Brooke Simpson-Fat, Unhealthy Americans Threaten Trump's Defense Surge

Fat, Unhealthy Americans Threaten Trump’s Defense Surge

            The Trump administration’s military buildup is slowing down before it has even started because there are very few Americans who are able to serve.  The plan was for 10,000s of new soldiers, sailors, pilots, and cyber specialists over the next five years, but almost ¾ of Americans from 17-24 cannot join the military because of obesity, health problems, criminal backgrounds, or lack of education.  According to retired Army Lieutenant General Tom Spoehr, there aren’t American citizens that can do anything anymore due to rising obesity, asthma, and crime, and the falling high school graduation rates.  Trump is also not helping himself, the low unemployment rate is working against recruiting, especially for the Army.  A huge part in the recruitment is making a new budget, which has been proposed and calls for a huge military, all mostly active-duty troops by 2023.  David Norquist, the top Pentagon budget official, has said that our military in 2016 is the smallest it has been since before WWII, and wants to have 487,500 in the Army, 335,400 in the Navy, and 329,100 in the Air Force, to fill in all of the jobs they need.  The Army is struggling the most with enlistment, even with increased bonuses and incentives.  The education system can be blamed for some of this; crime and drug problems prevent 1 in 10 young adults from being able to enlist.  Health problems are the biggest concern, and there has been a call for increased physical fitness and better eating habits in school from the Council for a Strong America, a bipartisan foundation that’s goal is to “promote solutions that ensure our next generation of Americans will be citizen-ready.”  A solution would be to lower its entry standards, by changing basic training to be more accommodating and people with minor offenses on a better path were accepted, but some argue that lowering standards risks national security.  It looks like the options are to give more signing bonuses and more incentives for people to volunteer.  The biggest thing that we can do is campaign for military recruiting on the local, state, and national level.

            The article was written by Bryan Bender for Politico on February 19, 2018.  The article is a little biased because it sounds like the author is saying that all of Trump’s goals are completely unrealistic, which is not completely true.  While they do seem hard to reach, hopefully more people are informed about the military recruitment shortages and will want to enlist.  The article is important because it tells people that there is a problem with recruiting and that Americans are not eligible to sign up, and that there needs to be steps taken to fix that.  This can be compared to the Civil War times when people could hire substitutes to take their place, so that the healthy eligible to fight men were replaced by people who weren’t as qualified.  While there isn’t a draft today and no one can hire substitutes, people aren’t joining when they can be, and many people aren’t well suited for service.