The Trump administration's ambitious new military buildup is at risk of being hobbled before it even starts — by a dwindling pool of young Americans who are fit to serve.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans age 17 to 24 are ineligible for the military due to obesity, other health problems, criminal backgrounds or lack of education, according to government data. That's a harsh reality check for the Pentagon’s plan to recruit tens of thousands of new soldiers, sailors, pilots and cyber specialists over the next five years.


"We all have this image in our mind of this hearty American citizen, scrappy, that can do anything," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr, co-author of a new Heritage Foundation paper on the military recruiting challenge titled The Looming National Security Crisis. "That image we keep in our heads is no longer accurate."

"Obesity and the percentage of people overweight in the country has just skyrocketed in the last 10 to 15 years," he added in an interview. "Asthma is going up. High school graduation rates are still just barely acceptable and in some big cities they are miserable. Criminality is also not going away. We have to face the reality that these things in some cases are getting worse, not better."

That’s on top of a more immediate obstacle that military leaders warned about last week: A relatively low unemployment rate is already making it harder to fill the ranks, particularly for the Army, which has historically benefited when full-time jobs are harder to find in the civilian economy.

"It’s difficult to recruit," Ryan McCarthy, the undersecretary of the Army, told reporters. “There’s 4 percent unemployment."

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But increased recruitment is a key part of the administration’s plan to spend billions more dollars to resharpen the United States’ battlefield edge against Russia, China and other aspiring military powers.

For example, the department's new defense strategy, which was published last month and provided the framework for its new budget proposal, declared that "the U.S. must reverse recent decisions to reduce the size of the joint force and grow the force while modernizing and ensuring readiness."

The new budget calls for increasing the size of the military by 25,900 people through October 2019 and by a total of 56,600 by 2023 — all mostly active-duty troops.

"In 2016, our military was the smallest it had been since before World War II," David Norquist, the top Pentagon budget official, told reporters last week in making the case for a bigger military.

For starters, he said the Army plans to add 4,000 troops to reach a total of 487,500; the Navy will add 7,500 sailors for a total of 335,400; and the Air Force is seeking an additional 4,000 volunteers to reach 329,100 active-duty personnel.

"This allows us to fill in units and provide key skills related to recruiting pilots, maintainers and cybersecurity experts," Norquist explained.

But the military is struggling to reach its current recruiting goals.

"The U.S. military is already having a hard time attracting enough qualified volunteers," according to the Heritage paper. "Of the four services, the Army has the greatest annual need. The Army anticipates problems with meeting its 2018 goal to enlist 80,000 qualified volunteers, even with increased bonuses and incentives."

The booming civilian jobs market — which ebbs and flows — is seen as the least of the military's recruiting challenges over the longer term.

The bleak demographic trends among the military-age population could make filling the ranks with qualified recruits exceedingly difficult for years to come. The government estimates that 24 million out of the 34 million people in the 17-through-24 age group are not qualified to serve.

One major area of concern is education. All branches of the military require a high school diploma or General Equivalency Diploma. But while federal statistics show that about 80 percent of students achieve a degree, concerns are growing that those numbers are vastly incomplete.

"Young Americans’ inability to meet education qualifications highlights underlying issues in America’s educational foundations, with national consequences," the Heritage paper concluded.

Crime and drugs are also a major impediment. Studies have shown that criminal histories prevent one of every 10 young adults from being able to join the military.

But health problems are the clearest impediment to military service — especially the alarming number of youngsters who are overweight.

"We need to increase physical fitness and better eating habits in schools," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Norm Seip, chairman of the Council for a Strong America, "and not get on that obesity scale that is going in the wrong direction."

The council is a bipartisan foundation made up of former law enforcement leaders, retired military officers, business executives, pastors and prominent coaches and athletes "who promote solutions that ensure our next generation of Americans will be citizen-ready."

One possible solution to ease the recruiting challenge would be for the military to lower its standards for entry.

"There have been efforts to look at whether you need to change basic training to accommodate the fact you have soldiers coming in that are going to take more time to develop into what you want them to be," said David Johnson, a retired Army colonel who is now a researcher at the government-funded Rand Corp. "If the physical quality is not what you want you are going to have to build that in."

He also suggested that some people with criminal backgrounds could be allowed to serve if their offenses were minor and if a determination is made that they got onto a better path.

"What is a bad apple?" he asked. "Is it habitual behavior? Does what they did when they were 14 really matter when they are 19 or 20?"

But others say lowering standards poses its own risks to national security.

"The Army learned a painful lesson in 2009," Spoehr said. "We lowered the standards, we signed more waivers for people who had acts of criminality than we usually did. We paid the price. These people we let in eventually caused misconduct, were separated for dishonorable reasons more than normal soldiers. The last place that we would go is to mess with the standards."

Seip agreed that cutting corners on quality to fill the ranks is short-sighted.

"The folks who run the Army Recruiting Command would say we are just getting through some of those issues that hurt our ability to do our business," he said in an interview, referring to the need to lower standards during the height of the Iraq War. "It doesn't solve the problem of how we grow the pool of eligibles."

The Pentagon will almost certainly also have to dole out more money than anticipated for signing bonuses and other financial incentives to persuade enough eligible young people to volunteer, a number of experts said.

But ultimately it will come down to leadership to address what many see as a national crisis, they said.

"The problem needs a team effort — at the federal level, the local level, parents, teachers, kids," said Seip, whose nonprofit includes a campaign called Mission: Readiness that is focused solely on the military recruiting challenge.

"Sometimes we are finding more success at the state and local level," he said, expressing frustration with "polarization in Congress."

"We can't sweep it under the rug," Seip added. "If you look at the new national security strategy, we are in a competition with other powers."