Not Fit to Fight? Rethinking Military Recruitment Standards
By Thomas M. Hunt
May 07, 2018
The state of physical fitness in the United States has long been a topic of concern among the nation's leaders. Declining fitness measures on the part of military draftees played an important role in prompting President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 to establish the President's Council on Youth Fitness. In 1960, John Kennedy, then the president-elect, felt so strongly about the subject that he wrote a multipage article, "The Soft American," for Sports Illustrated.
The problem, Kennedy scathingly asserted, constituted nothing less than a national security crisis:
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