> If your leadership puts you in a situation where that is necessary
While I'm mostly inclined to agree with your higher-level point, I think this particular argument hurts more than it helps. Military leaders plan for unexpected situations in the ultimate adversarial environment. They don't mean to put people in this situation, but they plan for it anyway because they want troops to survive even when things don't go as intended. Being able to reach an objective on time is important, and being able to run away from trouble even more so. These are elite units, put into the highest-uncertainty kinds of situations. In that context, at that age, seven-minute miles for an hour or so is not at all unreasonable. It's not even that far from what I could do, despite being 56 and never having been any kind of physical elite. "Indefinitely" and under load might be pushing the idea too far, but the idea that there should be some minimum requirement is fundamentally sound. It's the repetition and the normalization of tactics unnecessarily requiring such high levels of physical prowess that creates problems.
While I'm mostly inclined to agree with your higher-level point, I think this particular argument hurts more than it helps. Military leaders plan for unexpected situations in the ultimate adversarial environment. They don't mean to put people in this situation, but they plan for it anyway because they want troops to survive even when things don't go as intended. Being able to reach an objective on time is important, and being able to run away from trouble even more so. These are elite units, put into the highest-uncertainty kinds of situations. In that context, at that age, seven-minute miles for an hour or so is not at all unreasonable. It's not even that far from what I could do, despite being 56 and never having been any kind of physical elite. "Indefinitely" and under load might be pushing the idea too far, but the idea that there should be some minimum requirement is fundamentally sound. It's the repetition and the normalization of tactics unnecessarily requiring such high levels of physical prowess that creates problems.