When Sgt. David Morrow patrolled the sweltering hills of Afghanistan with an assault rifle and supply pack slung around his back, fitness wasn’t optional. It was existential.
“You’re basically in an oven 24/7 and you’ve got a hundred [plus] pounds of gear patrolling all day,” said Morrow, reflecting on his 2010-2011 deployment as a soldier with the Canadian Armed Forces.
“If you’re not fit, it is just… an absolute suicide mission when you go out there.”
Times have changed.
Canada is no longer engaged in formal combat missions. And in 2013, the Canadian Armed Forces replaced age- and gender-adjusted fitness thresholds with a universal fitness standard. The Forces say the test is designed to reflect the demands of military service and promote inclusion.
But some veterans say the test has coincided with a broader erosion of fitness in the ranks — raising questions about whether the bar has been set too low, and has come at a cost to military readiness.
“We’ve let that [fitness] standard slide,” said Morrow, who today runs an organization dedicated to improving soldiers’ fitness levels. “ Obviously nobody gives enough of a shit to stay fit. That should tell you all you need to know about [whether] we are ready to fight a war.
“Other than the pointy edge of the stick — which is our special forces and the few guys that are hanging on that still have pride — no, we’re not lethal at all.”
A shift in standards
In 2013, the Canadian Armed Forces introduced the FORCE Evaluation, a universal physical employment test meant to reflect the demands of six common military tasks. These tasks include picking and digging, escaping to cover, extracting vehicles, carrying a stretcher and fortifying with sandbags.
The move was a necessary departure from the older EXPRES test, which used age- and sex-adjusted thresholds, according to the Department of National Defence.
“Unlike EXPRES, which adjusted standards based on age and gender, FORCE uses a single standard for everyone,” a DND spokesperson told Canadian Affairs in an emailed statement.
The department says the change improved the fairness and legal defensibility of its standards. “These standards are designed to meet Canadian human rights legislation … [ensuring a standard is] necessary and the least discriminatory way to achieve the job’s requirements,” said the spokesperson.
But applying the same basic fitness standard to all individuals across all military trades has set the bar too low, critics charge.
“[If] you’re trying to accommodate the test to everybody so everybody can pass, well now you’ve got a problem,” said Morrow.
Since the universal physical employment test came into effect, the number of obese individuals in the military has ticked up — from 25 per cent in 2013 to 28 per cent in 2019.
In total, 72 per cent of CAF personnel were either overweight or obese in 2019, the most recent year for which data are available.
Readiness in decline
Lt.-Gen. (Ret’d) Andrew Leslie commanded the Canadian Army from 2006 to 2010, at the height of the war in Afghanistan. He believes today’s military has lost its operational edge.
“The Armed Forces’ readiness level right now is amongst the lowest it’s been in probably 50 years,” said Leslie, now a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute think tank.
“And if your people aren’t fit to go … then they’re not of much use to you.”
Leslie notes that physical fitness is just one factor in a larger readiness picture that includes equipment, training, infrastructure and funding — all of which, he says, are lacking.
“Right now we have a Canadian Armed Forces which is about 13- to 14,000 people short of their mandated strength, which has very old equipment in almost all fleets, and spare parts are really hard to come by,” he said.
Leslie likes some aspects of the new CAF fitness standard.
“When I joined, you had to be fit just to join. And now … you can also develop that fitness over the course of your first year, which I think is a much better way to do it.”
But the CAF is failing to ensure new and long-time members meet or remain at the required level of fitness, he says.
“I suspect that over the last decade or so, a variety of leaders have chosen not to essentially enforce the rules that used to exist,” he said.
“The lower you let the bar slip, the harder it is to recover.”
The military tests CAF members annually on four FORCE components. The test includes activities such as doing 30 consecutive lifts of a 20 kg sandbag from the floor to a height of one metre.
“[T]he CAF continues to use evidence-based approaches to support operational readiness and member well-being,” the DND spokesperson said. The spokesperson pointed to a number of CAF programs that support nutritional wellness, physical fitness, stress management and mental health.
The CAF does not currently track correlations between FORCE results and operational performance.
Consequences of compromise
Both Leslie and Morrow say physical readiness is inseparable from combat effectiveness.
“When you’re overseas in Kandahar … no one really cares where you came from,” said Leslie.
In a war zone, the questions are much more fundamental: “How are you gonna survive this? How can you contribute? And do you know what you’re doing? Oh, and by the way, are you so unfit that you’re going to heave and puff your way halfway up the top of the next hill, and then cave out on your buddies?” Leslie said.
Morrow links declining CAF fitness standards to a weakening institutional culture.
“Fitness and dress are the two single most important things for a soldier, because they are the things that define how disciplined you are,” he said.
“If you’re not disciplined enough to stay fit, you’ll likely not be disciplined enough to fight the enemy for a prolonged time in the field.”
For battle-hardened veterans like Morrow and Leslie, the simple image of one soldier hauling another to safety remains the ultimate test of military fitness. They argue that policy reform should not lose sight of that burden.
“[In Afghanistan] we knew there was an imperative to pull our buddies off the battlefield,” said Morrow. “So the standards were there … We were warriors. We respected the job, so we were fit.”
designed to meet Canadian human rights legislation…but not war.
The test itself evaluates all required activities during war, determines the absolute minimum you need to be able to function, and then tests for how well you can do that. The CAF took that and made it the standard as opposed to the minimum. It doesn’t have to be though. The science and the process are effective. The application isn’t.
It was required to be able to run 2.4km in 11:56 for a young guy to even be fit enough to go to basic training in 2001. Put all these modern warriors who are trade qualified on a treadmill and get ready to facepalm.