Army had been a force constantly at war for more than seventeen years at the time of the ACFT’s introduction, a similar turn from general to combat fitness could even be seen as overdue. Also, inasmuch as the ACFT represented a triumph of CrossFit principles over past fads such as the jogging craze of the mid-1970s and 1980s, the new test reflected the period’s wider cultural influences.5 Earlier configurations of the Army’s physical culture had similarly reflected their popular fitness milieus. Rhythmic gymnastics and college athletics both influenced Army training in their times. Engaging with the physical culture underlying the ACFT can enhance the Army’s efforts to enact real change. While most critiques of the ACFT to date seemed to be about the relative merits of push-ups, deadlifts, and other exercises, the issues actually went deeper. Just what does it mean to be fit? Fit for what? Who should be fit? How should fitness be measured? Who should decide? Answers to these questions have changed over time in response to imagined battlefields, actual wartime experiences, trends in civilian physical education, and popular fads. The responses embedded in the ACFT were just the most recent in a long history.
That history began more than a century ago. The nascent form of the Army’s official physical culture emerged in a particular context at the turn of the twentieth century and was shaped by military demands, wider American culture, and the state of exercise science. It represented an intersection between popular and military cultures, just as it does now. Yet today’s culture also reflects an additional influence—its own past. Understanding that chronicle of change over time is vital to understanding the culture today. Primary credit for its original formulation goes to Herman Koehler, father of both West Point’s physical education program and systematic physical training in the US Army, who wrote at a time of great change in military science. A need seemed to exist at the dawn of the twentieth century to fit waning men for dispersed combat on emptying battlefields dominated by new technologies. Koehler aimed for goals beyond simple muscular and cardiovascular improvement. In war, he wrote, “physical fitness is the factor upon which, more than any other, the efficiency of a fighting machine depends.” After fitness came “men, money, and materiel,” but most importantly “morale” because it alone could “determine and bring out the full and true value of these . . . physical components.”6 Elaborating on this body-mind-soul synergy, Koehler contended that “mere physical endurance, hardihood and force, will accomplish but little as compared to physical fitness plus the development of those mental qualities that guide and control this force intelligently.”7
Koehler’s concept of war and the soldier’s role in it harmonized then and now with deep-rooted cultural beliefs in the American military tradition that situate man as the “dominant instrument on the battlefield.”8 In this schema, improving the Army’s manpower was and remains imperative for success in war. Koehler regarded physical training as a key tool for cultivating a superior soldiery, but not just because it could produce troops capable of marching further or lifting heavier loads. Rather, his mission in physical training was multifaceted and educative. This approach is the historical basis of the Army’s official physical culture. Physical training was supposed to build bodies, shape minds, sculpt character, forge units, and make better citizens.
Over time, the Army’s physical culture grew up and out from these roots while responding to a variety of stimuli that included its own inertia, military need, wider American culture, and the state of exercise science. For example, emphasis gradually shifted from manufacturing disciplined human machine cogs to fashioning individual warriors. Valuations of intangible character traits and quantifiable physiological performance measures similarly shifted over time from weighting the former to the latter. Likewise, the relative importance of combat-related functional fitness grew during wartime and when physical training policy came under the Infantry branch’s control, but it generally flagged in peacetime. Projects of man-, soldier-, and citizen-making remained interrelated throughout, but their outward expressions in the form of prehabilitation programs morphed in response to resource constraints, popular acceptance, and expectations of a citizen’s potential military service obligations. Three punctuated periods in the physical culture’s evolution are evident between 1885 and 1957: Koehler’s disciplinary era, the combat-readiness interregnum of 1917–1919, and the scientific measurement school’s rise after 1942. All three eras shared a tension between tradition and innovation that reflects a paradox in military culture writ large. The core of that paradox derives from the need for conservative organizations to constantly adapt in order to maintain relevance and competitive advantage. Ultimately, the Army’s physical culture proved sufficient for fitting men to modern war. However, the inertia it acquired, coupled with repeated failures to sustain evolutionary progress in peacetime, produced spasmodic change and forced those responsible for physical training during World War II and the Korean War to relearn old lessons.
