Too Fat (and Too Stupid) for War?

The U.S. Army has found a new and fatal enemy. We are not talking about the Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) from Afghanistan and Iraq. Or the North Korean missiles, or the Iranian program.

No, this time we are talking about the fatness of the soldiers. As stated in the latest medical surveillance report from the U.S. Department of Defense, almost five percent of American soldiers suffer from obesity problems. This number might be higher, since only the soldiers diagnosed as obese by medical authorities are shown. In many cases, nevertheless, doctors don’t show this disorder in the reports.

The tendency also is overwhelmingly increasing. In 2003, roughly between one and two percent of the American military suffered from obesity. In its study, the Pentagon explains that this problem actually is the consequence of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, and their anxiety and psychological after-effects.

And, moreover, the obesity epidemic affecting the USA — and a great part of the world with it — is combined with legal and educational problems, and can represent serious consequences for the country’s defense. No more and no less than 75 percent of American youths between 17 and 24-years-old don’t fulfill the physical and intellectual requirements for Army enrollment, as said in official statistics. As a matter of fact, John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that “we’ve never had this problem of young people being obese like we have today.”

According to this information, three-quarters of American youths are ineligible to join the military because they are overweight, can’t pass entrance exams, have dropped out of high school or had run-ins with the law. This problem is serious enough to form an informal commission to analyze it, composed of a former NATO commander-in-chief and war architect back in Kosovo in 1999, Gen. Wesley Clark, and Shalikashvili himself, among others.

From a historical point of view, this situation has few precedents. Usually, empires fall down because of an excessive expansion of their borders (as occurred by the U.K., or the U.S. in the case that it keeps embracing wars in the Middle East, as it did in Iraq), massive debt (the case of Spain, that could happen to the United States, too) or a prolonged political crisis (Rome or the USSR). But never before has an empire sunk due to its soldiers’ fatness. With this regard, “American exceptionalism” can make history.