Steve Cohen is an author, attorney, former publisher, and former member of the board of the U.S. Naval Institute. In the City Journal column “The few, the fat, the fatigued,” he addresses the recruiting shortfalls of the military branches other then the Marines: “Last year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent—some 15,000 soldiers short of its target. This year’s numbers may be worse. Other branches of the armed forces also fell short, as the Navy missed its target by 19 percent, the Air Force by 10 percent, and the Coast Guard by 8 percent. Only the Marine Corps hit its threshold.”
In the column Cohen goes beyond the compulsions of political correctness and vaccination with which we are all familiar. He writes, for example:
To reach their combined recruiting goal, the armed forces need about 170,000 new enlisted recruits annually. The U.S. is home to about 4.1 million 18-year-olds. Attracting just 4 percent of that age cohort annually should not, in theory, be hard. It is hard, however, because much of the recruitable population is unqualified.
Here is a rough breakdown of that cohort’s situation. About 15 percent of U.S. high school students don’t graduate or obtain a GED within four years, and those who fail to obtain one of those certificates are ineligible to serve in the armed forces. An estimated 10 percent are ineligible because of criminal records, and an additional 15 percent won’t make the cut because of more-than-casual drug use.
A staggering 31 percent can’t enlist because they are obese. The obesity epidemic isn’t limited to the civilian world. Obesity among those in uniform doubled between 2012 and 2022—from just over 10 percent to more than 21 percent of active-duty service members. A disturbing 46 percent of service members are overweight, though not yet obese. Not only does being overweight adversely affect the force’s ability to do often physically demanding jobs—think infantry soldiers—it is also a major cause of service separation. In 2018, the Veterans Health Administration reported 12,429 administrative separations due to service members being “unqualified for active duty, other,”—defined as “not meet[ing] medical fitness standards, no disability.” In short, these were weight-related discharges. Those discharges reflect just 7 percent of the recruiting target, but the marketing truism holds that it is less costly to keep a customer than to attract a new one.
As I say, Cohen contrasts the recruiting issues of the Army and the Navy with the success of the Marines. Read the whole thing here with Cohen’s links.
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