ISTR that the remarkably small percentage of draft-aged men who met the military’s standards wasn’t strictly a physical fitness related thing.
It could be things like not having a high school degree, having a weed smoking misdemeanor on your record or other criminal activity, or any number of health-related things that they don’t want.
We’ve already seen that they relax a lot of that stuff as well as the age limits when they need people (as recently as 2008-2009, people as old as 42 were eligible to enlist).
Why would we think that if things were dire enough to need a draft, that they’d quibble about high school degrees, weed misdemeanors, petty theft, 5-10 extra BMI points, etc… ?
Well, I did say “pretty much” walking speed. 15 minutes a mile is my brisk walk speed. That’s amazing. I know you’re making the point that it’s easy, but that is surprisingly easy for the military. I think the slowest kid in high school beat that time for the mile for the presidential fitness test.
But as I mentioned above, us Navy guys probably do the least walking. We live and eat in our ride. On a busy day on a Carrier, 3 miles would be a lot of walking and there was almost no running or jogging. On a destroyer it would be weird to walk close to that much.
Without digging I am betting that’s the number he needs to achieve to be eligible to ship off to initial entry training. Standards to join and standards you have to meet once in are not always the same. That sounds like a fit enough we can handle the rest once you are ours standard.
Sure, I still expected the requirements to be a little higher, but that’s probably because I’ve seen the requirements for the other services, and the times were definitely more “competitive.” But I would expect anyone with any reasonable level of fitness to be able to hit a 10 minute mile, much less 15 minute mile. Anyhow, no matter. I’m just surprised. Like you said, in the scheme of things and the requirements of duty, it seems not to be an important measurement.