Air Force Loosening Body Fat Requirements Amid Recruiting Struggles

Senior Airman Jessica Mead, 407th Expeditionary Force Support Squadron personal trainer, takes a body fat measurement using calipers in a file image. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Francesca Popp via The Epoch Times

The U.S. Air Force is lowering body fat standards for new recruits as the military branch struggles to find enough people to join its ranks.

Males will be limited to a maximum of 26 percent body fat, while females face a maximum of 36 percent, Leslie Brown, a spokesperson for the Air Force Recruiting Service, told The Epoch Times via email. The previous requirements were 20 percent and 28 percent.

Military branches have been struggling to recruit during the COVID-19 pandemic, with officials blaming factors such as a hot job market and a shrinking pool of qualified youth. The Air Force narrowly met its active-duty recruiting goal for fiscal year 2022, but had “a minimal bank” of recruits lined up for fiscal year 2023, Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, an Air Force recruiting official, told Congress in October 2022. The Air Force also failed to meet its recruiting goals for reserve components.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in March that the service is projecting a 10 percent shortfall for active-duty recruits this fiscal year, with an even bigger gap between goals and recruits across the Air National Guard and the reserve.

“We are swimming upstream against reduced propensity to serve nationally across the board and a limited percentage of qualified candidates,” Kendall said, Military.com reported.

A rise in obesity among Americans means just 40 percent of young people are prepared to serve in the military, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to a military survey, 77 percent of America’s youth can’t meet service requirements.

The Air Force is implementing the loosened standards as it looks “to open the aperture on qualifying a broader pool of young Americans for service,” Brown wrote. “This policy is just one of several initiatives being worked by a cross functional team to be able to reach a bigger pool of candidates without lowering our standards of recruiting the best Americans to serve our nation.”

The change is estimated to result in 50 to 100 more applicants entering the service per month.

Recruits must still meet fitness standards outlined by the Department of Defense and the Air Force, including a waist-to-height ratio requirement that the Air Force announced in January and implemented starting in April. The Air Force portrayed the change as aligning with Pentagon standards, which are known as the Body Composition Program (pdf).

“I can’t stress enough, we are not lowering our standards, but rather we are aligning our standards with the overall DOD policy,” the spokesperson said.

The Pentagon guidance says that services “may implement policies that exempt personnel from negative consequences of exceeding body fat (BF) standards if high scores on physical fitness tests are attained” and that members must engage in physical activity to maintain a healthy weight.

Previous changes aimed at boosting recruiting include allowing some tattoos and not rejecting all applicants who test positive for THC, a sign of marijuana usage.

“It’s important that we continuously look at policies that may be a barrier to service for many young Americans,” Brown wrote. “We are recruiting today’s generation, not my generation who joined more than 30 years ago, where a tattoo may have been taboo but is now a societal norm. Or where youth now live a more sedentary lifestyle than before—we can take those new recruits and can promote physical fitness and incorporate overall healthier living decisions into their everyday routines as Airmen.”