OR TAXPAYER DOLLARS
Perennially, American generals proclaim how focused they are on the readiness of the military. There is a big problem with their delusion: rising and rampant obesity in the military.
21% Obesity
$1.5B in obesity associated costs
In September 2024, the American Security Project published a recent study showing that 21% of the active-duty military is obese. Worse, 70% are classified as overweight. The first logical question could be is this a one-year anomaly. If so, the generals could be forgiven as they devise a plan to combat the issue. Let’s look at the trend in weight for the active-duty military in past years.1
Year % Obese % Overweight
2024 21% 70%
20232 21% 68%
20223 21% 67%
20214 19% 51%5
20206 15%
2012 10%
Shockingly, during the COVID lockdown, when the military literally had nothing else to do with its time, service members accelerated their weight gain. This begs the question about what the adult supervision (generals) was doing during that time. Obviously, they were not focusing on readiness or the health of their force.
With an obese Secretary of Defense (Lloyd Austin) and a recently overweight Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (GEN (Ret) Mark Milley) the DoD is not setting a good example of fitness from the top down.
In addition to the impacts on readiness and troop health, the same study stated that active-duty obesity costs the military and therefore taxpayers an estimated $1.5B per year in lost work and associated health costs. With the modern Pentagon’s already bloated (no pun intended) budgets, it is clear from that the lack of urgency from senior military leaders to fix the obesity epidemic in our military that $1.5B of hard-earned taxpayers’ money means nothing to them.
What has the military been doing for the past 20 years for fitness improvement? The Army has gone through 3 different PT uniforms and just recently changed its fitness testing from the APFT to the ACFT. It seems that the generals’ proclivity to just change policy and uniforms to fix a problem isn’t working…again. It is just a distraction from the issue.
The military, admittedly, has to deal with an increasingly overweight and unhealthy pool of young Americans to recruit for service. However, the generals cannot continue to blame the weight issues in the civilian sector for an overweight, unhealthy force. Just as in any other endeavor, leaders often don’t get to pick the personnel they are given. A true leader figures out how to get the current service members to lose weight and improve fitness. Exercise is cheap. They also have many punitive tools at their disposal to motivate the service to lose weight and get healthy.
Obviously, the generals have little interest in fixing the issue. So, what have they been focusing on in the meantime instead?
DEI
Disastrous COVID policy
Losing a war
Deflecting introspection into their failures as a class of generals
Ironically, the focus of today’s generals has weakened, not strengthened our military.
SECDEF Austin separated nearly 8,000 servicemembers for failing to get the COVID vaccine, despite only 96 military deaths during all of COVID. Many of these were hardened veterans who were NOT obese. He did so under the auspices of protecting the force’s health and preserving readiness. Interestingly, he put in less than an honest effort to combat obesity at the executive level.
In 2012, then GEN Austin called the soldier’s the Army’s greatest asset.
"The greatest asset of the United States Army aren't our tanks or our helicopters or our sophisticated weapon systems. They are our people. You are what make ours the best and most powerful military in the world," said Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III.7
Too bad Austin and the rest of the generals don’t believe their own banter. This is a simple leadership issue. Nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps our generals should look up what ‘leadership’ means in the dictionary.
People are supposed to be the most important asset of the military. The continuing dismal obesity statistics prove the modern US generals don’t care about their personnel and thus don’t care about readiness of our military. Perhaps it is time to get a new crop of leaders who actually do care about readiness and their service members.
- https://www.americansecurityproject.org/event-recap-experts-weigh-in-fighting-military-obesity-in-2024/
- https://americanmilitarynews.com/2023/10/68-of-us-troops-are-obese-or-overweight-study-finds/
- https://www.americansecurityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Ref-0286-Combating-Military-Obesity.pdf
- https://health.mil/news/articles/2022/03/01/obesity-prev-msmr
- https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/187/7-8/201/6407955
- https://health.mil/news/articles/2022/03/01/obesity-prev-msmr
- https://www.army.mil/article/89816/austin_says_soldiers_armys_greatest_asset
