The new gender- and age-neutral fitness test, rolled out in 2018, included a host of new exercises meant to better measure a recruit’s ability to perform the skills needed in the field. The results, predictable to most people, were startling to the Pentagon. On the maximum three-rep deadlift, the average male soldier out-lifted his female counterpart 238 to 160 pounds. On the hand-release push-up portion, the average male performed thirty-four to the average female’s twenty. The two-mile run and the sprint-drag-carry were dominated by male soldiers, and on the standing power throw, an overhead medicine-ball toss, the average male out-tossed the average female by nearly four feet.

Between October 2020 to April 2021, forty-four percent of women failed the test, compared to just seven percent of men.

Most Americans, to that point, had assumed the armed forces were striving to create a maximally effective fighting force. The fact women were less likely than men to pass the new physical fitness test should not, by that standard, have mattered. The military is a killing machine, not a group meant to scratch its members’ felt need to “belong,” or better “represent” the diversity of the American population.

But the Biden administration thought otherwise.

[Rush Limbaugh used to say over and over again that the military had two purposes — to kill people and to break things. Any missions other than maximizing those abilities were a distraction. And that was before the DoD decided to go all-in on wokery, Pride Month celebrations, trans enlistees, etc. Social justice has overtaken the real mission for our military, and Hirschauer lays out some of the consequences for policymakers in that shift. — Ed]