Soldier resilience on the battlefield starts with maintaining health and fitness at home, a panel of experts said.
The Army Combat Fitness Test will be replaced with the Army Fitness Test, a new five-event test that will be “sex-neutral and age-normed” for 21 combat MOSs, the Army announced in a news release.
Designed to “enhance soldier fitness, improve warfighting readiness and increase the lethality of the force,” according to the release, the new Army Fitness Test will carry over five of the six events of the Army Combat Fitness Test, which replaced the decades-old Army Physical Fitness Test in 2022.
With a new focus on functional combat fitness training, the U.S. Army Infantry School has modified the physical fitness assessment for students attending the Ranger Course.
Formally known as the Ranger Physical Fitness Assessment, the assessment will still require students to perform a 5-mile run and six chin-ups, but it no longer includes situps and pushups, according to a Maneuver Center of Excellence news release.
Resilience is built through genuine connection, the kind that happens when soldiers talk around a campfire, said the Army’s chief of chaplains.
These “campfire moments” are “not laid out on a training calendar, they aren’t laid out on fancy PowerPoint slides, but they are decisive moments of leadership,” Maj. Gen. William Green said March 5 in remarks at a Hot Topic on “Holistic Health and the Resilient Soldier” hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army.
The Army’s program to enhance troops’ readiness and lethality through holistic fitness is “the largest investment in soldier readiness” the service has ever undertaken, a senior officer said.
In remarks March 5 at a Hot Topic hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army, Lt. Gen. David Francis, commanding general of the Center for Initial Military Training and deputy commanding general of Army Training and Doctrine Command, said the Holistic Health and Fitness program is the Army’s “primary investment in soldier readiness and lethality.”
The Army’s program to enhance soldiers’ readiness through regular mental and physical fitness continues to expand across the force, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus said.
In remarks Feb. 4 at the monthly meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army’s George Washington chapter in Arlington, Virginia, Mingus said the program, known as Holistic Health and Fitness, or H2F, started with 28 brigades and has now expanded to 71 brigades in the active Army.
The obesity rate in the U.S. continues to increase, and the military sees similar trends. As a result of the obesity epidemic, U.S.
The Army needs soldiers who are physically and spiritually healthy to perform the demanding missions required of them, said retired Maj. Gen. Tom Solhjem, the former Army chief of chaplains.
In a Nov. 13 Noon Report webinar hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army, Solhjem said readiness has “both a very deeply spiritual component … and a very physical component. We’ve got to have people to do what the nation needs them to do.”
Among a host of initiatives to strengthen the NCO corps, the Army is redesigning its physical training uniform, the service’s senior enlisted leader announced Oct. 15 during the Association of the U.S. Army’s 2024 Annual Meeting and Exposition.
“It’s going to look a little different than what we’ve done in the past. We’re not going to get locked into the same T-shirt,” Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Weimer said, adding that the current uniform “doesn’t represent who we are as warfighters.”
The Army is working to shift its fitness culture from a biennial test and weigh-in to a daily practice in not only physical but mental and spiritual health through its Holistic Health and Fitness program, now operational in 50 brigades and working its way to 111.
