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Comment by parent5446 | Hacker News Reader

The article says that the primary problem is the number of eligible volunteers. Changing what wars are fought isn't going to affect individuals ability to pass military fitness and character tests. If the problem was that there are so many eligible people, but nobody wants to volunteer, then you might be on to something.

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Biggest single problem is obesity. There are just too many fat teen-agers. Second is a criminal record or drug abuse. Third is inadequate education; the US military requires high school graduation now. As of 2009 [1]:

- 27% - too fat

- 31% - other health problem

The Army used to run fat recruits through a "fat farm" phase of 6 weeks of exercise. But they no longer do that. There's talk of bringing it back.

The Marines want you in shape before you enlist. Marine recruiters help promising recruits get in shape before they enlist.

[1] http://cdn.missionreadiness.org/MR-Ready-Willing-Unable.pdf

> The Army used to run fat recruits through a "fat farm" phase of 6 weeks of exercise. But they no longer do that.

Why not?

They didn't have to bother during the recession.

>If the problem was that there are so many eligible people, but nobody wants to volunteer, then you might be on to something.

They way I read it this is the problem:

> Once you take into account whether or not the remaining 9.7 million are enrolled in college — and that the Army doesn’t want the bare minimum for its future soldiers — the recruiting pool shrinks to just 1.7 million.

The biggest contributor is 7 million college students not wanting to enroll even though they can get the military to pay for college. I bet bullshit wars on the other side of the world affects this number.

Alternatively, maybe they just need fat camp as a pre-boot camp step.

29% is tens of millions of people. I just pointed out why people might be reluctant to volunteer.

Have you read the article? It says the effective recruiting pool is 1.7 million, and the goal is 180,000 recruits. That means you'd need to convince every 1 in 10 eligible person to enlist. Even if the military was a glory-filled job, I doubt you'd get those numbers.

Numbers don’t line up. There are 30 million people in that age group in the US. 30% of that is nearly 10M. There may be fewer volunteers than that, of course, but that problem is fairly straightforward to fix: pay more, and get the hell out of the Middle East.

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