Studying change in the Army’s official physical culture over time also shows that its dominant definition of fitness has always been layered, constructed, changeable, and heavily influenced by American society.9 Since cadets began sweating under Koehler’s tutelage in 1885, more has been at stake in physical training than simply improving an individual’s strength or endurance. Early on, fitness included elements such as symmetry and power, partly because muscle fiber was thought to be indicative of moral fiber and other qualities. Fit soldiers were masculine, disciplined, confident, selfless, and efficient parts in a larger machine who were also resistant to the pernicious effects of overcivilization in the modern world. During America’s first great crusade in Europe between 1917 and 1918, fitness accumulated new meanings that reflected Progressives’ worldviews and the demands of trench warfare. Later, scientific study yielded normalized measures of fitness in a physiological sense, yet the cultural definition of fitness retained immeasurable constituents such as teamwork, aggressiveness, confidence, a tough masculinity, and resistance to political subversion. Today, physical training remains a venue for the cultivation of mental toughness and a laboratory for character and leadership development. Notably, the dominant definition of fitness did not always correspond directly with the realities of combat. The ways in which cultural producers imagined combat and perceived the needs of the nation’s young male population tended to be more influential. Fitness within the Army’s official physical culture was always, and will likely continue to be, a malleable concept capable of sustaining many layers of meaning.
Part of the reason that fitness remains a malleable concept is that there is no objective, quantifiable standard of combat fitness. Indeed, such a standard may be impossible to define. None of the systems of exercise developed between 1885 and 1957 was premised on actual measures of soldiers’ battle performance, or on remediating specific reasons for physical failures in combat. McCloy’s and Esslinger’s work during World War II came closest to delivering a quantifiable definition of fitness. But even that work proceeded from a generalized list of tasks thought to be necessary on the battlefield, such as jumping in and out of trenches or carrying heavy objects, and analysis of what could be expected of an average man in related and controlled tasks. Studies of combat motivation and soldier performance, and works of history in the face-of-battle vein, frequently highlight the intense physical demands of war and the interconnectedness of physical and mental stamina.10 However, they are also consistently vague on the specific physical demands that soldiers face. Most scholarly studies and soldiers’ recollections never get beyond meditations on the sheer exhaustion and fatigue native to battle. A precise, quantified definition of fitness may be an impossibility. Too many factors are at play in combat, and too little data collection is possible. Superior battlefield fitness is also a relative concept measurable only between combatants. The unquantifiability of fitness is significant to the Army’s physical culture because it leaves much up to interpretation, values, beliefs, and reasoning by analogy. The application of science may yield practices that can render a body capable of lifting more weight or moving faster, but there is no comparable precision or certainty possible in making a person combat-ready.
Furthermore, though the Army’s physical culture changed over time, it always existed at the intersection between soldier-, citizen-, and man-making projects. As a result, exercise was often a vehicle for moral, mental, and physical uplift. Fitness for combat alone was therefore never enough. This is still true today. Army leaders tend to assume that fit soldiers are good soldiers, and that characteristics conducive to superior conduct in battle can be revealed and refined through physical training and sport. The interaction of these three projects has also turned the Army’s attention outward onto wider American society. Advocates of systematic training regularly promised that society would be enriched by men returning home who had been taught the value of fitness and ways of achieving it. But just returning healthy men was not enough. Men also needed to be made fit before entering the service so as to improve the overall quality of the nation’s potential soldiery and the efficiency of basic military training. Between 1885 and 1957, every young man existed in a yet-to-be-mobilized reserve and in a social context where soldiering was crucial to citizenship and the masculine ideal, so it was only right to prehabilitate them for service. The urge to sculpt young Americans into better potential soldiers, better citizens, and better men became an enduring feature of the Army’s official physical culture, informing the value of fitness within the Army and systems designed to achieve it. The American public’s physical fitness, or more often the lack thereof, remains a national security concern today. If called upon to fight a war demanding mass mobilization, Americans would no doubt adapt. Yet that process of adaptation would not be easy, and the percentage of the population capable of shouldering the demands of combat training immediately is far smaller than it was in the early and mid-twentieth century.11
Beyond 1957, the Army’s official physical culture continued evolving in response to familiar stimuli: military need, wider American culture, the state of exercise science, and the physical culture’s own history. This is evident in the greater significance that running and exertion-recovery activities assumed within the Army’s physical culture in the 1970s and 1980s. The move mirrored an aerobic exercise boom largely initiated by Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s book Aerobics, published in 1968. Interpretations of wartime demands on humans held by the agencies most responsible for physical training doctrine and policy also influenced the culture’s evolution. Wars featuring intensive ground combat, such as Korea and Vietnam, typically inclined the official physical culture toward individual combat readiness. In contrast, less demanding periods and a fascination with technology during the 1980s and 1990s inclined the Army’s physical culture toward general, corporate health. In recent years, high-performance athlete training programs such as CrossFit and P90X exerted a powerful influence, due in part to combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Elite units such as the 75th Ranger Regiment, conceiving of fit soldiers as “combat tactical athletes,” have been the vanguard in this movement.12 Nevertheless, creating greater change across the entire Army requires action to change an ingrained culture. Implementing a new test is not enough. A broader and deeper effort to modify values, beliefs, assumptions, and standard day-to-day practices at the lowest organizational levels is necessary. It will also be challenging.
