The course helps applicants who initially fail to meet body weight or academic standards get up to par for enlistment – effectively widening the Army’s recruiting pool at a time when the service is striving to find qualified applicants.

In short, the Army was recruiting faster than it had the ability to get new enlistees into training.

Weird, this program seems to be too successful 🤔 I am sure they didn’t use any tricks to get the results they wanted.

A growing number of young Americans fail to meet the Army’s baseline enlistment standards largely due to rising obesity rates and declining academic performance. Defense experts have long warned that the country’s obesity epidemic poses a national security risk, shrinking the pool of eligible recruits.

Another major hurdle: declining scores on the military’s SAT-style entrance exam, which determines what jobs recruits qualify for. Public-school test scores have been slipping for years, a trend exacerbated by the pandemic. The education gap has disproportionately impacted young men, who are now less likely than women to qualify for service.

While the Army has had an ongoing recruiting challenge, recruitment of women has remained relatively flat, with about 10,000 new enlistees every year for the past decade on average.