We have been chronicling the woke policies permeating US defense organizations, making them so unappealing to potential service personnel that recruiting numbers have plummeted.
For example, my colleague James Nault described how the Pentagon burdened war-fighting commanders with transgender policies.
Now the US Air Force has expanded its body fat range limits as it struggles to find new members to join its ranks amid a surge of obesity among America’s young people.
Male recruits are now permitted to have up to 26% body fat, up from the previous requirement of 20%, while females can have 36%, up from the previous max of 28%, according to Air Force Recruiting Service spokeswoman Leslie Brown.”The Air Force is looking to open the aperture on qualifying a broader pool of young Americans for service in the Air Force. These changes bring the Air Force in line with DOD policy,” Brown told Fox News Digital in a statement. “While recruits will be allowed to join with greater body fat percentages, they will still be expected to meet the same fitness standards as everyone else to stay in the service. That means meeting the waist-to-height ratio requirement the Air Force announced in January and implemented this month.”The changes come as Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in March the military service branch is expected to miss its active-duty recruiting goal by 10% this year, after dipping into a pool of delayed-entry applicants to meet last year’s goal, Military.com reported.
The Air Force also plans to expand a social media campaign targeting women.
But while leaders see no “silver bullet” to solve those issues, the Air Force Recruiting Service is pressing ahead with a push to attract more women to serve. Acting Undersecretary of the Air Force Kristyn E. Jones described in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week the Women in Sports Campaign, which she said “aligns DAF recruitment with female athletes through direct marketing as well as enduring partnerships that encourage female participation in sports.”The target of the campaign, she said: “Approximately 7.6 million 18- to 24-year-old women [who] watch women’s sports on YouTube.” Taken as a group, “these viewers constitute a key demographic for DAF recruitment efforts,” Jones added.The Air Force Recruiting Service plans to expand outreach to young women via social media, officials told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
Interestingly, the US Space Force is currently not having any issues with recruiting.
Unlike other U.S. military branches, it is not struggling to hit its recruitment goals; in FY 2022, it hit its targets for both officers and enlisted personnel. (By contrast, the U.S. Army fell about 25% short of its goal for fiscal 2022, according to Army figures, a gap of roughly 15,000 enlistments.)In a hearing in September before the Senate Armed Services Committee, ahead of his being confirmed as Chief of Space Operations, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman put forth the idea that, because Space Force is small, it can be both picky and flexible in choosing its personnel.Picky in that it should seek enlistees with highly specialized technical skills. But flexible in that it can take a more holistic view of candidates who might not perfectly align with the requirements to enter other military branches.
Meanwhile, the US Marines are taking a more tech-based approach. It ordered 250 biometric machines to get better readings on body mass index.
Under the new policy, which went into effect Jan. 1, Marines who exceed weight standards and fail a body fat assessment taken with a measuring tape will be evaluated with a body scan before being sent to the body composition program or being discharged from the service, according to an August announcement about policy change.The Marine Corps concluded after a yearlong study done in collaboration with the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine that the scan, which is conducted on a bioelectrical impedance analysis machine, can detect the percentage of body fat that a person has more accurately than the tape test.
While all the new limits, social media campaigns, and biometric equipment might lead to a few more recruits, I suspect that recruiting numbers will continue to decline under the current administration and its woke policy priorities.
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