I’ve seen a small but noticeable number of men on post that are quite overweight - large beer guts, extra chins, panting from climbing the stairs, etc. Think “Pvt Pyle” x2. They’re definitely not private contractors, due to the ACUs, buzzcuts, and rank insignias.
How is that possibly allowed? While I can buy the odd recruit who somehow scraped by in basic due to their father being a general, a fair number of these men are low level officers. What gives?
What is their function?
If you work at it, you can pass physical standards tests still carrying a lot of weight…but it takes a lot out of you. A friend from high school had a heart attack and died while running on a treadmill trying to make the physical standards requirement for his job…not military in his case, but WY highway patrol. He was never skinny, but always strong. After 35-40 he started putting on weight.
You see this in the Navy, especially with the senior enlisted folks (at least in my day). I remember a master chief who had a huge beer gut (though the rest of him was pretty firm…arms like a gorilla). I’ve seen Navy officers who were pudgy too.
How? Well, they have mainly sedentary jobs (none of these guys were deck ape types in first division), and while there are health standards for weight and such, they don’t always apply to NCO’s or officers in consistent manners. Most of the pudgy ones were career, so that might make a difference too (also, a lot of them were older).
Haven’t seen many fat or pudgy Marines, but I’m sure there are some with desk jobs. Same with the Army.
How do they define “fat” in the US military? Are they strictly looking at BMI or body fat percentage? There are chubby folks who are surprisingly agile and who can run fast.
I think it’s just a matter of leaders refusing to enforce the standards. For a few years there, when the Army was hurting for troops, there was a definite aversion to putting Soldiers out. Even TRADOC got a bad reputation for graduating Soldiers (or Officers!) who couldn’t pass a PT test or didn’t meet weight standards.
I’m not sure where the root of the problem lies. Officially, the Army admits that the deployments and high OPTEMP caused them to loosen the standards. Unofficially, I think kicking out Soldiers makes a commander look bad.
Nowadays every week the Army Times has articles about how the Army wants to “return to the standard” or “get rid of Soldiers who don’t meet the standard.” They’re also writing articles about how the CSMofA wants to draft new and redundant policies… it’s not that the old standards were bad, it’s just that we weren’t enforcing them!
Maybe when peace breaks out and the Army gets serious about cutting personnel, we’ll see some of the overweight Soldiers get sent home.
“WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION, PRIVATE PYLE?!?!” - R. Lee Ermy Full Metal Jacket
I’m guessing mostly management and overseers, but there are a few obvious enlisted who are overweight. Then again, it is “Fort Puke”…
Career Air Force here. I’ve seen similar in my experience, and worse… almost my entire career was rear eschelon (technical operations at headquarters organizations). As sedentary as sedentary gets. The only advantages over contractors from a performance perspective were (A) military technicians are cheap, and (B) you can’t throw a contractor in jail for disregarding orders.
Anyway, the Air Force has stringent standards (on paper) for weight versus height and for aerobic fitness. However, standards don’t enforce themselves; that’s on supervisors and the commander and his/her staff to see to. And in a headquarters organization, at least, there’s a lot of winking and pencil-whipping, especially if a troop is pulling the load from a “mission accomplishment” perspective. (Remember, a rear-echelon headquarters does all its “warfighting” from desks, so real-world fitness isn’t as practically required as if you were humping a 70-pound pack over mountains and dodging incoming fire.)
I guess it boils down to "technical REMF*s working stateside can sometimes get some slack on HOO-AH stuff if they do their technical REMF stuff well enough (“saves the day”, in the extreme case) and don’t piss of their chain of command otherwise.
In my experience.
*Rear Echelon MotherFuckers: what they guys and gals in the field (rightly) called us desk-riding Powerpoint Rangers back in our Aeron chairs and airconditioned shirtsleeve comfort.
In the Air Force, it was a table: maximum allowable weight for a given height (to the quarter inch). Essentially, a mediocre proxy for BMI. But pretty easy for the fitness schlub in the orderly room to work.
What you’re talking about is currently the single most contentious subject in the Air Force. It used to be that the PT monitors would give you the gentleman’s pass if you got even remotely close. Additionally, if you were “connected” you got hooked up. Last, if you had skills that were needed, you never got downchecked for conditioning.
That is all changing now.
If you fail the first PT test, you get mandatory formation for PT. If you fail the second, you get to speak to the commander. The third time you get administratively punished, and the fourth time you potentially get processed for separation after seeing a board.
Even worse, it is possible to meet the minimum standards in all categories and fail. Any waist measurement over 40, no exceptions, is an automatic fail.
We have loads of people looking like what you’re talking about. In two years we will have many fewer, as they will either quit or be shown the door.
All of this is subject to change, however. The one constantly changing thing about the Air Force is the PT test, so we’ll see how this shakes out, but for now it’s an absolute killer.
if someone was for example, an excellent logistics manager who was dedicated and did a difficult job well would they be forced out for being overweight? What about an intelligence officier fluent in two middle eastern languages?
I suspect that despite what the armies official standards are, if you have a speciality thats in demand and want to stick around in the forces, they’ll find a way to let you.
This is precisely what is happening.
Would that hold true though for Reserves and Guard? Admittedly Army and Airforce can be worlds apart but I was through Bragg and Hood this past year and saw more out of shape soldiers than I have since the major RIF cuts in the 80s. Once I got close enough to check flashes. few seemed to be regular duty though. Just part-timers in for training or passing through to/from the Middle East.
In the army there are height and weight standards. If you are heavier than allowed you have to take a tape test. They measure your neck and waist and calculate the body fat percentage. I have needed to be taped for 20 years. It’s possible to pass your PT test, be overweight by the chart and be muscular enough to pass the tape test. Big enough neck and you can have a bit of a gut. My waist is my cite.
My brother was in the army when random urine checks began. His job was fairly important, it was peacetime, and marijuana was readily available.
Each time he had to give a urine sample he was given ample notice by his superior.
Yes, it holds true for the Guard and Reserves.
Incidentally, the commonly cited rate of obesity in the US is 1 in 3. The failure rate in my unit? 1 in 3. It’s not a coincidence. The leadership slacked off because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they are reaping what they have sown. With the reduction in force, you have to toe the line or you’re out.
Ten plus years removed from needing to know this but there were provisions in the regs to keep overweight people. Doctors who had their medical school paid for my the military have been known to show up overweight or saying they are gay (not an issue now) to try to get out of their obligation. There also used to be an exception for people who had served 18 years. At that point being overweight resulted in a mandatory retirement date at 20 not an immediate discharge.
Still, in general I think the overweight soldier is probably rare and therefore makes a bigger impression than the thousands of soldiers meeting the standard.
I came into the active Army about 5 years after drug tests started (didn’t look up the exact date). I would be very surprised if he wasn’t blowing smoke up your ass, so to speak. For one, his superior wouldn’t know about it far enough in advance for it to matter to a frequent marijuana user.
That’s true in the Army Guard too. I know we are slower to kick out than the active duty but there is a bar to reenlist and a flag against favorable actions. So no schools. No promotions. And no way to re-up. If they really show no improvement and are obviously not trying we separate them.
Well, he was not a frequent user. I’d rather not give further details, since they involve “criminal” activity. Basically, at that time, in that country, the implementation of random urinalysis was flawed.
Spike Milligan was passed as “unfit to be shot by either side” in WW2…