(OPINION) Let’s just hope that the U.S. does not need to fight a major war any time soon. Right now, the U.S. Army is actually shrinking because so few young people are being recruited. Interest in serving in the military has plummeted dramatically, and meanwhile, the percentage of our young adults that actually qualify to serve has fallen to a depressingly low level.
According to a recent Pentagon study, 77 percent of all Americans from age 17 to age 24 are ineligible to serve in the military for one reason or another. That is a pathetically low figure, and it is the main reason why we need other countries to fight our wars for us at this point.
Just look at Ukraine. We are providing the funding, the equipment, the ammunition and the intelligence, but they are providing the warm bodies. If that changes and our young people are actually forced to fight in a major conflict, they will quickly find out that a real war is nothing like Call of Duty or Fortnite. During the most recent fiscal year, the U.S. Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent…
How bad is the recruiting crisis? During the last fiscal year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, or 25 percent of its target. This shortfall forced the Army to cut its planned active-duty end strength from 476,000 to 466,000. And the current fiscal year is likely to be even worse.
Army officials project that active end strength could shrink by as much as 20,000 soldiers by September, down to 445,000. That means that the nation’s primary land force could plummet by as much as 7 percent in only two years — at a time when its missions are increasing in Europe and even in the Pacific, where the Army provides many of the critical wartime theater enablers without which the other services cannot function. The U.S. Army was once the most fearsome military machine on the entire planet. But now it is steadily getting smaller and smaller.
It turns out that school closures during the pandemic have had an enormous impact on military recruiting, because test scores have been dropping like a rock… Levels of depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions exploded among young Americans (and many not-so-young Americans), who faced sometimes extreme levels of social isolation.
School closures and remote instruction have caused test scores to decline dramatically throughout the country (and the world), and scores on the ASVAB, the military’s standardized test for potential recruits, declined by as much as 9 percent.
Of course low test scores are not the primary reason why so many young Americans fail to qualify for military service.
Sadly, obesity is actually the number one reason… A Pentagon study revealed that 77 percent of young Americans do not qualify for military service without a waiver due to being overweight, drug use, or mental or physical problems.
“When considering youth disqualified for one reason alone, the most prevalent disqualification rates are overweight (11 percent), drug and alcohol abuse (8 percent), and medical/physical health (7 percent),” the Pentagon’s 2020 Qualified Military Available Study of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 read.
It wasn’t always this way. At one time, America’s young people were the fittest on the entire planet and our military had more qualified recruits than they knew what to do with. But now everything has changed.
In fact, obesity has now become a major problem for those that are already serving in the military…mNew research found that obesity in the U.S. military surged during the pandemic. In the Army alone, nearly 10,000 active duty soldiers developed obesity between February 2019 and June 2021, pushing the rate to nearly a quarter of the troops studied. Increases were seen in the U.S. Navy and the Marines, too. (READ MORE)
