Overweight or obese is main reason for dismissing U.S. soldiers ...

Under intense pressure to trim its budget, the Army is dismissing a rising number of soldiers who do not meet its fitness standards, drawing from a growing pool of troops grappling with obesity.

Obesity is now the leading cause of ineligibility for people who want to join the Army, according to military officials, who see expanding waistlines in the warrior corps as a national security concern.

Between 1998 and 2010, the number of active-duty military personnel deemed overweight or obese more than tripled. In 2010, 86,186 troops, or 5.3 percent of the force, received at least one clinical diagnosis as overweight or obese, according to the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center.

The trend has prompted the military to reexamine its training programs and is driving commanders to weed out soldiers deemed unfit to fight. ?A healthy and fit force is essential to national security,? said Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Pentagon spokeswoman. ?Our service members must be physically prepared to deploy on a moment?s notice anywhere on the globe to extremely austere and demanding conditions.?

During the first 10 months of this year, the Army kicked out 1,625 soldiers for being out of shape, about 15 times the number discharged for that reason in 2007, the peak of wartime deployment cycles?

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said he was floored by what he found in 2009 when he was assigned to overhaul the Army?s training system. Seventy-five percent of civilians who wanted to join the force were ineligible, he said. Obesity was the leading cause.

?Of the 25 percent that could join, what we found was 65 percent could not pass the [physical training] test on the first day,? he said in a recent speech. ?Young people joining our service could not run, jump, tumble or roll ? the kind of things you would expect soldiers to do if you?re in combat.?

RTFA for details and the many directions the report describes as health and fitness failures among those trying to enlist, today. There?s a lot there to ponder. Not just obesity from inactivity and overeating keeping out recruits; but, soldiers who thought they had a career being dismissed from service, from their job.

Source: http://eideard.com/2012/12/11/overweight-or-obese-is-main-reason-for-dismissing-u-s-soldiers/

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