Well... it sounds more like they are loosening the height AND weight requirements. Yeah, 26% is a bit higher for a man but it’s far from morbid obesity. I’m sure the chairforce wouldn’t care ;-)
By the way, I hope you don’t think I am personally attacking you on this issue, it is just something I feel very strongly about.
We are seeing these types of gradual loosening of standards in every service, and the end result is going to be a less capable military.
Everything will be fine in a peacetime military. but when there is actual battle damage to a vessel, people are going to see what is going to happen when sailors have to do extreme physical work in smoke-filled or high temperature compartments to save shipmates or the ship itself.
Men who have been in combat know that it places extraordinary physical demands that people who haven’t experienced it cannot imagine. Civilians think of ground combat as people with guns shooting at each other, and shipboard combat as ships making tight turns and launching missiles.
What ground combat really is involves wearing and carrying large amounts of heavy equipment while wearing heavy and confining clothing, sometimes in very high temperatures, while running from point to point, climbing, scrambling over things as adrenaline is being pumped into the body. It often goes on for hours or days.
Shipboard combat (which our Navy has been fortunate enough to avoid since WW II except for incidents like the USS Cole, USS Stark, and various fires aboard ships, is more deadly than most civilians can imagine. In WWII, it is a little known fact to most people that four times as many sailors were killed in the campaign for Guadalcanal as were killed on the ground, and to survive it required strength, toughness and endurance on the part of the sailors that rivaled anything taking place on a battlefield. Men working in chest deep water of smoke filled, darkened compartments trying to control flooding, steering casualties or engineering failures due to fire and battle damage. Trying to carry wounded men directly up ladders to escape flooded or fire-filled compartments.
These decisions they are making are not being based on things like that, they are being base on making sure that certain billets needed for advancement are open to women and men who would not otherwise be eligible (for physical reasons) in order to meet societal experimentation quotas and standards.