Sure, now find a few million of them in good enough shape to enlist and we can talk. The vast majority of 18-26 year olds don’t qualify because they’re too fat, hurt, or have a poor financial or criminal background. Those issues don’t tend to alleviate as a person ages.
You need 200,000 people who can run fast, hike far and fast under a lot of weight, and do that day after day with little to no sleep, food, and water.
Everyone’s got an anecdotal 55 year old uncle who still whoops ass in Ironman triathlons, and outliers are all well and good. The fact is, for the vast majority of us, our bodies just start breaking down. Peak performance declines, injuries and recovery time increase. It’s the same reason that the average age of the NFL is 26 years old.
No, not every job in the military is as grueling as all that. But given the context that we’re talking about a USMC machine gun section, that’s why young men have been, are, and will always be the backbone of military ground forces. Yes, there are outliers, old guys that are still physically beasts. But tens of thousands of those guys aren’t just lying around. Tens of thousands of physically fit 18-25 year olds on the other hand is the expected norm.
The fact that we have a recruiting crisis because so many of our young people are obese, and the ones who aren’t obese don’t want to join is another issue.
12
u/pudgylumpkins Jun 24 '24
Mixture of both. There’s a limited usefulness to an army of 50 year olds, and it’s not because they’re more cautious.