Critics have accused the Defense Department of having fat in their budget, but at the moment, they’re more concerned about the adipose in their recruits. The Army’s top recruiter wants to launch a new fat farm to deal with the rising number of rejects barred from enlistment because of their weight:

The Army has been dismissing so many overweight applicants that its top recruiter, trying to keep troop numbers up in wartime, is considering starting a fat farm to transform chubby trainees into svelte soldiers.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, head of the Army Recruiting Command, said he wants to see a formal diet and fitness regimen running alongside a new school at Fort Jackson that helps aspiring troops earn their GEDs.

Bostick told The Associated Press that obesity looms as “a bigger challenge for us in the years ahead” than any other problem that keeps young people from entering the military, including lack of a GED or high school diploma, misconduct or criminal behavior and other health issues such as eye or ear problems.

This really isn’t a laughing matter. The British (and the US, to a lesser extent) learned a hard lesson between the two world wars about the health of its youth and the ability to effectively defend one’s nation. The Germans spent the two decades between the wars doing everything possible to turn out healthy young men who could bring stamina to warfare. Now, the national obesity problem has come home to roost in the all-volunteer military, and a lack of physical regimen in school has complicated our ability to fill our ranks.

Physical conditioning isn’t the only problem, either. The decline in high-school graduation rates also makes recruitment more difficult, as the story notes. This belies the idea, offered by John Kerry and others over the last couple of years, that the unintelligent and ignorant wind up in uniform. In fact, the military has consistently held to its standard of high-school diplomas or GEDs as a prerequisite to service, but now they have to provide more assistance to get young men and women over that mental hurdle than ever before.

Regardless of what philosophy one holds for education, clearly we are failing a larger number of younger Americans both mentally and physically in their education — and we will clearly pay a price for that neglect. On the other hand, we used to believe that boot camp itself effectively addressed this, especially during the years of the national draft. Have we dumbed down boot camp, or does it just not have enough time to tone up rejected recruits?

In the clip below from the 1981 classic Army comedy Stripes, the late great John Candy talks about his desire to become a “lean, mean fighting machine”: