USAF Battlefield Airmen Occupationally Specific, Operationally Relevant Physical Fitness Tests and Standards

Abstract

The US Air Force officially implemented Tier 1 health and general physical fitness (PF) tests and standards in 2010 with aerobic and body composition component standards established on professionally recognized health science criteria. Scores reflect degrees of health and general fitness, but do not necessarily reflect task achievement for military occupations, e.g., Battlefield Airmen (BA). PURPOSE: We developed prototype Tier 2 occupationally-specific, operationally-relevant PF tests and standards for BA (PrT), and compared PrT to incumbent BA PF tests and standards (InT) for content, predictive, and consequential validity and gender neutrality. METHODS: An occupationally-based bona fide operational requirements physical demand analysis was conducted for six BA career fields. Analysis identified operationally-required critical physical tasks (CPTs), plus six PF components and 14 physical movement patterns necessary to perform CPTs. CPTs provided the basis for developing physical task simulations (PTSs). Subjects (n = 171, 62 female, mean ± SD; age, 28.5 ± 5.6 yrs) completed 15 PTSs and 39 PF tests to determine the optimal PF test battery for predicting operational task success. Data were analyzed using SAS®. RESULTS: We developed a ten component PrT that addresses all operationally-required PFCs and physical movement patterns whereas the five component InT addresses only two PFCs and eight movement patterns. PrT explained variance in subjects’ PTS performance significantly better (adj R2 78% to 82%) than InT (adj R2 58% to 63%). PrT classification accuracy (PF test scores vs PTS success) was significantly better at 85% correct versus InT at 66% (p < .05). Finally, PrT predicted operational performance equally well across genders; however, InT under predicted male performance by 17% and over predicted female performance by 24%. CONCLUSIONS: The study approach proved efficacious for developing a viable prototype BA PF test. InT has limited validity and pronounced deficiencies in predicting operational task performance; PrT strengthens the validity and mitigates these deficiencies. In addition, PrT meets public law requirements that qualifying PF tests for military specialties be occupationally specific, operationally relevant, and gender neutral.