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Being too fat or weak to enlist seems like a trivial problem to solve. The base controls your diet and exercise routines. Can't they just engineer their physiqu

Being too fat or weak to enlist seems like a trivial problem to solve. The base controls your diet and exercise routines. Can't they just engineer their physique after they've signed up?

TheCoelacanth 3y ago
Can and do when they get desperate for recruits. They are willing to put more effort into training when they have a shortage of people joining.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  The other problem, though, is sometimes-unrealistic medical standards which can't be waivered.
Kon-Peki 3y ago
In various areas, the military offers pre-bootcamp programs to get non-qualifying potential recruits into qualifying form. No obligation. But a real, major problem are the people that are fighting the attempts to make the military more attractive to women and "liberals". You can see course-grained recruiting statistics and it's obvious which areas of the country are over-represented and under-represented in recruiting. No matter what you do, you are not going to solve the recruiting shortfalls by making the military more attractive to people from Texas and the rest of the southeast - they are already enlisting at very high rates. Our military needs to get people from the west coast and the northeast to voluntarily enlist. Going on an "anti-woke" crusade against every single potential change is self-defeating (unless you don't actually care about our country as a whole...)
- psunavy03 3y ago
  The US military is also proudly and resolutely apolitical. Unfortunately, the culture wars in this country are getting to the point where people look at "apolitical" and see "supporting the other guy because they aren't doing exactly what I want." Look at the beating then-Chairman Milley got from both sides of the aisle at different times. Some of that he brought on himself, and he explicitly apologized to the officer corps and the military in general for the Lafayette Square debacle. But then he turned around and caught it in the face from the right, both for apologizing and for having the gall to (checks notes) work for the Biden administration per his job description after the inauguration.
psunavy03 3y ago
The problem is when this leads to things like diabetes or other conditions which are not as easily fixed as just "being fat or weak." As mentioning, the services are experimenting with a "pre-boot camp," and it's proving to be more difficult that just "eat right and move." Among other things, kids that spent a childhood on the couch or a desk chair in front of a console or computer, and then start exercising, are at extreme risk for stress fractures and things of that nature which set the whole process even further back. What's more, mental health standards haven't caught up with this generation's increased willingness to seek treatment for things like depression and anxiety, both of which are HUGE pain trains to get waivered, if not outright showstoppers. And to top it all off, google "MHS Genesis." It's a program that was rolled out that gives the doctors at MEPS (the medical inprocessing people) access to kids' full electronic health records. So now the old standby of "forgetting" to mention something is gone . . . they see it all. And they wonder why the amount of medical disqualifications spiked! Well, because since time immemorial, kids would lie on the form to be able to join, and now they can't. And now for every kid who had no business in uniform, and who cost inordinate pain and paperwork to kick out, you now also bounce a kid who would have had a successful 20-year career but for some doc reading something in a book about a .001% chance of a problem with X.

Being too fat or weak to enlist seems like a trivial problem to solve. The base controls your diet and exercise routines. Can't they just engineer their physique after they've signed up?

TheCoelacanth 3y ago

Can and do when they get desperate for recruits. They are willing to put more effort into training when they have a shortage of people joining.

psunavy03 3y ago
The other problem, though, is sometimes-unrealistic medical standards which can't be waivered.

Kon-Peki 3y ago

In various areas, the military offers pre-bootcamp programs to get non-qualifying potential recruits into qualifying form. No obligation. But a real, major problem are the people that are fighting the attempts to make the military more attractive to women and "liberals". You can see course-grained recruiting statistics and it's obvious which areas of the country are over-represented and under-represented in recruiting. No matter what you do, you are not going to solve the recruiting shortfalls by making the military more attractive to people from Texas and the rest of the southeast - they are already enlisting at very high rates. Our military needs to get people from the west coast and the northeast to voluntarily enlist. Going on an "anti-woke" crusade against every single potential change is self-defeating (unless you don't actually care about our country as a whole...)

psunavy03 3y ago
The US military is also proudly and resolutely apolitical. Unfortunately, the culture wars in this country are getting to the point where people look at "apolitical" and see "supporting the other guy because they aren't doing exactly what I want." Look at the beating then-Chairman Milley got from both sides of the aisle at different times. Some of that he brought on himself, and he explicitly apologized to the officer corps and the military in general for the Lafayette Square debacle. But then he turned around and caught it in the face from the right, both for apologizing and for having the gall to (checks notes) work for the Biden administration per his job description after the inauguration.

psunavy03 3y ago

The problem is when this leads to things like diabetes or other conditions which are not as easily fixed as just "being fat or weak." As mentioning, the services are experimenting with a "pre-boot camp," and it's proving to be more difficult that just "eat right and move." Among other things, kids that spent a childhood on the couch or a desk chair in front of a console or computer, and then start exercising, are at extreme risk for stress fractures and things of that nature which set the whole process even further back. What's more, mental health standards haven't caught up with this generation's increased willingness to seek treatment for things like depression and anxiety, both of which are HUGE pain trains to get waivered, if not outright showstoppers. And to top it all off, google "MHS Genesis." It's a program that was rolled out that gives the doctors at MEPS (the medical inprocessing people) access to kids' full electronic health records. So now the old standby of "forgetting" to mention something is gone . . . they see it all. And they wonder why the amount of medical disqualifications spiked! Well, because since time immemorial, kids would lie on the form to be able to join, and now they can't. And now for every kid who had no business in uniform, and who cost inordinate pain and paperwork to kick out, you now also bounce a kid who would have had a successful 20-year career but for some doc reading something in a book about a .001% chance of a problem with X.