The greatest military threat of the next generation may not be foreign or domestic: it may be in level of fitness.
A group of retired military leaders concluded earlier this month that American youth entering military service are increasingly turned away because they are not fit enough to fight.
The recently formed group created a nonprofit organization called Mission: Readiness, Military Leaders for Kids to invest in the next generation of American soldiers.
According to the group’s website, “Currently, 75 percent of 17-to 24-year-olds in the U.S. cannot serve in the military, primarily because they are physically unfit, have not graduated from high school or have a criminal record. That’s an estimated 26 million young adults.”
“You have a shrinking pool of eligible people, and that pool has got to start going the other way,” said retired Army Maj. James Comstock in a news release. “That’s why it’s a security issue.”
The group, comprised of 250 retired generals, admirals and other senior military leaders, issued the report the day before Veterans Day. It urged educational organizations to ensure students are receiving proper physical education and that state and national requirements for fitness are met.
Misson: Readiness also noted that California’s high school students spend an average of 22 minutes per day in moderate-to-vigorous exercises during PE classes; middle school students spend 16 minutes and elementary school students only spend nine minutes.
In total, the group estimates fully one in every four Americans are now too overweight to enlist.
Dan Cole, a member of BYU’s Air Force ROTC, is not surprised by the statistics.
“Those statistics sound about right,” Cole said. “We have a real health problem in our country when it comes to the physical, mental and emotional health of our youth.”
While he acknowledges the problem, Cole said he doesn’t think the trend will actually affect the military much.
“The military is not in the business of scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Cole said. “We take the best of the best. We take people who are already in shape. Military members usually are athletic, talented people before they sign up.”
Richard Baird, a major in the Air Force and an assistant professor of aerospace studies at BYU, said he believes the field of military candidates to be more diverse.
“I do think it is a great cause for concern,” Baird said. “We have a huge ticking time bomb of obesity, diabetes and other diseases that are going to explode in our face in the next 10 to 20 years. You are going to have people who can’t do anything because they have a bad heart and bad lungs.”
Baird said BYU students are starting to show signs of those health problems in fitness tests.
“There are people who join our ROTC program and for some of them, it is a large learning curve,” Baird said. “People who are overweight have to do a lot of extra work to get caught up. We have some students who have lost up to 30 pounds to improve their fitness. I wouldn’t generally state that we are picking athletes.”
