Major General Allen Batschelet, CDRUSAREC, says that only thirty percent of American youth ages 17-24 are fit enough to join the US military. The trend lines, he goes on to say, are for that to decline to only two in ten.
That's OK. The Dempsey Rule shows us the way forward. 'If [an obese person] cannot meet a standard, senior commanders better have a good reason why it should not be lowered.'
Heh :)
ReplyDeleteSince we're all aware of the limitations of BMI as a method for measuring fitness (at least I hope we are)...
ReplyDelete...what if one of these horrid obese persons can meet those fitness standards which are actually based on performance? (Examples: run X distance in Y time, walk distance Z carrying N pounds of equipment, carry a sack weighing M pounds distance P after hoisting it over a fence of height Q... you get the idea. Functional fitness, not how pretty you are.)
If they're turning down qualified recruits based on weight or BMI instead of actual physical fitness for the tasks they'll need to do, there's a problem all right, and that problem is not with the people applying.
Well, fair enough. I was turned down on BMI in 2002 -- I was trying to get into USMC OCS that year, having at that time a Master's Degree, and running five miles over the north Georgia mountains as my near-daily exercise. I could do 16 pull-ups, max the situps, and did a 21 minute three-mile run. Still, I wasn't able to get down to 170 pounds except by living on Slim Fast. I was 173 when I went to MEPS, sent home to lose some more weight, and by the time I got down to 167 they had filled up all the classes (this being about a year after 9/11, the USMC was a very popular option).
ReplyDeleteI found other ways to contribute to the war, and surely the Corps did not suffer at that time from the loss of my talents. But the BMI standard is highly questionable.