watching the ARmy/Navy game, all the Academies field a football team, I was thinking how do they recruit them? If a 300 lb guy appeared at the recruiters office, they wouldn’t meet physical requirements for combat obviously–no tank/submarine/aircraft. capacity for them. Do they get a waiver, or special training? Athletes are in football shape but not military shape. What role can they do after graduating and starting service?
Any role they are commissioned for, once the appropriate waivers to physical standards are completed at their gaining unit.
Some of it will be realistically based on the officer’s size. When Chad Hennings graduated from the Air Force Academy, the assessment was that he was physically too large for most aircraft cockpits, except for the F-15, F-111, and A-10, and the A-10 became his ride for his four years of active duty.
Alongside Boot Camp they typically have a Fat Camp for the overweight recruits, who won’t be released to regular B.C. until they have shed the excess weight. Vincent D’Onofrio’s character in Full Metal Jacket should have shown definite signs of weight loss by the time boot camp ended (and he lost his mind).
David Robinson was 7”1’ midshipman in the 80s. Star of Navy’s basketball team, there wasn’t much in the way of sea duty he could manage built like that, so he pulled shore duty.
thanks, but we’re talking 300+ linemen here
In the Army I knew some really fat people who were all desk duty or similar roles. While they got in under weight and just slowly became overweight, I can see the linemen getting waivers and then just having those kind of jobs.
Combat arms - people in tanks/submarines/aircraft - makes up maybe 10% of the military. The remaining 90% are in support roles, and many of them don’t need to be in better shape than any other office worker.
When I was in OCS, there was a guy who supposedly failed the BMI standards. But he was truly all muscle - almost like a comic book character. He needed a special waiver in order to be commissioned. He wasn’t headed to flight school, so that helped.
Football players (and other athletes) at the academies are recruited from high school just like other Division 1 colleges. If they had to be under some arbitrary height & weight so they’d be able to hump up and down mountains or fit in a submarine the academies would very quickly drop out of D1.
The submarine service couldn’t have used an extra torpedo?
This. Also, look at how quickly retired linemen slim down post-career. Being that big while working out like they do takes WORK. Once they don’t need that extra mass, they can very quickly slim down (for slightly modified versions of slim) by just not eating the 6000+ calories a day while maintaining something in the same universe of activity level.
Add to that the young age, where cutting weight happens much faster, and sports nutrition leading to those linemen floating between 15-20% body fat and running sub 5 second 40s instead of the 30% body fat monsters of yesteryear.
Interesting otter corrupt auto-correct
Not really. It was standard terminology (at least in the Air Force, at least 20 years ago) for “the unit to which the service member is being assigned.”