Posted on 02/25/2018 7:30:23 PM PST by SeekAndFind
With all that’s going on in this report from the Free Beacon, it’s amazing that our military is still hitting all of its recruiting goals. But somehow they are.
They don’t have all that many people to pick from, however. Just as the military is entering into a period of renewed expansion, there are fewer qualified candidates and even fewer expressing an interest. According to the Pentagon, if every person in the country age 18 to 24 showed up to apply, roughly three out of four would have to be turned away because they simply couldn’t qualify.
Nearly three-quarters of young Americans are ineligible to serve in the United States military due to obesity, criminal record, or lack of education, according to a new report by the Heritage Foundation.
The contracted pool of Americans aged 17 to 24 who are fit to enlist in the armed services poses an “alarming” threat to national security and risks derailing the Trump administration’s path to rebuilding a depleted military, the report found, citing Pentagon data.
The Pentagon estimates that 24 million of the 34 million Americans between 17 and 24 years old, or 71 percent, are unable to serve.
Health problems are the greatest obstacle to military service, with more than half of the young people who are ineligible for service suffering from a health issue.
This is particularly bad news at the moment because the Army is getting ready to recruit up to 80,000 new soldiers in the coming two years. The Navy isn’t quite as hard up, but they’re going to need 30,000 more sailors. All of this recruiting will be required to expand the service in line with the plans put in place by President Trump.
So what is disqualifying so many of them? For the majority, it’s health issues. Of those, more than half are too obese to be accepted. (The Army is saying they’ll take you if you’re “a little chubby” but if you’re seriously obese there won’t be time in basic training to whip you into shape.) Others are showing up with joint problems, respiratory ailments and related issues. Others failed to graduate high school or get an equivalent degree and are refused entry until they can meet the educational standards.
Other people hoping to enlist have criminal records. If it’s a couple of minor items you can sometimes get a waiver, but if you’ve run up any sort of serious criminal background they have to reject you. (As they should.) This is a big change from the bad old days of the Vietnam War when it was still not all that uncommon for a judge at sentencing to offer a defendant a choice of jail or boot camp.
The other problem the military is facing is a rather ironic one. Unemployment is nearing historic lows at the moment and that’s traditionally when fewer people turn to the military for a career. If better paying (and, frankly, less dangerous) jobs are plentiful, fewer young people are looking to the armed services as a better and more secure alternative to stocking shelves at Walmart. But with luck, enough of the truly dedicated and patriotic ones will keep their noses clean, work themselves into shape and volunteer to serve their nation.
My son had planned to join the military until he blew his knee out. Now he’s going into the law.
One of my favorite John Candy characters.
My father, a Navy officer veteran and a circuit judge in Florida for almost thirty years accommodated military recruiters in that manner and it usually worked out. Prudently, he insisted that the recruiter be informed by the prosecutor of all charges and negative information, that the recruiter appear in court and go on record, and with the young miscreant warned that the prosecutor could revive the charges if he busted out of the military. The recruiters liked that approach.
Hearing loss is also a big medical reason. Earbuds are bad news.
Bariatric surgery is now the preferred course of treatment and even then success ratios are low.
The kind and type of foods consumed by the young condemn them. And after teenage years the addition of fat cells is not naturally needed, except for pregnancy, and once added is irreversible. Stats since the 50s don’t lie. It is a pandemic with no cure given the food supply.
Those that make the ‘grade’ will have an easy time of it compared to years ago - will not have to meet any sort of physical standard not have to throw a grenade (not that many can in the 11st place) to pass Basic.
Then many of those will be women, who will suddenly become pregnant when deployment time comes, some of the rest will be changing gender and also be not deployable.
Such a wondrous social experiment, the US military! Fight wars? Touch guns? Eeew.
America has a huge, bloated, parasite class.
So open up a military boot camp on the border with Mexico. Let them run it off as they stand guard at least until the wall is built.
The impact on many parts of society from drugging our elementary school kids needs much more attention.
They are drugged because they act like boys. Boys age 5-15 do not need drugs, they need to learn self-control, self-discipline and to play by the rules. When drugged, they never have the ability or need to learn how to build character. Then we wonder why at aget 19 they are the way they are.
Do FOIA on the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by your Medicaid on Adarall, Ritalin and 2 dozen other mind control drugs forced on our kids.... and of course, the millions spent on doctors to prescribe the drugs at the request of the teacher's union with no actual examination by the doctor.
I don’t know how many war movies feature a bad boy forced into the military. We always throw the baby out with the bathwater. Never fails.
Care to elaborate? Where do you see the greatest problems?
Society is so messed up it is hard to know where to start. Medicaid is used by the teacher's Union to forcibly drug kids age 5 - 12 who act like boys. Those kids are prevented from learning self-control and self-discipline. Then, when they are teens we wonder why they do what they do.
Police departments are run by people concerned about their budget and how to maximize revenue and create the statistics that will impress funding sources. Police indiscriminately arrest gang members with no actual knowledge of them committing any crime. The police assume well they must be guilty of something. The prosecution and defense attorneys make the same assumptions. Numerous times when I had a friend falsely accused, it was impossible to find a defense attorney that would even consider the possibility that the kid was innocent.
The RINO Republican frames Rolando Cruz for murder and tries to murder Cruz to prove to the voters that this RINO is tough on crime. Democrat Prosecutor Daley does exactly the same thing to the innocent Ford Heights Four. After many years in prison and long court appeals to avoid the chair, the innocent are finally released. Incidents like this happen and get attention at the murder level.
But the many innocent Rolando Cruz's charged with something less than murder get no attention.
Funding the bureaucracy motivation for bad police behavior has the counter-productive effect of turning kids on the street very cynical and hardened about crime. They will be accused and convicted whether they are innocent or guilty. So they might as well get the benefits of being guilty before they do their inevitable time in jail.
And yes, many kids see a life in jail for them as inevitable. In exactly the same way that from age 2 I assumed that, of course I would go to Wheaton College, they see that of course they will go to Crook County Jail or Stateville.
Medicaid forcing drugged kids and police bureaucracies chasing money are just two of the many problems in our messed up society.
I would give the overweight recruits an option of probationary induction. If they are not able to pass the physical due to weight, they don't go to full boot camp. They go on a program of physical training for three hours a day, interspersed with helping out at the base. At the end of 6 months, they are either in good enough shape to make it through boot camp, or they get discharged with no benefits.
My 17 year old nephew is 300lbs. I don’t think the Army will be knocking on his door.
The biggest motivator for the guys that joined with me was the extreme amount of work that our parents were demanding if we wanted to stay living at home.
They pushed us out but without kicking us out. Once we were 18 they wanted us to work full time at home and at work.
The Military became our new home, a place to sleep, clothes, food, and money.
It was the central theme of “From Here to Eternity”!
I’m trying to remember - did Montgomey Clift kill a man prior to being drafted.
Yeah - in a boxing match
Right. That’s a major plot point - he’s punished for refusing to box.
I actually thought I was in pretty good shape when I showed up. Turned out I wasn’t. That’s what basic is for.
They should just think of it as the Biggest Loser without colorful t-shirts, cameras, or crying sessions. Oh, and with a somewhat different prize at the end.
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