I was born with flat feet. No arch in my metatarsal arch. Pool table flat. My feet pull suction on a smooth wet floor when I walk. It hasn't stopped me from hiking, climbing, and a huge number of activities, and I still don't have any foot problems today (over six decades later), but it did stop me from one thing. Even going and talking to a recruiter, because I was told I would have been refused.
My friends enlisted, one became a Sargent Major in the USMC, another a SEAL, others I lost track of after H.S. but at least two went into the navy and served at sea. I had to sate my inner adrenaline junkie rock climbing, spelunking, hiking, driving fast, working in the oil patch, and riding motorcycles, among other things.
The Armed forces would not take me in, even though I didn't really acknowledge any problem with my feet being flat (except that thing about driving steel shanks out of the bottom of boots). Spending 12 hours or more on my feet wasn't so abnormal, I was known to pick up 250-300 lbs and walk off with it, but nope, the military wasn't interested. It didn't matter that I did not (and still don't) acknowledge any problem with my feet, which, by virtue of having been born that way, 'identify' as perfectly normal feet, and have since I can remember.
The Armed forces would not pay to 'correct' my flat feet surgically so I could join up. It simply didn't work in the calculations or calculus of the military budget to pay for the surgery for a few people with flat feet to join up at the cost to fully equip an infantry squad each, when there were plenty of people out there who could pass the physical.
Now, this is another issue, albeit likely not so much a physical one, but I have to ask who these people are that are so essential to the defense of these United States that we have to pay for the gender reassignment surgery of anyone so they can be in the armed forces? Is there some strategic genius, some tactical supersoldier so indispensable that we will lose all future conflicts without them?
I think we all know the answer to that. You don't get to be George Patton while dithering over whether you should sit or stand, if you get my drift.
The job of the military is to be the enforcement arm of our civil government when it comes to foreign policy, and to defend our nation against attack, whatever projection of (or use of) force that may require. That requires people who can step into the training regimens without need for major physical modification and proceed to be trained and to perform the mission they are tasked with. Once in, if they are injured, part of the deal is to repair those injuries as much as possible, for a return to duty if possible, a disability pension if not.
If it is to the benefit of the military to spend a few hundred dollars on lasik rather than a half million to train another pilot, that is a decision made at command levels, but one which just makes good, sound, fiscal sense.
But for a raw recruit to enter the service in anticipation of having major surgery to correct something they personally see as a defect is not part of the defense mission. If they perceive that defect as so serious as to affect their performance without that surgery they should save everyone the trouble of telling them 'Thank you for your interest, but no." If you really want to serve your country, to defend it, to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, consider saving the cost of your surgery that would have come out of the military budget for the warfighters out there to use when and where we really need it, and find an alternate means of financing your elective surgery.
There are other ways to serve your country; sometimes that is best done by standing down.
