America's youth cannot even qualify for the military

And yet the Navy is in the process of kicking a large portion of experienced sailors out of the service.

I actually think I wouldn't be eligible to enlist if I wanted to. I was born with a medical condition that may prevent it. I obviously won't say what it is but it limits my physical ability. But I would never enlist so. . . .

Are historical records available?

is this surprising?

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they are too fat or too dumb... wow...

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First, the military is full. It is all volunteers, and because of the Obama economy, it is enjoying near-record fill-levels.
Second, if the military really needed recruits, they'd take those tattoos and piercings in a heartbeat.

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military deems many youngsters ineligible due to obesity, lack of a high-school diploma, felony convictions and prescription-drug use for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But others are now also running afoul of standards for appearance amid the growing popularity of large-scale tattoos and devices called ear gauges that create large holes in earlobes.

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It is amazing how dumb some of our soldiers are, but there's nothing to be done about it I guess. It does remind me of when I nearly enlisted though

A couple years ago I toyed with the idea of military service so I went down to a recruiter. He had 2 other guys looking to sign as well, so he loaded us into the car and took us to the testing center. On the way I got to know both of these guys pretty well and they seemed nice enough. One wanted to be scout infantry and needed a score of ~90 CO and a 30 percentile, and the other wanted to be a diesel mechanic and needed a MM of 100 and a 50 percentile. We got there and after playing pool for about an hour went to testing.

The test was easy for the most part, but at the time I had no experience in fixing vehicles and barely knew the parts of engine so I assumed that I had done poorly in that area and maybe the spatial portion as well because it seemed to easy. We finished and they took us to a small room to wait for our results.

When the recruiter came he had our 3 envelopes and said the name of the scout and asked him how he felt about his chances. He replied that he felt the test was too easy. The recruiter opened the envelope and said that his CO score was high enough to qualify but that he didn't make the percentile score needed so he would have to take it again. He moved on to the second guy and asked the same question, but he fired back that he knew he did at least good enough. Sure enough when he opened that score he had just barely squeaked by on both.

It was not until I had my results read that I realized how unintelligent these guys were. I didn't even consider the possibility that anyone could do badly on such an easy exam.

To finish the story it was then my turn to have the results read, which I knew would be better than both of theirs. I was not prepared to hear that I scored in the 98th percentile and could have any job I wanted, I didn't know which job I wanted at the time and was going to use the test to figure that out. They called me for the better part of 2 years afterwards on a regular basis.