Now how will that impact branching, etc.? If the argument is that girls should not be held to the same standard as boys, what about in the classroom? Should there be different grading scales for those who are not as smart? If the end state is a force that is measured on an equal scale, shouldn't the scale be equal from the beginning?
Imagine this: A girl has scored above the max on the APFT and got in A in Military movement; both times with scores that would be near falling for men. Now it comes time to branch. Her class rank is higher because her physical ranking is higher, so she gets an armor slot over a guy whose raw scores are higher than hers. Is that fair to the guys who are outperforming her to miss an opportunity like that because the Academy says girls cannot perform on the same level physically but the Army says they must be able to?
At Navy the issue of women getting higher class ranks because of lower standards for physical fitness also came up relatively frequently. I see how it plays into the branching thing, so here is my two cents on the "testing at the academy" vs. "how it affects branching" issue.
On the testing at the academy, I don't know if they perhaps already do this, but I'd think most remotely fair-minded people would be okay with a system in which the raw standards might not be the same, but the proportion of men and women who qualified for the "A" range was. So if only the top 10% of men can get an A on the PFT, and only the top 10% of women can get an A on the PFT, that should satisfy fairness concerns for the most part. Again, maybe this is already the case, but at least when I was at USNA the one part of the PFT that seemed to be lower than the real capabilities of women was the run -- hard to max for guys unless you were a varsity track or running type, but maxable by very fit, hard-training non-track athlete women.
I get that this would still mean that a woman with a lower raw score on an absolute scale might be able to branch armor over a guy if they are equal in academics, etc. Then she would still have to qualify physically or risk washing out once she is doing her training in the branch, by meeting whatever standards Armor sets (and I agree with USNA85, if real standards tied to the job are tough for women to meet, they should still have to meet them). To a certain extent, some of this is life in the service -- they worry about their needs, not what is most "fair" to you. For example, at Basic School for the Marines, they have something called the "thirds rule" for MOS selection (equivalent to branching). The class is divided into thirds, and they'll take Infantry officers from among middle and bottom thirds as well as from the top third of the class (and Infantry tends to be highly sought after). So let's say you have a company of 120, and there are 30 infantry slots up for grabs. They don't give those slots to the people ranked 1-30. They may give them to those ranked 1-15 and 40-50 and 80-85. Is that "fair"? If you're ranked #16 in TBS and don't get infantry, it doesn't feel fair to you, I guess, but the Marine Corps doesn't want to skim off all the cream of every TBS class for infantry, they want more of a bell curve. If you don't like it, it's all volunteer, right?
BUT I think in this situation, you might not want to send women into their branch schooling after West Point with the rest of their newly minted lieutenant classmates thinking they don't deserve to be there. So, maybe West Point should consider changing its branching to either (a) encompass a physical test that is set by the branch (Armor or Infantry); or (b) set up more long-term screeners like the SEAL Screener or USMC Leatherneck at USNA.
On I-Day, every other dude said he wanted SEALs. By second-class year, that number was way down (reality had already hit) but we probably had over 100 guys take part in the SEAL screener (a winter weekend spent PTing and immersed in the Chesapeake Bay without sleep, NOT fun) and a bunch of them dropped out. If there were no such screening process, you'd have had a lot more people who didn't get SEALs in service selection, some of whom thought it wasn't fair, etc. The Leatherneck example might be even more relevant to West Point's branching for things like Armor or Infantry. Leatherneck is four weeks at Quantico before first-class summer. Performance at Leatherneck is a big factor in service selecting Marines, and can knock higher class rank types out of the running if they bomb physically or on the leadership evaluation. Maybe West Point would go to some kind of Armor or Infantry version of Leatherneck, run by those already in the branch, not detailed to the Academy, and that will help some with the issue of resentment for women taking combat arms slots in the branching.