Bridging the Gap: Military Recruiting and Injury Prevention
Across the US Military, branches have reported challenges in attracting new recruits to fill their needs, with the US Army missing their recruiting goal in 2022. While the contributing reasons are numerous, one of the main disqualifiers has been applicant fitness levels.
As obesity levels continue to rise in American youth, the pool of eligible applicants for military service has shrunk dramatically. At the same time, lowering fitness standards and sacrificing quality of recruits has been vehemently ruled out.
In an effort to broaden the pool of potential applicants, the US Army has begun the Future Soldier Preparatory Course. This course, along with providing educational support to pass the academic requirements, provides would-be recruits with a pre-basic training course to help improve their fitness level. The course accepts candidates with 2% to 6% more body fat than the military standard for their age and gender are eligible, who move on to basic training after coming within 2% of the standard for entry.
The Future Soldier Preparatory Course has seen early success with 87% of the candidates on the fitness track graduating and continuing to basic combat training within three weeks of starting the course. This initial success has led the Army to expand the course further.
An area that merits further research as more recruits come out of the Future Soldier Preparatory Course is the injury rates of those recruits who graduate from the fitness track. Injury rates during basic training are often high, especially for those who are entering with lower fitness levels to begin with.
The outstanding question is whether the intervention and guidance during the Future Soldier Preparatory Course lowers the risk of injury due to recruits entering basic training with a higher fitness level and competency.
With one of the contributing factors to injury risk being injury history, finding ways to reduce injury occurrence early on during basic training could have a lasting impact throughout a warfighter’s entire career.
The initial results of the Future Soldier Preparatory Course are overwhelmingly positive. As the other branches of the military also struggle meeting recruiting numbers, this structure of early intervention and guidance for currently ineligible candidates could be a model to follow.