4. Department of Defense · Notable
Base physical fitness requirements on occupational field, not gender or race
Printed page 103 4. Department of Defense
“Physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation.”
What has happened
- Partially done
The Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel opened a six-month review of the "operational effectiveness of ground combat units 10 years after the Department lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles," requesting Army and Marine Corps data on readiness, training, performance, casualties and command climate. The occupational-field standard is being applied; the review is about who can meet it, not about race, ethnicity or orientation, which no instrument addresses.
- Partially done
The Secretary of War's *Military Fitness Standards* memorandum, one of eleven issued at Quantico that day and read in full, is the mechanism. Active-component members take two fitness tests a year, and the memorandum's own matrix sets the terms: for combat arms personnel the Service Fitness Test is "sex-neutral; age-normed (simplified); male-standard; must achieve 70% average, across all elements" and a Combat Field Test is required; for non-combat arms personnel the Service Fitness Test remains "sex-normed, age-normed". Failure "may be used to withhold favorable personnel actions, to include denied promotions, and administrative separation". So the occupational-field standard is in force for combat arms and only for combat arms — which is why this is `partial` and not `done` — and race, ethnicity and orientation, which the Quote also names, are addressed by no instrument at all. (Replaces the earlier reading, which rested on NPR's report of the same day because war.gov and media.defense.gov were recorded as HTTP 403. They are not: media.defense.gov answers the full Chrome header set.)
- Attempted
The Secretary of Defense's memorandum *Combat Arms Standards*, read in full, directs the Secretaries of the Military Departments to "develop comprehensive plans to distinguish combat arms occupations from non-combat arms occupations" and rules that "all entry-level and sustained physical fitness requirements within combat arms positions must be sex-neutral, based solely on the operational demands of the occupation and the readiness needed to confront any adversary", with the further limit that no existing Service member may be held to a lower standard. Plans were due to the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness within 60 days and full implementation within six months of submission. A directive that changed no test on the day it was signed, and a directive about sex only: race, ethnicity and orientation are not mentioned.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Reviewed 2026-09-06 — the documents were readable after all. An earlier note recorded that the Secretary of Defense’s own memoranda “are on media.defense.gov and war.gov pages that refuse every request, so the Status rests on NPR’s reporting, twice”. Both memoranda can be read. The combat arms standards memorandum (COMBAT-ARMS-STANDARDS.PDF, 2025-03-30) and the eleven-memorandum Quantico compilation (2025-09-30) are now the Primary evidence for the first two events, and NPR is kept only where it dates the same day. The 2026-01-06 event still rests on NPR alone: the six-month review of ground combat units it reports is not published as a memorandum on either host.
This item sits in the page 103–104 personnel cluster, whose shared instruments are EO 14151, EO 14183, the FY2026 NDAA titles V, VI and IX, and the Secretary of Defense’s 2025 personnel memoranda — nearly all of which live on Department of War pages that refuse automated reads. One negative search covered the whole cluster.
- Action
- other
- Object
- military physical fitness requirements
- ID
- 169