There have been several studies which suggest, no, that’s too polite, which record the diminishing physical strength of college-age males compared to students of the past. In fact, the Pentagon did a study in 2020 which revealed that 77% of Americans would not qualify for military service due to obesity, drug use, mental and physical health issues.
The Army reached only 66% of its recruitment goals last year, and while the Marines, Air Force, and Space Force reached 100%, the overall rate is at 85%. This is not the only challenge faced by the military in maintaining readiness. Not only are enlistees unqualified for service, but the number of young people enlisting is diminishing.
In recent years (some would say particularly in the last 4) the trend in military training has been toward a more “holistic” approach. Some lawmakers have suggested that recruitment is down because the military is not a “safe space” for those who serve. Irony of ironies, don’t you think? I can envision some future Trêve de Noël where our emotionally secure soldiers text back and forth with their enemies and try to help them get in touch with their feelings.
As far as diminishing physical fitness is concerned, it’s easy to see where technology, if not a root cause, is certainly an enabler of the decline. I blame electricity.
My grandfather was tougher than me. His world was built by hand. He used a sling blade to cut weeds. My father’s generation and my own used gasoline-powered trimmers. The young man of today, if he even cares to have any amount of ground where weeds might be a problem, uses a battery-powered electric trimmer.
Electric trimmers are great. They just work. You pick it up, slide in a battery and start cutting. You don’t have to mix any gas and oil. You don’t have to clean or rebuild the carburetor or change the spark plug or the air filter. There’s no gas to turn to jelly if you forget to empty the gas tank in the fall.
Yesterday Tracey wanted some help trimming her flower garden, so I grabbed the trusty Kobalt, popped in a battery and set to work. Alas, the electric trimmer was not physically fit enough to overcome the armies of woody stems. It was too weak. The lighter gauge line used in electric trimmers shattered to pieces and after half a minute of trimming, it was down to nubs.
My state of readiness in the war on the weeds was dismal. All those small conflicts, helping little tufts of grass and patches of Creeping Charlie get in touch with their inner compost, had given me a false sense of security in thinking my battery-powered forces were sufficient to defend the farm. My frontline troops were unprepared. I had to call up the reserves, so I hiked down to the shed to retrieve the behemoth Husqvarna gas trimmer with the blade.
Only a Husqvarna could hang in a shed for two years unattended and have any hope of cranking again, but I could tell after a few pulls that it wanted to crank. It just needed a little help. The gas line had hardened in the tank and curled into a shape that raised the intake above the level of the gas. I didn’t have a spare gas line, and I was burning daylight, so I held the intake down with a screwdriver and pumped the bulb, which allowed the trimmer to start and run a minute or two before repeating the process.
It took several repeats of this ritual, and many, many…many pulls on the cord to crank the machine again and again and again. My own physical state of readiness began to diminish rapidly, as anyone who has ever owned a two-cycle engine with a pull cord can understand.
Defeat seemed inevitable, but in a moment of inspiration I spied the solution to my problem hanging in the shop, the simple, elegant, low-tech “green” solution: The sling blade. Together we won the battle if not the war.
I don’t know what the military will do to maintain a state of readiness against an array of enemies who are not in touch with their feelings and are driven by whatever demons pursue them. Technology is not a permanent defense against anger, fear and desperation when that technology is accompanied by complacency and ambivalence. The answer to these problems is above my pay grade, but what I can do is keep my sling blade sharpened.
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Outside The Box 