Roger That: Nation’s obesity epidemic causing military recruitment problems

At least one in three young adults is too fat to enlist in the U.S. military.

That’s the startling conclusion at the center of a new report from a group of retired military leaders, who believe the nation’s obesity epidemic is causing significant recruiting problems for the military, according to the Associated Press.

Titled “Retreat Is Not An Option For Kansas,” the report released Wednesday by a group calling itself “Mission: Readiness” is promoting healthy school lunches to combat the problem. The report provides a state-by-state comparison showing, which states have the highest percentages of young people ineligible to enlist in the military because of obesity, criminal histories and drug use.

Illinois ranked No. 14 on the list, but even so, 71 percent of its young people were considered ineligible to enlist because of obesity, criminal history and drug use. Hawaii ranked No. 1, where “only” 62 percent of young people are ineligible. Mississippi ranked No. 50, where 78 percent were deemed ineligible.

Obesity is among the leading causes of military ineligibility among people ages 17 to 24. Others are a lack of adequate education, a criminal history or drug use. The military has also seen a 61 percent rise in obesity since 2002 among active duty forces, driving up health care and other costs.

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MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper drone pilots will be eligible for retention bonuses worth up to $135,000 beginning in fiscal year 2016 under a new policy announced by the Air Force, according to the Air Force Times.

Also, beginning this August, the Air Force plans to steer 80 undergraduate pilot training graduates directly into drone squadrons, instead of traditional manned aircraft.

“In a complex global environment, RPA (remotely piloted aircraft) pilots will always be in demand,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in a release Wednesday. “Remarkable airmen have ensured the success of the MQ-1/9 programs. We now face a situation where if we don’t direct additional resources appropriately, it creates unacceptable risk.”

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The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems, according to DefenseOne.

“Even though today’s unmanned systems are ‘dumb’ in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we’ve seen before,” Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research, told DefenseOne.

The United States military prohibits lethal fully autonomous robots. And semi-autonomous robots can’t “select and engage individual targets or specific target groups that have not been previously selected by an authorized human operator,” even in the event that contact with the operator is cut off, according to a 2012 Department of Defense policy directive.

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Seventy years ago today the world changed forever.

On July 16, 1945, scientists assigned to the top-secret Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear weapon outside Alamogordo, N.M. The atomic bombed hastened the end of World War II and completely changed the nature of war, global security and the reasoning America’s war planners use to determine the threats to our nation.

Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project from its headquarters in Los Alamos, N.M., gave the first bomb detonation the code name “Trinity” after a poem by John Donne. The test used an implosion-design plutonium device, informally nicknamed “The Gadget.” It was same design as the Fat Man bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945.

At about 5:30 a.m. Trinity exploded with an energy equivalent to around 20 kilotons of TNT. The explosion left a crater in the desert 5 feet deep and 30 feet wide. Witnesses recalled that the surrounding mountains were illuminated “brighter than daytime” for up to two seconds, while heat was reported as “being as hot as an oven” at the base camp. The roar of the shock wave took 40 seconds to reach the observers. It was felt more than 100 miles away. The resulting mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles in height.

At the moment of detonation, Oppenheimer recalled a line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

This story was originally published July 16, 2015 at 11:47 AM with the headline "Roger That: Nation’s obesity epidemic causing military recruitment problems."