Early Tests Show Female Airmen Can Perform Many SpecOps Tasks: General | Military.com: Preliminary tests show female airmen can perform many of the same battlefield tasks as their male counterparts in Special Operations positions, a general said.
The Air Force ran a series of tests involving 170 airmen, including about 70 women, between May and July at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas, to predict how they would perform on a series of physical tasks required on the battlefield and for Special Operations jobs, according to Brig. Gen. Brian Kelly, the service's director of military force management policy.
"In lots of cases, they were able to compete and stay up with the men," Kelly said on Tuesday during a briefing with reporters at the annual Air and Space Conference held outside Washington, D.C. He later confirmed they did so most of the time.
"There were some tasks and places where they would say had they known that that was the task and had they the ability to train to that over time they were pretty comfortable that they would be able to do that over time," he said. "They may have struggled that particular day because their job is maybe a desk job and they weren't able to do 100 pull-ups or whatever they were doing in that regard.
"But there was confidence that if they really had a desire to do that career field, and had the ability to train to it, the test subjects all thought that they would be able to accomplish the task and be successful," he added.
