CONTACT:
FEEDBACK@WEST-POINT.ORG
Provide us the link, and we’ll quickly review the situation!
Category: Military Interest
New in 2021: The Army Combat Fitness Test — what you need to know
The new Army Combat Fitness Test officially became the service’s test of record this past October, but lawmakers are poised to hold off any further implementation, pending an independent study to determine how it will impact deployed soldiers, recruiting and retention.
If the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act passes in its current form, a provision in the law will require an independent study to determine the “extent, if any, to which the test would adversely impact” soldiers “stationed or deployed” to areas that make it difficult to conduct “outdoor physical training on a frequent or sustained basis,” the defense bill reads.
The inside story of the deadliest attack on a U.S. military base during the Iraq War
Sonja Ruhren vividly recalls that morning 16 years ago. Just days before Christmas, she heard someone pull into her driveway and then knock on her door. A pair of uniformed troops stood on her front porch in Stafford, Virginia. One was a chaplain. Confused, she invited them in out of the cold. They appeared painfully uncomfortable. It took them a while to finally explain why they were there. They had come to talk to her about her only child, Davey, her best friend, her “Golden Boy,” the sensitive, generous, forgiving son with green eyes she raised as a single mother. He was gone. Killed in Iraq.
Smoldering with red hot rage, she ordered the troops out of her house. Her anger with the U.S. military gave way to grief in the days that followed, sorrow so suffocating that just summoning the will to climb out of bed in the morning became a struggle. The day she lost Davey, Dec. 21, can be especially painful each year.
“Sometimes, December 21 comes and I am numb. It doesn’t register with me,” she told me. “And then sometimes it comes and it just takes the wind out of me — it completely just knocks me on the ground. And there are times when December 21 comes and I am OK, but then the next day it slaps me really, really hard. Really hard.”
On that day in 2004, a suicide bomber infiltrated a sprawling U.S. military base in northern Iraq, walked into the bustling mess tent there at the busiest part of lunchtime and detonated his explosives. The deafening blast killed 23 people. Among the dead were the bomber, Ruhren’s son, 13 other U.S. troops, four civilian contractors and four Iraqi soldiers. Dozens of others were injured.
The bombing at Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul was the single deadliest attack on a U.S. military installation during the war in Iraq, according to icasualties.org, which tracks troop fatalities. It made headlines around the world. On the day of the bombing, President George W. Bush trained his focus on grieving loved ones like Sonja Ruhren, telling reporters: “We pray for them. We send our heartfelt condolences to the loved ones who suffer today.”
I narrowly survived the attack.
Army now testing recruits for sickle cell trait
The Army has started testing recruits for sickle cell trait, or SCT, to identify at-risk Soldiers, as the service plans to screen all Soldiers within a year, according to a U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command medical officer.
Earlier this month, the screening push kicked off to both give Army leaders an idea of how SCT has impacted the ranks, and to help Soldiers combat the lifelong ailment, said Maj. Sean Donohue, command surgeon at TRADOC’s Center for Initial Military Training.
“On the enlisted side, recruits [at basic combat training] are now tested as part of their initial screening exam,” Donohue said. The SCT tests are grouped in “with a variety of other blood samples as part of initial processing.”
Since Nov. 2, roughly 2% of recruits have been diagnosed with the blood disorder, he said, a number on par with the national average.
Coronavirus forces military to cut training, quarantine and shutter recruiting stations, creating strains
WASHINGTON – The coronavirus pandemic is stressing the military’s ability to keep its troops ready to fight as 124 service members, their families and civilian workers had contracted the disease as of Friday and the Pentagon seeks to halt its spread.
The Pentagon has canceled or curtailed major war-training exercises, quarantined thousands of troops, closed recruiting centers and slapped limits on foreign and domestic travel. One former Pentagon official said the virus could degrade everything from maintenance of warplanes to troops’ effectiveness in combat.
Senior officials insist that the military remains ready to fight and win against any threat around the world.
“I want to assure the American people that the United States military remains ready and capable of meeting all of our national security requirements,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper said this month.