The Army’s typical one-size-fits-all approach to fitness exemplifies the type of challenge the service faces in implementing change. According to official promotional and aspirational publications, today’s soldier is supposed to be an elite warrior-athlete. For instance, the Army justified its “Soldier Athlete” initiative around 2010 on the premise that “our Soldiers must perform and excel at Soldiering at a professional level, just like any world-class athlete.”13 This elite warrior-athlete paradigm exists in tension with other factors. The Army is a massive organization that prefers applying singular standards and practices, which will by necessity be more productive of middling than elite outcomes. Also, since its inception the Army’s physical culture has focused more on average unit performance and the ordinary soldier than on elite individuals. This ingrained tendency lives on. Most units still conduct mass physical training led by relatively junior and undertrained members. The onus for above-average performance rests on the individual soldier and requires him or her to invest personal time outside of the training day. Finally, the elite warrior-athlete paradigm centers on lethality in ground combat, but in truth this is only a requirement for a minority of the Army’s population. Higher physical standards, especially those derived from an interpretation of ground combat’s demands, preclude sizeable portions of the population from service, even if those precluded people have skills and aptitudes well suited to the highly technical demands of modern warfare.
High physical fitness standards are not undesirable or inappropriate, but the Army should diversify them or else face up to the challenges of enabling a large and varied population to meet them. Different performance benchmarks aligned with different types of duty positions, as proposed for the ACFT, are a step in the right direction. Yet the Army and its soldier population are more diverse than the ACFT’s three degrees of performance. The Army Ground Forces learned a similar lesson during World War II, which led it to fashion a classification system that acknowledged many different categories of fitness. Ways should be found to retain service members whose contributions are not primarily physical, such as older soldiers and those working in highly technical fields. Additionally, producing truly elite warrior-athletes involves more than implementing new testing activities and standards. Deeper cultural change needs to occur at the company and battalion level. Physical training must move away from its focus on the mass, long valued for its supposed ability to instill discipline, and instead seek to maximize the capabilities of individual bodies. Old approaches will not work because they were designed to improve whole units and those units’ weakest links. The scientific approach to physical training, pioneered during World War II and ascendant since, offers much promise, but units cannot sustain old practices and expect new results.
Changing the existing physical culture is no easy feat, but the culture’s history suggests a possible approach. Historically, cultural change occurred most rapidly and was adopted most thoroughly during periods of expansion, such as during the world wars. Influxes of new leaders without entrenched values, assumptions, and approaches to physical training created windows of opportunity for implementing new ideas. Today, massive end-strength Army growth is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely. It should not be the basis of planning. Yet periods of rapid cultural change shared one more commonality—empowered experts who were also organizational outsiders. Herman Koehler, the original driving force behind a physical culture predicated on systematic training, arrived at West Point as a young, barely tested Turnverein teacher. He only earned an officer’s commission after fourteen years of service. Joseph Raycroft and his hastily recruited team of civilian educators and coaches led a major reform of the Army’s physical culture during World War I. During World War II, Theodore Bank, Charles McCloy, and Arthur Esslinger dramatically altered the Army’s official physical culture by ushering in a data-driven “new physical training concept” rooted in scientific research. In each case, unacculturated outsiders brought with them some of the latest ideas and practices from the world of physical education and were sanctioned by Army authorities to make changes. Similarly empowered outside experts could help realize change in today’s Army. For example, performance coaches and nutritionists, uniformed or civilian, could plan programs full-time and tailor those programs to the needs of individual soldiers. Of course, making use of experts would require commanders to give up some authority and control. Experts would also be expensive, especially for such a large organization. However, if the Army truly seeks revolutionary change in physical fitness, then measures more drastic than introducing a new test will be necessary.
In implementing change, the Army should also address the gendered nature of its physical culture. A recurring urge to improve men has historically been a core component of the Army’s physical culture. That urge creates a tendency to foster and reinforce traditional gender norms. Because cultural producers between the late nineteenth century and 1957 understood the task of building men and building soldiers to be one and the same, women had no place within the culture. Women’s entry into the force in 1942 threatened the Army’s man-building mission, even as the Army’s physical culture appeared to threaten women’s femininity in the eyes of many contemporary commentators. Thus, women required a different physical training system and culture, even though many men and women served in similar or even identical duty positions. Separate physical cultures, and the specific character of each, reinforced the notion that women were not real soldiers. Even when the Army’s physical training system became gender-integrated and duty position–neutral in 1980, it set female performance standards for two of the three Army Physical Fitness Test events significantly lower than male standards.14 Although designed to account for physiological differences between men and women, gender-based standards buttress conceptions of male superiority and arguments against gender-integrating combat arms units. If the Army wants to take gender integration seriously, then it must define fit soldiers, not fit men and women. The recently proposed gender-neutral test may help move the Army’s physical culture in this direction. However, as some critics have observed, the ACFT is equal-opportunity, but statistically biased in ways that disadvantage women.15 Consequences of a biased fitness test will manifest in the retention and promotion rates of female soldiers. Fortunately, testing standards and events can be modified to address this bias if the Army’s leadership cares to do so. Precise measurements of what exactly combat demands of the human body cannot exist. Performance standards are thus by nature best guesses and generalized constructions, so they can be tailored and modified to ensure more statistically commensurate male and female outcomes without compromising their utility for assessing combat readiness.
Finally, this work offers important insights into relationships between citizen fitness and the Army’s combat readiness. Poor national fitness negatively affects the military today as it did a century ago, but the problem has changed over time. Whereas the key concern between 1885 and 1957 was typically about quantity first and quality second, today the problem is chiefly one of quality. Between 1885 and 1957, the Army focused on conscription. Because young, male American citizens were also potential soldiers, they needed to be fit in order to enable the military’s rapid expansion in time of war. High draft rejection rates during the world wars, along with narratives formulated to explain early Korean War failures and POW behavior, helped fuel the Army’s conscription-related concerns. Practical mobilization issues regularly intersected with broader cultural anxieties about racial and masculine decline, and, especially during the Cold War, the nation’s competitive edge relative to its adversaries. Army leaders and civilian policy-makers consequently gave increasing attention to the prehabilitation of American youth. Anxieties over national fitness have not disappeared. Commentators today still frame declining fitness as a national security concern. Approximately 71 percent of young people in the United States do not meet basic military entry standards.16 However, the immediate problem for today’s smaller, more selective, all-volunteer force is that poor national fitness denies the military access to a wide swathe of skilled citizens. From a purely military perspective, improving the nutrition, exercise, and general health habits of America’s youth will produce more talented soldiers in addition to fitter soldiers. Exploring the history of prehabilitation in the first half of the twentieth century illuminates past approaches and suggests best practices. While this project offers no simple lessons or cookie-cutter solutions, historical awareness may help today’s policy-makers approach issues with wisdom and sensitize them to possibilities, tendencies, and limitations.
A note of caution is necessary, however. Commentators and policy-makers must avoid the “youth these days” fallacy when discussing national fitness. This fallacy assumes that the current generation of young Americans is somehow innately weaker or less capable than earlier generations. It is worth remembering that elders of the men and women who won World War II doubted that the “Greatest Generation,” as we know it today, was up to the task. In times of need, Americans have adapted and standards have adjusted to accommodate service by a larger percentage of the population. The US population is, in all likelihood, not in terminal decline. Assuming inherent generational softness obscures opportunities for intervention, systemic adjustment, and adaptation.
Writing in 1892, in the dawning years of the Army’s physical culture rooted in systematic training, Capt. James Pilcher observed that the necessity for “individual action has again arisen.” Pilcher posited a historical pendulum action. Where “individual strength and personal prowess” had been crucial characteristics for a warrior in the “days of Lysander and Scylla,” gunpowder later “dethroned individuality in combat” and gave way to the methods of “hurling great masses of men against the enemy.” Yet according to Pilcher, cutting-edge technological advances in his day denied soldiers “elbow-touch” encouragement and necessitated dispersion and individual action. “Duelling, although on a modified and vastly extended scale,” he wrote, “has once more taken the chief place in the machinery of war.” These new developments rendered the “culture of the soldier’s physique . . . indispensable.”17 Pilcher, like all his peers who first advanced the cause of systematic training in the Army, believed he could enhance human performance to a degree never before known by applying science, rational exercise, and a modern, detailed knowledge of the body. Pilcher’s generation inaugurated the Army’s body-sculpting movement, which continues today. However, their efforts and the efforts of those who followed were influenced by more than a simple “detailed knowledge.” Broad and shifting cultural, political, scientific, technological, social, and military contexts informed and constrained the imaginations of these advocates, as they still do now. War is an intensely physical activity. Participation in ground combat is perhaps man’s supreme test of physical stamina, mental toughness, and character. Despite the promises of the most ardent technophiles, technology has not changed these fundamental facts. Nor is it likely to do so in the future. Where there is war, there will be a need for strong bodies to prosecute it. Even outside the demands of infantry combat, sufficiently strong bodies are necessary to endure the hardships and stresses intrinsic to war’s nature. Much is bound up in those bodies—interleaved mental, spiritual, moral, and physical characteristics. How might the nation and its army best sculpt those bodies in pursuit of virtue, victory, and civic need? Answering this question will remain a process fraught by and freighted with layers of meaning that transcend the battlefield.