At Army bases, bayonet practice may now be called off if the weather is too hot. On obstacle courses, which have now been renamed "confidence courses," recruits may now run around walls if climbing them is too hard. A visitor to a Marine training facility even noticed a footstool placed in front of an eight-foot wall so that no trainee would fail to scale it. Time magazine reports that some Navy recruits are given "blue cards" to hand to a trainer when they are feeling blue. And carring a stretcher, once a two-person job, now requires four people.

Army trainees perform many drills in sneakers because women suffer high rates of injury when wearing boots. Marine climbing ropes now feature a yellow line part-way up at which women are allowed to stop. In one Army exercise, male soldiers must do 20 push-ups, while women must do six. The Armed Forces justify these differences using the concept of "comparable effort," which was developed after disturbing findings that, for example, 45 percent of female trainees at Parris Island were unable to throw a hand grenade far enough to avoid blowing themselves up.

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