Steve Cohen
The Few, the Fat, the Fatigued
With diminished fitness standards, the armed services (Marines excepted) pander to increasingly obese personnel and recruitment cohorts.
Oct 26 2023
Recent Pentagon reports confirm that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard cannot meet their recruiting targets. At the same time, they are lowering their physical standards to keep people in the service who are overweight, often to the point of clinical obesity. As one might expect, the two problems are connected.
We’ve had an all-volunteer military for 50 years now, and by most measures, the shift from the widely hated draft has been a success. Ninety-seven percent of recruits across the services hold high school diplomas, compared with just 71 percent who did so in the draft’s last decade. Those better-educated personnel are more likely than their predecessors to master the ever-more-complex technology underlying advanced weapons systems. In the Navy, for example, 90 percent of recruits qualified for advanced training, compared with just 60 percent during the draft era.
It has, however, become ever harder to get young people to enlist. Last year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent—some 15,000 soldiers short of its target. This year’s numbers may be worse. Other branches of the armed forces also fell short, as the Navy missed its target by 19 percent, the Air Force by 10 percent, and the Coast Guard by 8 percent. Only the Marine Corps hit its threshold.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-few-the-fat-the-fatigued
