Many of these recruits simply needed a little bit of structure and a little bit of discipline to get squared away.

For any American concerned about the national defense, the recruiting crisis of the post-Covid era should have been ringing alarm bells. Young Americans, surveys showed, were less and less likely to want to pursue an enlistment in the military (let alone a career, which is a different commitment entirely). Perhaps worse, fewer and fewer young Americans even qualified for military service due to physical, medical, and educational limitations or a criminal record.

That’s why I was so intrigued by the write-up that USA Today reporters Cybele Mayes-Osterman and Tom Vanden Brook published on the Army’s “Future Soldiers Preparatory Course” at Fort Jackson, S.C. — which is known out there in the wild as “Army Fat Camp.”

“The Future Soldier Preparatory Course aims to bring young people with academic and fitness challenges up to military standards,” Mayes-Osterman and Vanden Brook write. “In 2022, as years of shortfall in recruiting numbers compounded into a crisis, the Army test-launched the Future Soldier prep course, a boot-camp-style program to quickly pull up recruits who don’t meet academic or physical standards. That year, the Army’s recruiting class had been 25% shy of its goal of 60,000 new soldiers.”

This prep course is designed to get recruits to the starting line pre-boot camp; it’s for those who don’t meet the minimum standards to even ship out. (The standards to ship are not particularly high). And it’s working.

“More than 46,000 soldiers have joined the Army through the Future Soldier prep course,” report Mayes-Osterman and Vanden Brook. “It has produced between 20% and 24% of the Army’s newly minted soldiers since the course’s launch in 2023.”

The trainees work out multiple times a day. Their meals are supervised. Those requiring academic remediation attend daily high-school-level classes on math or reading comprehension in a no-nonsense environment.

The course accepts recruits whose body fat is up to 8% higher or whose scores on the Army’s aptitude test are as much as seven points lower than the requirement to become a soldier. In the span of 90 days, they work intensively to bring down their body fat or bring up their academic scores, testing every week until they succeed. If they fail, they can try again after six months.

Getting recruits up to standard isn’t cheap. The Army will spend about $120 million this year and about $99 million in 2026 in this effort to fill its ranks.

Again, the prep course is working. The data show that the young Americans who make it through the course can become good soldiers once they matriculate through the rest of the training pipeline. It would of course be better if our schools were educating young Americans more consistently in order to meet the Army’s minimum standards. It would of course be better if the culture was producing a generation of Americans who were already in shape and ready to enlist.

But we all know that many of our kids are failing — and being failed — before life even gets started. That’s why the Army’s decision to prioritize this prep course is so commendable. For so many young people, the military can be a path out of poverty and out of aimlessness. Many of these recruits simply needed a little bit of structure and a little bit of discipline to get squared away. In doing so, they’ll change and improve their own lives and prospects.

While they’re at it, they’ll help stand watch during very dangerous times for our country. Now on to boot camp. The drill sergeants are waiting.