Читать книгу ACFT For Dummies - Angela Papple Johnston - Страница 13

The Army knows that military operations have become more complex. You’re not riding a horse into battle with your sword drawn. You’re up, they see you, you’re down. You’re wearing and carrying 80-plus pounds of gear through rugged mountain terrain, setting up OE-254s, performing HAZMAT operations in Level A, or emptying truck after truck full of supplies on a remote operating base.

Push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run just couldn’t tell the military that you could perform under those rigorous conditions. In fact, all the APFT told the Army was that you could do push-ups, sit-ups, and a two-mile run. The APFT was designed to have 40 percent predictive power for performance in combat. But today, it’s all about functional fitness — and assessments indicate the ACFT has 80 percent predictive power for battlefield performance.

Training servicemembers for the ACFT (and requiring the test itself) is the Army’s way of improving soldiers’ physical fitness, reducing preventable injuries, enhancing stamina, and contributing to enhanced unit readiness.

The ACFT is required for every soldier. Age and gender don’t matter. Like my drill sergeant at “Relaxin’” Jackson told me, “You’re an infantryman first.” That means the Army wants assurance, whether you’re an 18-year-old male private or a 55-year-old female four-star, that you have muscular strength and endurance, power, speed, agility, cardiovascular endurance, balance, flexibility, coordination, and high-speed reaction time.

Is the ACFT harder to pass for some soldiers than it is for others? Yes. Does that mean you may need to work harder than your battle buddy? Absolutely. But that’s what this book is for. I can’t go to the gym with you, but I can show you what you need to do to meet the Army’s vision: “To deploy, fight, and win our nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt, and sustained land dominance by Army forces.”

The bottom line is that the Army is a standards-based institution, and those standards are in place to meet the requirements of combat operations.